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Comment by meowface | Hacker News Reader

You have a point, but it's also how art works in general. Most artists draw inspiration from a conglomeration of hundreds/thousands of other artists. If an artist draws inspiration from one and only one artist, they're just a plagiarist.

(Not necessarily saying that clears up any potential legal or ethical issue with generative image models training on artists' work.)

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Why do you think artists draw inspiration from other artists?

An artist who's never seen art is like an AI with no training data

And based on what I've seen in the article, the AI images look to be notionally better than the original examples.

We probably have different definitions for what constitutes an artist. In my experience most artists spend time looking at the world around them rather than looking at other artists' work.

not my college of arts experience.

All art is derivative. Even "outsider art", which is made by artists who are ostensibly naive to the work of other artists. (Personally I think that category is bullshit gatekeeping, but that's another discussion entirely.)

But these aren't artists and this isn't art. This is fast food. This is content for articles and technology for startups to become the middelman for yet another thing.

There will be art coming from these tools at some point but right now it's creatively bankrupt illustrations driven by curiousity and lots of creatively bankrupt people.

Yet. As "real" artists start using these generations to leapfrog their projects, at some point, how is this different from someone studying a style and producing something in that style with that addition of actual "art?"

That's like expecting a chef to take inspiration from a fast food menu. It might happen but it's more likely that the chef already knows what makes fast food taste good and can develop a new menu based on their fundamental knowledge.

The fundamental knowledge they gained by looking at thousands upon thousands of previous bits of information; and, after today, that collection of insights is going to include auto-generated artwork, as well.

It's not any different if there's true craft to it. The person in this article and many of the examples are who I'm referencing as not an artist or making art. I would imagine the person that wrote the article doesn't call himself an artist either.

I'm not arguing that the tools can't be used to create art and I'm not trying to say "real" artists don't use these. What I'm trying to say is the images I've mostly seen look like illustrations and content machines.

Personally, these tools are incredible and are almost magic in a sense.

Edit: To put it another way a writer can still write if his keyboard stops working, a carpenter can still build if his saw breaks, an illustrator can still draw if their tablet dies.

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