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I’m not a fan of it as their are just certain details an AI can never do. A color here, a twist or turn there, a stroke this way, a drip in that place. It is something that one can’t program to have AI even think to do. I do think AI has its place and is a good tool.
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 go 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 by devaluing artists and using this work instead of a real artists work, 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.
Yes, as it conveys nothing more than the prompt it was given. Art is a means of communication, but when all it does is chop up pictures it’s seen to match a prompt there just isn’t anything to analyze.
It may look pretty in the moment, but lacks all substance and will be forgotten as quickly as it was generated.
Just playing devil’s advocate here. Let me lay out some counter points … (it’ll take me an edit or two to format this right, btw.)
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Instructing a machine to assemble bits in a specific way takes creativity. My prompt to AI is that creativity and without it, you can’t even get much of a copy of anything. Even though AI is generally assembling stolen bits, the end result (ignoring copyright law) can be original.
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Music has been mostly “figured out” and many songs we have heard over your lifetime use many of the same exact chord progressions. I-V-vi-IV being one of the most common and used in the following songs:
Journey – “Don’t Stop Believing”
James Blunt – “You’re Beautiful”
Black Eyed Peas – “Where Is the Love”
Alphaville – “Forever Young”
Jason Mraz – “I’m Yours”
Train – “Hey Soul Sister”
The Calling – “Wherever You Will Go”
Elton John – “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” (from The Lion King)
- Musicians may use patterns or progressions from other songs. Painters may use the same colors and brushes designed by other artists. In both cases, techniques that have been known for thousands of years are being used in self-expression.
I assert that given the correct instructions, you can still give someone plenty to analyze, via prompt, that has enough detail to extract a deeper meaning:
FWIW, I am extremely fed up with this AI hype now. “AI” is just a tool, and that is it. I could go on for hours about this mess, but I am trying to make a valid point: Regardless of how you interpret copyright, art is just self-expression.
There are endless examples I could give about technique re-use when it comes to creating art with machines. From my perspective, a particular brush stroke might be the same as using a specific bit at a particular depth of cut on a CNC. The art theft for AI training is one aspect, for sure. The biggest issue I see is that many people don’t understand how to create original art and the AI just spits out a copy of something it was trained on and something the user already saw.
Edit: After reading many of the other comments here, many people have a strange definition of “art”. Yes, art can be about communication, it can be about sending a message, it can express a style of creativity or hundreds of other things.
Art is just… art. It’s something a person sketches, composes, speaks, signs or farts. You don’t have to like it or agree with it. Hell, you don’t even need to recognize something as art for it to be art. Art is just self-expression. It’s a feeling that is converted into some kind of other medium that others might happen to see, feel or hear, smell, taste or a combination of all of those things.
As much as I hate to admit it, a banana taped to a wall is art. Someone eating said banana is also art. I think it’s fucking stupid, but who am I to not call it someone’s self-expression?
based on your points (2 and 3), do you think there are no more “original art” in this world?
That some, most or all art is partly or wholly derivative of other art is not relevant because the process used by ‘AI’ does not resemble the artistic process. When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet (a work derived from an older play, itself derived from an older myth which itself had been through countless retellings, variations and translations), he did not do what an LLM does, which is approximately to say: ‘It’s statistically likely that the phrase “to be” will be followed by the phrase “or not to be”’. Putting together statistical likelihoods is not creativity. This alone shows that AI ‘art’ is not creative and therefore not art at all.
Additionally, instructing a machine to make things from prompts does not require creativity. Creativity is not ‘having ideas’; it’s an ongoing process. When you tell an image generator to make an image, you’re not asking it to create something, because it cannot do it. You’re saying ‘Show me the statistically likely output for this input’. Again, this statistical generator is not the same as, nor is it comparable to, the human imaginative process.
Example: My picture of the Lemming.
I knew exactly what I wanted before I even typed in the prompt: My vision was for a nervous, burned-out lemming to be sitting on a log, hunched over a laptop smoking a cigarette with bloodshot eyes surrounded in crushed beer cans.
That is not creative? Saying I have no imagination or creativity is kinda rude and giving all my credit to AI is downright insulting. Sure, I didn’t draw it and I absolutely do not have the ability to draw it. However, you cannot (reasonably) deny that the idea is mine. I’m not exactly the most creative person in the world, but damn… (The image will show up under my username over at least two instances over the span of 1-2 years? It’s mine, is my point.)
If you saw my edit, you should know exactly what I thought when you said “artistic process”.
