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No, quite the opposite.
Honestly, I find the vast majority of the arguments against it to be be made from a point of ignorance, propagated by a rabid sub-set of artists looking to generate clicks for their sensationalist YouTube videos.
Some pertinent reading/watching:
https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/how-much-energy-does-chatgpt-use
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54271-x
https://craigboehman.com/blog/in-defense-of-ai-art
https://www.fxhash.xyz/article/in-defense-of-ai-art
https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-defense-of-ai-art
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-did-you-do-on-the-ai-art-turing
thanks for your opinion.
The easy answer is: Yes, because it’s mostly bad.
The Long answer is: Like everything in art and life, If you can set it in right context it could also work. If you cannot, it’s just bland and bad in the classic artistic craftmanship standard and modern art and Action Art.
Same short answer but adding a bit to the long, it seems that they have a feel to it that I just do not enjoy.
Also art is transgresive and AI generated images are usually not.
Yes. It can only exist through stealing the creative work of others.
Also, it looks terrible.
AI is just a fun toy. It can’t make “art.” There are CEOs out there fucking thirsty at the idea of a 59% unemployment rate because everyone else is cut out of their business, but AI can’t do the job and they will learn that the hard way after fucking over a bunch of people.
Even the success stories seem skeptical. I use AI all the time at work to assist with coding, and beyond that I use it all the time for fun—my job is safe because AI is fucking awful at it.
So anyway I don’t hate it per se, but I don’t like it other than jokey shit. But I don’t want to see it everywhere, either.
I feel old because I remember when this conversation was happening with airbrushing photographs and then Photoshop.
And now these days, really good Photoshop is invisible. We can remove people from backgrounds. We can improve the lighting. Movie CGI is just photoshooting stills.
AI will reach that stage too, where it will be so good, it’s scary that you can’t tell.
Lol, removing things from backgrounds and stuff is also AI
That’s a task that probably would be better served by purpose-built machine learning. Using “AI” for that isn’t what anyone means by “AI art” though.
I don’t hate AI-created images. I hate the insane amounts of energy required for current AI models. I hate that it’s the same rich assholes who control everything also controlling AI. I hate that they monopolize access to models trained on all our work. And I hate that it will be these rich assholes benefiting from humans being put out of work by AI. Because this will happen on some scale.
If it were free, I’d love AI. Because it allows people who aren’t artists to create stuff. And lowering the barrier of entry on art is always good, in my opinion.
Have you heard about AI Horde? It’s a cluster of volunteer workers generating text and images for everyone for free.
You get credits by contributing your GPU to generate for others, but you can use the service without credits (or even an account), credits are there just to determine your position in the queue.
You can try it out for example on HordeNG (disclaimer: I created the HordeNG frontend).
What I hate about AI art: How it’s based on stolen work. How it is purpose built to replace real, talented artists and devalue their labor. How it uses way more energy than it needs to and is pretty wasteful
What I love about AI art: Instant stupid shit for meme madness.
If AI art was all just stupid jokey shit like this that a friend of mine made when we were discussing how people were making Ghibli-fied versions of important moments in history, and we decided to with “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” but make Mike Myers dressed as Austin Powers, I’d be okay with it entirely. It’s not for profit, it’s just stupid shit that makes us laugh. Everything else aside, I can get behind stupid shit that makes us laugh. The rest of the issues with AI art suck though.
I’m with you on this one. I have no issues with AI being used for shit posting and memes, other than the ecological impact I guess.
No, I enjoy how it democratises image creation and allows me to create a vision in my head without training at art for years.
You’re lazy and talentless, and you like how it allows you to steal the hard work and talent of others.
In general - yes. There is a flood of shitty and lazy “art” that has infected search results and creative spaces. I’m also deeply uncomfortable with it being trained on artists work without their consent - for all the talk about it being equivalent to human inspiration I’m pretty sure there have been examples where it’s started generating attempts at signatures.
It’s terrible in knitting and crochet spaces (I imagine woodworking and sculpture and architecture too) because there are lots of things generated which are physical impossible and just wrong to anyone who enjoys the crafts. It gives false understandings of what those art forms look like.
I think the entire point of art is the human intentionality aspect. Art is humans using materials to do things that don’t serve an immediate practical purpose. There has to be some element of “desire” on the part of the artist.
