Comment by beezlebroxxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beezlebroxxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

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beezlebroxxxxxx

I'm of the position that art needs an artist.

> txt2img prompt crafting is a bit of an art in its own right, as getting the model to spit out what you want isn’t always trivial.

I don't find the output images from a lot of "AI" art to be artistically interesting because an "AI" made them. The output might be novel, or even kind of surprising, but still just the output of code. Someone might say the code of an "AI" art machine could qualify as art. I often find the txt2img prompts artistic in a way that the output images lack, because they are representative of human imagination, often like surreal poetry, or like musique concrete, cutting and pasting segments around on a tape. This is not to deny that the output of "AI" art is impressive. It is, frankly. But as a matter of machine, computational, output rather than human artistic merit.

It comes down to a simple thing: if you showed me two images and you told me a human made one, and "AI" made the other, I will always find the former artistic in a way that I would never find the latter.

This is also not to touch on the licensing issues that arise from these tools. That's its own knot to untangle.

Art Turing test: If you can't distinguish between human-made art and AI-made art, then there's nothing backing up your emotional bias.

It doesn't matter anymore that you emotionally value, or want to emotionally value, human-made art more than AI-made art, if you can't distinguish the two except based on other people's representations of how it was made.

Unless you watched a (non-augmented) human make a piece of art, you have no assurance that a human didn't touch up an AI generated art piece or simply curate a collection of fully AI-generated art.

ETA: I'm not trying to put down recognizable human-created art that's already been created, especially historically notable works. I'm not sure what all those replies are trying to get at. Of course there can continue to be an art-collecting market for human-made works made before the AI-art era.

I think OP understands there may not be a physical difference, but the provenance / "Colour of the Bits" is important to them; and that's a valid position to take (not the only valid position to take).

For example, a woolen blanket made by my mother is much, much dearer to me than an equivalent woolen blanket made in a factory.

I see it very likely that certified-provenance human-art may command high prices in the future; but also for physical part, it's pretty trivial and doesn't have to be so posh and fancy - anything from street art to art galleries and art collectives/workshops.

This is already the case for the most part. I don't think anyone expects AI to displace "name brand" art. Low quality and stock art will become profitless virtually overnight, while artists that already make good money for original works will likely continue to do so. Your blanket analogy is apt for that reason. Human made blankets are indeed more special and people do often pay higher prices for them, but the vast majority of blankets sold or in use were made by machines at this point.

> I don't think anyone expects AI to displace "name brand" art

The problem isn't for existing artists (except in terms of ethical issues)—it's for new/budding artists, who will have to contend with challenges to the authenticity of their work. How can they prove that they put their blood and sweat into making a piece of artwork by hand when an AI could've generated something equally passable?

The woolen blanket is not a precise example: you like one more for sentimental reasons, but you agree that both are blankets. If you had said "I don't think that a factory-made woolen blanket is really a woolen blanket" the discussion would be different.

> If you can't distinguish between human-made art and AI-made art

The art is always human-made. Missing attribution doesn't mean "machine made it". Humans developed the AI, ran the AI, created the training data, picked the non-horrible sample from the output, etc.

If a copy of a Van Gogh is next to the original, and you can't which is the original, do they have equal artistic value?

If an artist who studied Van Gogh intensely made an original piece in Van Gogh's style, does it have equal artistic merit as one of Van Gogh's originals?

AI is just going to be another aspect of provenance, and if it's found out an art piece had AI used to make it, it won't be forgotten or ignored.

I can’t tell if someone is selling me something made locally, or is just pawning something made in China as local, but I still try to support local because I believe the underlying knock on effects are greater.

The same holds for AI art.

The made in China one is cheaper and better for society for comparative advantage reasons. Trade is good!

Supporting local manufacturing helps to build resilience in the supply chain. Outsourcing everything to another country can be great for margins but it adds risk via external dependencies.

Trade isn't good when its for products made with forced labor.

People appreciate art for the story. It’s why originals sell for more than prints.

The print's story is the original's story with one sentence added: "and then I printed it a million times".

People will pay more for the original because it's rare.

For me personally, it's more about appreciating the act and capabilities possible by a human being.

I find it similar to watching chess. AI/Chess engines will always be better than humans, but it's exciting to watch a human play to see what they can do.

That is not how art works at all though. It's very difficult to distinguish a real van gogh from a fake van gogh. The real will still sell for millions and the fake will not.

There's a spectrum of human agency in art. Where will you draw the line? Where does Warhol fit? Pollock? Bridget Riley, Vasarely or even Malevich?

Whatever line you draw will leave several canonical figures on the wrong side of it. Maybe that's OK and you'll draw your line in the sand. Just don't pretend it's a non-controversial consensus.

I agree. Also, it's not that stable diffusion spontaneously generates art: someone has thought of a prompt, written it down, iterated, and finally decided that a given image was good enough to publish. Is stable diffusion an "artist" or is it a tool?