However, my underlying point about derivative process or technique was to shoot a hole in the arguments of “cobbled together bits from wherever” and why I specifically used music as an example. Drum lines are openly copied. Not derived: blatantly copied. It’s considered a compliment in many cases, actually. Progressions and transitions are all just copies. You don’t even need AI to “statistically generate” music patterns. With every chord I choose to start a progression, there are only X number of chords that will work correctly after it.
I believe there have been some projects to generate (within reason) every chord progression possible and every kind of melody that would fit it… statistically. Almost every bit of popular music you hear is a derivative or a copy or reused or whatever, is my point. How many times have you heard the “Amen break”? More times than you actually know, unless you know your music, then you do. Much of music is just, for lack of a better term, math.
Creativity is an idea or multiple ideas. It’s anything that exceeds the sum of your existing knowledge. AI by itself isn’t “creative” and it is impossible for AI to be creative, we both agree. Again, from my perspective, AI can be used as a tool to fill in the gaps between two different ideas. It’s the assembly of different ideas or components that is important. The sum of the key bits.
In my CAD work, I use formulas and simulated physics to automatically generate connecting features or structures. Are the designs I create exempted from “art” because of that?
Putting creativity and art into a box and saying you must follow “creative process” or “artistic process” is just odd. You can think that way if you want, but it’s very limiting. The artists I study make a habit of saying “fuck the rules, fuck the process and do what makes you feel good.”
Just for lulz, I was wondering what another machine would think of my Lemming. It kinda got it, but kinda didn’t. Statistically, it figured out the parts, but you should know darn well what my intent was:
The problem is AI art can never be any deeper than the prompt and can never hold up to anything more than a surface level analysis.
I actually agree with that. I don’t actually appreciate AI generated stuff more than what we see on the surface. It’s not highly complex and I never said it was.
(I was just arguing AI generated stuff can be a means to an end and still carries a hint of creativity as stated by the original prompt. It’s a tool. Personally, I detest nearly all of these LLM parlor tricks. I think people who were giving counter points thought I was pro-AI stuff when I really am not.)
Again, you’ve written quite a long comment, almost none of which is pertinent.
Music is not math. Some aspects of it can be expressed mathematically, yes, but that’s not the same thing.
Imagining the idea ‘I’d like to see an image of a lemming’, which is what you’ve done, does require some imagination. However, the output is not art because the process used to go from your ‘prompt’ to the image was not a creative one. (Also, this isn’t entirely pertinent, but the image output is really bad. If it had been made by a person and otherwise looked like this, I would still say that it was just ugly, bad art.)
You may well be a creative and imaginative person; I don’t know you and I wouldn’t want to judge! However, your image of a lemming was not the result of a creative process and so is not art.
Sorry if you couldn’t see my points, but that is OK.
I’ll go off and create some corporate logos then…
I have a reply to most of the points you’ve brought up which I hope will help you see another perspective. Some things I hadn’t even thought of until you wrote this (thanks). But I don’t have time to write them all now, nor do I want to type it all out at my phone. Leaving this comment as a reminder.
Having ideas is not creativity. Creativity is creating the thing. If a billionaire pays a painter to create their idea, the artist is still the painter, not the billionaire commissioning the art. Replace the painter with AI and the logic doesn’t change, the person putting the prompt is not an artist. It did not create the thing. The machine is not an artist either, as the human painter at least had consciousness, intention, agency, emotion,all things the machine doesn’t have and cannot source from to create the art. This is why AI images always feel soulless, dry and boring. They don’t produce any emotion on the audience because it had none to source from or communicate through the art. The prompt engineer is no artist but a commissionner to an inept soulless painter.
We are talking about a word with multiple definitions and it’s getting philosophical now. Depending on where you look or what context you use, creativity is how you choose to define it. (I hate saying that here because, well, its philosophical and any back-and-forth rapidly becomes subjective. On the intertubes, that usually doesn’t work out very well for discussion.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity - Creativity is the ability to form novel and valuable ideas or works using one’s imagination.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/creativity/ - We may ask the same question not just of artworks but of any creative product, whether it be a new scientific theory, a technological invention, a philosophical breakthrough, or a novel solution to a mathematical or logical puzzle. (There is more to this regarding creative process, so feel free to read more.)
https://dictionary.apa.org/creativity - the ability to produce or develop original work, theories, techniques, or thoughts. A creative individual typically displays originality, imagination, and expressiveness.
A discussion about a definition is usually fruitless. I just have to cap this saying that I simply maintain that AI can be a tool for creating original art. (Art doesn’t need to be a painting or a picture.) We, as creative humans, can create art with any tool we are given.