So it’s not that it is impossible to use AI tools to generate art (there’s stochastic computer generated pieces from the 70s that are lovely iirc) To me though, the way these tools are used is what is important - if you’re using an AI you’re training and adjusting yourself, if you’re spending hours tweaking prompts and perhaps sifting through hundreds of pictures to combine and really participate in “making” something.
The current trend is really just a bunch of content sludge. I don’t see the appeal in either the process of creation or in what can be appreciated from it. The best stuff is mostly memey topical political jokes, where it rests more on the symbols rather than the art itself.
Like, when I make art - my process is adding layers over weeks and weeks. It’s noticing that I don’t like the way this section looks, so I go back over it, come back to it later… it’s a process - I engage with and shape the work. I’m just a guy who glues trash to things and paints them, my art doesn’t really have external value - but it still feels like art in a way that getting Midjourney to make pictures of Gandolf with big honking naturals isn’t.
As someone pointed out, do you like ads ? Because AI content feel the same, it’s annoying stuff I need to skip to access real content and on top of that it’s an ecological disaster.
When I open an image or a page and realise it’s AI, I feel the same as when I download a movie and it turns out I got a dot exe.
I don’t consider it art either but not hating it since it offers you a different view on realism while trying to be realism. With silly results like pouring a mug of hot coffee out of the fingers 🤌, or carrying a shield backwards.
I’m not entirely against LLMs as a tool, but I especially despise the image-based LLMs. They are certainly neat for some fun things. I’ve used them a little bit here and there for a dumb profile picture or a “I’m kinda thinking about this…” Brainstorm, but even in those cases I noticed the capabilities of the LLM and its tendencies quite literally pidgeon hole my artistic vision and push me in other directions that felt less and less creative. (Sidenote: I feel the same way about coding LLM tools. The longer I use them at any given time, the less creative I feel and it has a noticeable impact on my interest in the code I’m writing. So I don’t really use them much. Also I consistently manage to point out coding LLM code in PR reviews because it’s always kinda funky)
I’ve avoided using AI art tools for a while now. I’ll consider some limited use if the cost, billionaire ownership, blatant theft of real IP without compensation, and environmental impact problems are solved. (No, an “open source” model doesn’t solve all of these problems, especially since nearly all open source models are not truly open source and are almost always benefiting from upstream theft)
You know what I do like about AI art? I like the older Google machine learning art experiments from the mid-2010s. They invoked a strange existential curiosity. But those weren’t done with LLM’s.
Outside of LLMs, I like that there are some newer tools for editing that can do a better “lasso” select, that can mix and match into brushes as an alternative to something more algorithmic, the audio plugin that uses a RNN to simplify or expand upon an audio technique. Things that are tools that can be chosen or avoided and have nothing to do with LLMs.
I honestly cannot wait for this bubble to burst and for these tools to return to a cost that they’d need to be for these companies to turn a profit. A higher cost would eliminate all this casual use that is making people worse at research, critical thinking, and creativity, as well as make the art tools less competitive to just paying artists, even for scumbags wanting to cut the artists out. And it’d incentivize non-LLM, non-insanely costly ML techniques again instead of the current “LLMs for everything” nonsense right now.
It’s pleasant to see such a long post so full of good takes. Nice work!
I do, but not for the reasons you think.
What makes a Jackson Pollock painting so valuable? I’ve heard time and again people saying “I could do that too”, “it’s just paint thrown at canvas” etc. But it’s not the actual paint on the canvas that makes the painting. It’s Pollock’s aesthetic sense that chose that color, that pattern, and that’s what you get to see when you look at his paintings. It’s an image that said something to him, and we have decided to put value on that.
The vast majority of AI generated imagery is not art just like the vast majority of people throwing paint at canvas won’t get a Jackson Pollock painting. It might become art if used by an artist with purpose and intention. Which at the moment is pretty hard, given that small, iterative adjustments are really hard to do with AI. But in the end, AI is yet another tool that would allow humans a bit more freedom of expression.
It used to be that a painter had to literally prepare his palette from raw ingredients. Then he could buy pre-made paints. When digital art came along, we gave up paints entirely. Now we skip the painting part. The one common thread though is the honest expression of intent, and the feedback loop given by the artist’s aesthetic sense. If either is missing, you get kitschy garbage. And that’s most AI generated imagery these days.
Pollock stole the whole idea from an east bloc woman who did “pouring” already.
Also, the art world in the USA was heavily CIA sponsored in the 50/60 to counter USSR cultural influence.
