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Comment by Mtinie | Hacker News Reader

This supports with my hypothesis about human-created art, post-AI.

People are deeply concerned about how their livelihoods and identities will survive the next few years. I get it, and while there’s certainly a level of existential dread that feels reasonable, I don’t see many people yet discussing what the visual arts industries will look like on the other side.

If Go play is in any way a creative exercise—which I’ve heard it is— then I’m super interested to see the state of humans in the arts 24 months out from now.

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There is a key difference in the way these models are trained - Chess and Go have clearly defined win conditions, so a model can be taught to explore the possibility space and try to reach victory by any means necessary, potentially with strategies which have never been seen before. With art on the other hand there is no objective measure of quality, so the models are instead taught to treat already existing art as the benchmark to strive towards, making them trite by nature.

As I see it AI can absolutely find innovative solutions, but only if you can clearly and explicitly define the problem it needs to solve.

With art on the other hand there is no objective measure of quality, so the models are instead taught to treat already existing art as the benchmark to strive towards, making them trite by nature.

Isn't this reminiscent of the arguments that were made at the dawn of photography as an art form? Some were afraid that portraiture was finished as an art form, but we got Impressionism, Cubism, and a host of other innovative forms to take its place. Never mind that portraiture was not in fact killed by photography, nor was any other visual form.

Others swore that cameras and film would never be valid implements of art, but they got awfully quiet when Adams and Weston and others showed up on the scene, and you don't hear much from them at all these days.

If nobody was afraid of AI -- if nobody was screaming bloody murder about how urgent it was to stop it -- only then could we safely say that it will have no role or relevance in art.

I use diffusion models and other generative tools to give me inspiration for works. While these aren’t solutions, per say, the tools do help me define (and refine) my approaches and offer visual options to consider.

Most of contemporary art is unaffected by the current AI craze.

On one hand, the art world has been steadily pushing boundaries since the 19th century, and computer technology is just one blip on the vast radar of interesting subjects (other fashionable ones being gender, colonialist history, social practices, and physical properties of paint).

On the other hand, art is mostly created by artists who were professionally trained as artists, i.e. not as scientists. Knowledge about computer technology is typically rather limited with both artists and collectors, leading to fairly bland stuff, or properly misguided hypes such as NFTs.

> On the other hand, art is mostly created by artists who were professionally trained as artists, i.e. not as scientists. Knowledge about computer technology is typically rather limited with both artists and collectors, leading to fairly bland stuff, or properly misguided hypes such as NFTs.

Having reread this section, and considered it, I’m going to hard disagree. You are severely underrating the technical capabilities of artists. Historical and contemporary.

Note the "mostly" and "typically". There are some amazing artists who really know what they're doing.

The chances of an artist having a PhD in machine learning and a masters at Goldsmiths are statistically speaking very low.

> Most of contemporary art is unaffected by the current AI craze.

The illustrators and digital artists I know would generally disagree.

As an abstract painter, I agree with you.

Significant genre specificity.

Most of the AI generated "art" I've seen I'd classify as more craft than actual art. Art is supposed to express something and communicate and so far I haven't seen any AI art that really moves me or says anything insightful about experience or existence.

When I scroll through the latest highly rated work on Midjourney, for example, I'm reminded mostly of tacky poster shop stuff.

That’s fair but I don’t understand the relevance to my comment.

Illustrators and graphic artists are in a hard spot given the commercial work they do. I’ve worked in this industry in the past and can attest that many of the contracts I executed on cared less about the originality of the output and more about the specifics of the prompt.

Generative AI is enough for a lot of clients, if the price is right, even when the output is subjectively bad.

Yes sure the kind of art that pays the rent for commercial artists is definitely seriously threatened by AI.

I'm inclined to say that AI companies should have to pay for the training data they use although that does seem to mean only companies with billion dollar warchests can train AIs.

I doubt illustrators and digital artists(and their patrons) actually disagree to that line, they just hate AI image generator outputs and want them taken down. The amount of unintended strong negative sentiment an art incites isn't a proxy indication of its artistic value, I mean, I don't get why it's assumed to be one, left and right.

I totally agree. There are some confusing differences in definitions of art :)

I feel sorry for the illustrators, and wonder how they'll be able to sustain their creative passions.

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