I find "what is art" discussions impossible to resolve and untangle from prejudices and biases. The least problematic answer I've found comes from John Carey, paraphrasing: "art is whatever someone has decided it to be". In other words, if I decide something is art, then it is.

The problem shifts slightly to a more interesting way to pose this question: why some art has more value than some other art (or even "does some art has more value than some other art")? Equally difficult to resolve but more prone to highlight prejudices and biases mentioned above.

>I agree. Also, it's not that stable diffusion spontaneously generates art: someone has thought of a prompt, written it down, iterated, and finally decided that a given image was good enough to publish. Is stable diffusion an "artist" or is it a tool?

I'm curious about the possibility of the commissioner role for this situation.

From my point of view, the AI is the artist and prompting an AI to produce a specific image is akin to commissioning an artwork.

I think we have moved beyond human agency, and creation of art is reduced to the simpler constituents, the roles of artist and (if there is one) commissioner. The request to make an artpiece can also come from a machine.

I think the same argument can be made of photography. A photographer does not "paint" or "create" the image. It points a machine to a place and presses a button with a finger. This machine does "the work" for her. Who is the artist? Are photographers just commisioners of images?

Capturing the moment is more than just pointing. Look, I know the argument you're making, and it's certainly something to ponder on. But the whole "writing prompt" thing has a different aim from "human-created" art. Whatever that means. But it's generally a small subset from the latter.

I'm fully aware that I'm stretching the argument and analogies. However, I find all of these expressions ("Capturing the moment", "has a different aim") vague and full of gaps. Maybe it's because I never fully got photography, in a way. The difference between "capturing the moment" and "writing prompt" is that the former has a more romantic feel to it, but let's not forget that some of the most well-known photographies were staged to look spontaneous. And suddenly photography is just an exercise of story-telling and technique (light, exposure, etc), which is not that different from "harnessing the algorithm" to do the same.

Also, we're comparing an art 150 years in the making (with its schools, philosophies, heroes) with one in its infancy.

> the last paragraph

Oh, for sure. As for the rest, well I might've also missed the whole writing prompt thing. But I've always felt as if reverse engineering the thing.

"Art is anything you can get away with." — Marshall McLuhan

> I'm of the position that art needs an artist.

As a historical note, this argument is over 50 years old. In 1965, an engineer at Bell Labs generated pseudo-random artworks inspired by famous artist Piet Mondrian. He found that a) people couldn't tell if the artwork was generated by Mondrian or the computer, and b) people generally liked the computer's art better.

https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=4437

Fascinating! Thanks.

I don't think for "art as art" purposes where we take some painting and say it's worth a million dollars and put it in a museum ai can replace humans. But a lot of art is much more utilitarian: art in games, art in movies and tv, in picture books, etc. In those cases I care that it looks how it is meant to and costs as little as possible to make.

I feel like the majority of "art" we consume falls in the second category.

>I'm of the position that art needs an artist.

Would you say the same of general intelligence? IE, general intelligence (artificial or otherwise) requires an agent?

I have a project that involves publishing an image I generate and publish to an audience everyday. It's not high value art, but the process does often involve me thinking of a concept I want to communicate to my audience and working with the AI to produce something that communicates that concept.

When I started doing this, I was uncomfortable thinking of myself as the author of the image in any way. I'm okay with it now. There's some skill I am expressing, even if not much, and I am connecting with an audience.

This argument could be made 150 years ago about photography. For the sake of an argument: can a selfie be a form of art?

To take a selfie, human intervention is minimal: someone decides they want to take a selfie; take dozens of them, pretty much at random; choose one they like; publish it.

Similarities with the stable diffusion process are striking. And yet, could you consider a selfie "artistic"? Are all selfies artistic? What if Annie Leibovitz or Marina Abramovic take a selfie?

What if Marina Abramovic generates a million images of a rabbit with stable diffusion and papers a whole warehouse with them? Is this art?

Edit: syntax.

It's considered art for the purposes of e.g. copyright law. Recently there was a dispute about whether a selfie taken by a monkey belonged to the owner of the camera, or the monkey. (A judge opined that only humans can have copyrights, and PETA eventually settled out of court.)

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/12/550417823...

But most selfies probably aren't high value art.

If Marina Abramovic were to take a bunch of selfies, or generate a bunch of AI images, and exhibit them, that might be considered high value art. A famous artist can literally tape a banana to a wall and it'd be considered high art:

https://www.vogue.com/article/the-120000-art-basel-banana-ex...

Let's not confuse tax evasion with proper high art, alright?

Sure, and if your 4 year old son draws 2 sloppy stick figures representing him holding your hand, that's going to be valuable to you in a way a stranger's precocious 10-year-old child's drawing isn't (no matter how good it is).

But does that make it more artistic than something generated by AI which was coaxed out by a human applying their expertise?

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