[yoyohello13]

Seriously. Being able to look up stuff using AI is not unique. I can do that too.

This is kind of the same with any AI gen art. Like I can go generate a bunch of cool images with AI too, why should I give a shit about your random Midjourney output.

[kristopolous]

Comfyui workflows, fine-tuning models, keeping up with the latest arxiv papers, patching academic code to work with generative stacks, this stuff is grueling.

Here's an example https://files.meiobit.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/22l0nqm...

Being dismissive of AI art is like those people who dismiss electronic music because there's a drum machine.

Doing things well still requires an immense amount of skill and exhaustive amount of effort. It's wildly complicated

[codr7]

Makes even less sense when you put it like that, why not invest that effort into your own skills instead?

[kristopolous]

It is somebody's own skill.

Photographers are not painters.

People who do modular synths aren't guitarists.

Technical DJing is quite different from tapping on a Spotify app on a smartphone.

Just because you've exclusively exposed yourself to crude implementations doesn't mean sophisticated ones don't exist.

[delfinom]

But you just missed the point.

People aren't trying to push photographs into painted works displays

People who do modular synths aren't typically trying to sell their music as country/rock/guitar based music.

A 3D modeler of a statue isn't pretending to be a sculpturist.

People pushing AI art are trying to slide it right into "human art" displays. Because they are talentless otherwise.

[kristopolous]

When those technologies were new people gave them all the exact same critique and from a labor perspective they were all correct. The industrial labor critique is 100% valid.

The portraiture artist industry was dramatically disrupted by the daguerreotype.

The automobile dried up the income of farrier and blacksmith along with ending the horsemanship industry.

The rise of synthesizers in the 80s greatly reduced the number of studio musicians.

And it's undeniable that the industry of commercial artists is currently being disrupted by AI.

But the decline of portraiture artist due to daguerreotypes doesn't mean, say Ansel Adams is dogshit.

We can acknowledge both the industrial ramifications and the labor and skill of the new forms without being dismissive of either. Auto repair is still a skill. Driving a car is still work even if there's no horses.

When mechanical looms replaced manual weavers during the luddite movement, it might have killed countless careers but it didn't kill fashion. Our clothing isn't simulacrum echos of the 1820s.

This is the transfer of a skill into a property. The transfer of a skill into a property changes it from something that must be rented from below to something that can be owned from above.

Property isn't a thing however, it's a chosen relationship between people about a thing. we could make different choices...

[codr7]

This is different. Now the tool is giving us (lousy) instructions, that never happened before.

[alwa]

I mean… I have a fancy phone camera in my pocket too, but there are photographers who, with the same model of fancy phone camera, do things that awe and move me.

It took a solid hundred years to legitimate photography as an artistic medium, right? To the extent that the controversy still isn’t entirely dead?

Any cool images I ask AI for are going to involve a lot less patience and refinement than some of these things the kids are using AI to turn out…

For that matter, I’ve watched friends try to ask for factual information from LLMs and found myself screaming inwardly at how vague and counterproductive their style of questioning was. They can’t figure out why I get results I find useful while they get back a wall of hedging and waffling.

[namaria]

> It took a solid hundred years to legitimate photography as an artistic medium, right?

Not really.

"In 1853 the Photographic Society, parent of the present Royal Photographic Society, was formed in London, and in the following year the Société Française de Photographie was founded in Paris."

https://www.britannica.com/technology/photography/Photograph...

[alwa]

Not that photographic art wasn’t getting made, more that the doyens of the Finer Arts would tend to dismiss work in that medium as craft, trade, or low art—that they’d dismiss the act of photographic production as “mere capture” as opposed to creative interpretation, or situate the artistic work in the darkroom afterward where people used hands and brushes and manual aesthetic judgment.

It’s been depressingly long since school, but am I wrong in vaguely remembering the controversy stretching through Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and well into the Warhol era?

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/10/when-photogra...

And I guess legitimacy doesn’t fully depend on the whims of museums and collectors, but to hear Christie’s tell it, they didn’t start treating the medium as fine art until 1972–and then, almost more as antiquities than as works of art—

https://www.christies.com/en/stories/how-photography-became-...

In much the same way as there are tons of Polaroids that are not art and a few that unambiguously are (e.g. [0]); there’s a lot of lazy AI imagery, but there also seem to be some unambiguously artful endeavors (e.g. [1]), no?

[0] https://stephendaitergallery.com/exhibitions/dawoud-bey-pola...

[1] https://www.clairesilver.com/

[h4ck_th3_pl4n3t]

How can you be so harsh on all the new kids with Senior Prompt Engineer in their job titles?

They have to prove to someone that they're worth their money. /s