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
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.