In my personal opinion, pollocks work isn’t worth the paint he poured. It’s just based on the idea that if you’re the first to do it, it’s “revolutionary”, which it was for the impressionists and before, but not very much beyond, IMO.
It also lead to money laundring, and eventually selling a banana scotched to a wall for hundreds of thousands of dollars. That is not art.
Rant off/ 😱
Hey, I have that banana duct taped in my living room! 🤣
Art is subjective, always has been. I remember visiting a modern art museum in Germany years ago, and seeing a weed growing at the base of the wall in one of the rooms. Looking closer, I could see the weed was a very lifelike bronze cast, but in that moment the juxtaposition was jarring enough to make me question what art really is. I doubt it will have the same effect on everyone, but for me that was significant. And memorable, as you can see.
I remember reading something about Pollock way back on the early 2000s and finding a new appreciation for the work. His pour paintings followed a fractal pattern, Pollock distilled an essence of nature and expressed it with mastery. One can do it these days on a computer, if you know what to do, but he made it out of sense of art alone further cementing his genius. Here is some more info: https://blogs.uoregon.edu/richardtaylor/2017/01/04/the-facts-about-pollocks-fractals/
The man is a genius, no doubt about it. I didn’t know about the mathematical analysis of his paintings though, that’s really cool. Thanks for the link.
Different strokes for different folks. In a hypothetical scenario where I’m a billionaire and buying a Pollock or an AI image in print and choosing what to hang in my bedroom, it for sure won’t be someone throwing random splashes of colour. It’s extremely boring and awkward.
No judgement, mate, art is a matter of taste. Always has been.
My point was more along these lines: every single piece of AI imagery in the public space has been selected and put there by a human. We are the feedback loop in this space. And if the vast majority of it sucks, well, that’s saying something about the people doing the selection, doesn’t it?
I read an article recently about the difficulties of using AI by artists in animation studios, which partly inspired my original reply. Sure, AI is great at, say, generating a magical fairy forest. But if it’s almost good enough and you want it to do small, incremental improvements to an existing image, that’s where it fails. Sure, it will generate another magical forest, but even using almost the same prompt can lead to wildly different results.
To wit: for me and you, almost is probably good enough. But that’s not the case for a professional.
We categorically did not gave up paints entirely. That’s an ignorant and naive statement.
Of course not, and I was not implying that either. I was merely illustrating the influence of technology on artistic expression.
Case în point: silkscreen collages, to stay in the analog domain. Andy Warhol is widely recognised as an artistic genius these days. That wasn’t the case iback then.
Andy Warhol was one of the most popular and famous artist of his era, while he was alive. He was considered such a genious that he threw parties with Hollywood stars and millionaires. What are you on about? Are you just willfully ignorant? repeating some AI hallucinations? Who fed you these lies?
You seem to mistake popularity for acceptance. Warhol was hugely controversial in his day, especially in the beginning of his career (the Campbell Soup expo?). Most great artists are controversial, because they tend to push the status quo until it shatters.
And tone down the ad hominem, this isn’t reddit, we’re just having a conversation about art.
I think it’s fascinating. I don’t think it holds the same reverence as man-made art by any means, but I still find it impressive.
It’s absolutely fascinating. I was really enjoying watching it evolve. That’s tapered off a lot now.
But I also find it really off-putting when people use it for meaningless illustrations that just reek of laziness. Especially so when the images are supposed to represent something meaningful, but are full of errors and nonsense. This is particularly the case when the illustrations accompany academic texts. Fucking gross.
Probably if we lived in a society that didn’t inventivise doing meaningless, environmentally destructive shit for profit, then I might be more into it now.
Yes, I hate it. I hate that it fills every image platform. It is not art at all.
It’s a fun toy thing and can make decent images but its not art and can never replace actual art. When you compare for example an anime art of someone who actually drew it and the AI image, the drawn art is 9 out of 10 times better.
It’s also petty pretty easy to spot whether an image is AI or drawn made.
It’s also petty pretty easy to spot whether an image is AI or drawn made.
Doubt. Most studies have shown that people are horrible at actually picking out AI art. You suffer from selection bias because you don’t realise which ones you didn’t spot.
its not art and can never replace actual art. When you compare for example an anime art of someone who actually drew it and the AI image, the drawn art is 9 out of 10 times better.
That implies it’s solely about quality? At the inevitable point where AI gen gets better than drawn art, is the AI gen image now art too?
