I was on stable diffusion art and one of my comments got removed for saying the OP didn’t “make” the AI generated art. But he didn’t make shit the AI made it, he typed in a description and hit enter. I think we need a new word for when someone shared art an AI made, like they generated it or something. It feels insulting to actual artists to say you made art with AI
Counter argument for the sake of education, go try to recreate his picture using Stable Diffusion. Let me know how easy it is.
I don’t really get how this is a counter point. I don’t think anyone is contending that the pictures produced are reproducible by the same means. They’re contending that the method of production isn’t “making” art and they aren’t an artist for starting the production process.
It’s sort of like when rich people go to space and call themselves an astronaut. People have an idea of what an astronaut does and it isn’t just “space tourist.” If you fired back with “you try spending that much money and see how easy it is” then that wouldn’t answer the point of why people don’t want to call space tourists “astronauts.”
I don’t think their point was just that it’s impossible to reproduce, more that there is skill, knowledge and choice put into getting close to the intended idea when working with AI output.
With that I think your point breaks down when you compare it with something like photography. Often you aren’t ‘making’ the images that you capture, but there is skill and artistry in the choices that capture the moment or picture you want. Obviously there is more control in photography, and I would disagree with anyone that uses AI and claims the same level of artistry of photography. But ultimately I think the lines around art are so blurry in general, it seems incorrect to me to do decidedly exclude AI generated images.
That’s interesting cuz I took their point as “you can put the exact same prompt into the stable diffusion and not get the same image each time, thus good luck trying to recreate the picture.” Which seemed to me to suggest the opposite point: That intentionality has a diminished role in creating ai images, so it serves even less of a role as art. You wouldn’t say someone sitting in front of a slot machine “intended” to get a cherry, bell, and bar on a specific pull, after all.
But… you are though. Images would not exist without the photographer choosing to make them. Not to mention that many forms of photography (albiet older forms) have very real physical elements to them like dodge, burn, and film development. Even without those elements though, those images would not exist without the effort, intention, and presence of the photographer. The photographer also makes the conscious decision about what photos not to take, because they don’t align to their message. Intention is at every step of the process and that invites us to explore the meaning of their work.
Contrast that with AI art. The only intention you have is your prompt and choice of model. I would argue the fact that ai prompters need to “get close to” what they want their piece to say, rather than making the piece say what they want it to say, shows how starved for meaning the products are.
I don’t disagree with what you’re saying. But I will say that skill is not what makes art art. Skill can make you a better artist, but someone without skills can make art.
My understanding is that if you have the exact same model, prompt, and everything else, if you use the same seed, you will get the exact same image output. That and that they called it a counter point, I took it to mean they were talking about the skill in the layers of different tools folks will use to get what they are hoping for. Because, a little to your further point, there are folks that get very into it and have like 30 different fine tuned loras or whatever to finesse every finer point of the image.
At the risk of getting a little philosophically wanky about it, I guess I would argue the same for AI images. Like what exists is a nebulous connections of weights and nodes trained off stolen art that only connect in certain ways because of a given seed and prompt. Does a hypothetical random image of a muppets version of Kermit the frog as Darth Vader ‘exist’ without the high, half baked, prompt from someone using a free trial of midjourney?
I completely agree, and I think my point more was that with photography, you don’t “make” the landscape or architecture you’re capturing, but you make the image in the end.
I will say, I respect photography more, and so much of what AI generates is soulless slop. I think that ultimately my push back is on the folks that argue that it can’t be art. And just as there is intentionality in choosing what photos you don’t take for photography, there is non-zero intentionality in generating 30 loose candidates, 50 fine tuned candidates, and 3 final images with stable diffusion.
Sorry if this comment is scattered, I’ve restarted my reply like three times trying to sort out what I even think lol.
I’m not really jumping in on this discussion, but I did want to add one thing:
I can believe two things at once.
AI generated media can’t be art … because the whole purpose of a generative AI machine is to alleviate the burden of decision making. The fewer places you let something decide for you, the more “art” you can imbue into your project. Art is a communicative effort.
Artists can use AI generated media … but the points of interest, the meaning, would not (necessarily) be the decisions the machine made.
An example above, I forget if it was you or someone else, shows a pen sketch of a scene then filled in by the generator, and I think the artist there can be given credit for the perspective, the framing of the subject, the mech-suit, the sci-fi aesthetic; but I wouldn’t credit them with the tally marks on her left shoulder, or the shape details of her eyes, or the various light-up displays that dot the walls.
There’s also something to be said for choosing as opposed to creating outright, but I think we’re losing ourselves in myopic details at this point.
The bottom line is that, aside of any ethics issues, I’m not that upset about AI media that’s honest about what it is. I watch youtube channels that depend on AI for their performance art. But, AI proponents love selling this technology as a replacement for people, which is a sentiment I find… disgusting. Inhuman.
And, I find it really sad the way a person who spent the better part of their life perfecting a style and technique can be essentially shoved out of their own niche by the 10,000 style-copy images a generator can make in an afternoon. This isn’t like photography, where painters and camera-snappers can coexist in separate styles of image production: AI generators can replace both.
Sorry, I thought all that was going to be just two paragraphs.
I know the feeling lol
Yeah I largely agree, the fact that it is replacing humans is rough and really speaks to such a depressing view of art in our society. Even before AI, the commercialization of art was hugely detrimental, and really sucks the soul out of much of what it touches. The fact that AI attacks the starting footholds for artists to find any money at all in the industry is particularly upsetting.
All that being saying, I guess I would still push back a little bit on the idea that it can’t be art when generated in it’s entirety. I would argue that while yes it does have less intentionality, even at the most base level of a prompt and picking your favorite generation, is enough to qualify it as art. I may be a bit of an absolutist in this regard, but I justify it by pointing to things like splatter or fluid acrylic painting. Where the exact lines of intentionality is hard to draw. All of that to say I don’t think there is much value in drawing a strict line that excludes AI work from art just because the discrepancy between choice of the artist and the choices on show is so vast.
The counter I would give here is that those are just techniques. The challenge, then, is whether the generation machine can be made to do things that are interesting and meaningful. I know it can produce spectacle, but spectacle and meaning are different concepts.
I don’t know much Pollock, but isn’t he valued largely for his process and expressionism? I’m not making this accusation of you, you do seem to actually care, but a lot of people who bring him up seem to think that his work actually is random and unintelligible—I don’t think that it is.
I will concede that the process of interacting with the generation machine to produce something is a creative one, I just don’t think it’s anywhere near what a lot of proponents claim it be.
I’ve used Suno, and my lasting impression of it is that it was fun, sometimes really funny, and overall kind of soul sucking. As a musician, there were essentially no times that I felt anything produced there was mine. It was just novelty. Some of it sounded really cool, but none of it was an expression of me or what I was really looking for.