If you want to get philosophical, please do. I won’t argue my point further that it still takes a human to provide creative input to get some kind of unique output.
thanks for dropping the definitions here :D
so there’s no thing called “thinking creatively”?
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I don’t even consider AI generated images to be art since there is no expression of skill, imagination, or feeling in them.
Even if the image was regenerated with tweaked prompts until the generated image expressed what the prompter wanted to convey?
The person inputting prompt modifications may have controlled the larger assets as a whole, but they did not curate the Gestalt of the image. If the input is text that a computer is to output as a literal estimation, then it is data, not art; if the input is data curated by a person who means for a computer to output it as plotted data, such as with a complex lineplot or 3D model or even text as ASCII images, then that can be art.
Then it’s still just a commissioned work
But would that then imply that all commissioned works aren’t art?
Or does the difference of who (or more specifically what) you commission to produce something decide whether it’s art?
An artist has done the art in question. That makes all the difference.
If the person using the paintbrush is the artist - not the brush itself - then why doesn’t the same logic apply to AI? It’s just a tool, after all. AI doesn’t generate anything on its own. Sure, you could ask it to spit out a picture with no effort, but you can do the same with a camera. However, if you have a clear vision of how you want the final result to look, it’s a different story. Getting AI to output an image is easy. Getting it to output your image - that’s hard.
It’s not hard. What are you, a „prompt engineer“?
Yes even then. Writing a prompt is no more an artistic skill than describing your idea to an artist you’re commissioning. You didn’t create a damn thing. You will not be called an artist for commissioning a work.
I don’t think we’re at the level AI prompting can be used to reflect the subtlety needed to make art. It’s like chainsaw art, cool and mebbe art but it’s not art like the old masters art.
Also everyone thinking that shitting out a Rembrandt liking image is fantastic does not understand what art really is.
I tend to agree with that. I also hate that of all the great uses for generative AI, this is the direction they took the tech. It’s not a replacement for whole jobs, and I knew that at the onset, but so many dumb business types thought it could replace entire departments, customer service, etc.
I agree.To me art is an expression of the soul; it’s an expression of one’s perception of the world. It has spiritual qualities (in an atheist sense). There is an inner world that puts out together a piece of art that LLMs do not possess and that’s why they need to train on existing material that comes from human expression.
I highly doubt an LLM suffers, loves, hopes, hates and cries like us. Art is an expression of who we are individualy and collectively. LLMs only hallucinate with art made by humans. While we humans can find inspiration from other artists, it is not a necessity to train on vast databases of art pieces to put something together. They say that while it’s hard to define what art is, you know it when you see it. To me when I get that feeling from something made by AI, all I really see is a piece of an other artist’s soul trapped in some sort of simulacrum put together by an algorithm.
Cut the training material and AI “art” will stagnate. We, on the other hand, won’t.
That’s why I think AI art will never really be art… unless if one day they somehow develop a “soul” themselves and start to express an inner world of their own.
Exactly this.
to be honest, i’m not only referring to images. any kind of what so called “art” since it’s possible now to make “music” with AI. thanks for the response anyway.
Art is about expressing one emotion from one person to another.
We have a word for fake pictures: advertising.
The first phrase is true.
The second, I’m not sure. Some really talented artists have worked in advertisements for a long time, and many of their works are celebrated internationally. Alphonse Mucha is one name that quickly comes to mind - tell me his advertisement work isn’t art. You have probably seen more amateur ripoffs of his style in your life than the real deal.
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.
For me it’s on the same level as memes - not intended to be consumed as art, but merely as a form of posting. It’s trash and that’s fine.
But it shouldn’t be elevated above that. It’s derivative and stilted and lacks character, and worse, it might be depriving amateur artists the chance to flex their creative muscles and actually create art themselves.
Also draining cities dry of municipal water to generate a picture of a bored ape is probably a bad use of resources.
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.
It is not art.
Ai is capitalism maximizing productivity and minimizing labour costs.
Ai isn’t targeting tedious labour, the people building these systems are going after art, music and the creative process. They want to take the human out of the equation and pump out more content to monetize at ever increasing rates.
It’s an insult to life itself.
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.
I don’t hate AI art. I hate people who pretend they’re artists when all they do is writing prompts.
No, because I don’t have an irrational fear of AI. I don’t like when poor or unfitting AI art is used, but it isn’t AI who makes that decision to use it.
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.
We categorically did not gave up paints entirely. That’s an ignorant and naive statement.
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.
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.
Don’t know about “art”, but I use it sometimes to generate contextual imagery for blog posts and videos. I would’ve never hired an artist so the only real difference is that it looks a lot better than when I used to try to draw something myself.
