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You are presenting opinion as objective fact for a subjective medium, which is surprising to hear from an artist.

This argument, and this article, are not about the "great masters" but about amateur and professional artists who find their efforts easily reproduced and outproduced by AI. These people are not protected by "This is a REAL Picasso" and some of them could lose their financial security because of it.

The article indicates that style can be copied in as few as 20 to 30 images. Could you imagine being an artist who is attempting to gain notoriety, publishing low quality pngs of 20 of their works for their Etsy store, and then someone trains a LoRa on that and profits off of your images? Hundreds of hours of time in an attempt to start your art career, to have it duplicated in seconds by computer. You have no time to grow as an artist, because your required contribution to the data set has already been made.

My takeaway is that as with many of the artists, they are reacting to the philosophical no mans land that cheap computer reproduction is putting them into...From TFA:

>As I’m contemplating this Cronenberg-like transformation of the image, I can’t help to be struck by the triviality of my own work. There’s something confronting in facing a computational doppelgänger, something akin to the uncanny valley. I’m surprised at how much this affects me, even though my whole schtick is to be reflexive and critical about style, what surprises me the most is that even though the output if “objectively” a failure1, I see myself in it. But maybe what I see in the generation, what I find actually disturbing, is the part of my work that has already been objectified and commodified, the parts of my style I spent years making digestible for clients, consistent for social media, and reproducible for easy production.

This feeling is not present in artists who are not commercial artists or otherwise produce VOLUMES of similar work - because it is functionally impossible

Why?

Again, as with picasso et al... they are performing the work of an artist. Namely it is a lifetime oeuvre - not a single period - that defines an artist.

This is my point, and you can disagree, most commercial artists are not producing art, they are designing propaganda for corporations. It takes artistic skill, but it's not what I would consider relevant for the author

The author sits at the intersection of capitalism and art - that you can produce designs for money repeatedly and so predictably as to be identically imitated is proof enough for me

Nobody can reproduce or copy my art because it's PHYSICAL and hanging on my (and many others' including our own jacquesm) wall. They can try, but forgeries are very hard to do.

> This is my point, and you can disagree, most commercial artists are not producing art, they are designing propaganda for corporations.

Tbf I think the artists most threatened are the ones doing fetish or furry commissions for individual clients paying $100-$300.

Corporations need to be able to make revisions to a style or have artists advise them on where to make changes. AI isn't good at that. (Getting better though.)

> The art masters cannot be replaced, you cannot predict what they’re going to do next because they change the rules entirely. This is how we know a great artist from a mediocre artist.

I agree that in principle the best working artists are those who know how to create, modulate and discard artistic languages over time -- creating and abandoning rules for sequences of work -- but AI systems can clearly be unethically trained to mimic art in those styles, and there are many living artists (or estates of recently departed artists, supporting their families) whose incomes are defined by some periods of their lives where they worked a particular set of rules in a way that became definitive.

So it's not enough to say that great artists won't be affected because they change the rules all the time. Most of them will still be ruined by this, because as soon as there's enough work in the new style it can be stolen.

> because as soon as there's enough work in the new style it can be stolen.

This is where the oft-cited comparison to previous advances like the camera breaks down - AI has an ongoing parasitic relationship with the mediums it is displacing. The camera doesn't need a thousand photorealistic paintings of a new subject to be made before it can capture that subject going forward. AI is an unprecedented situation, as far as I can tell, where a new artistic medium greatly de-values prior ones while also being reliant on those other mediums continuing to be used at scale in order to avoid stagnating.

This week I completed a sculpture which I intentionally made to be non-photographable by choosing lighting and materials which showed off high reflectivity and high chroma so that screens would not be able to reproduce it. To the human senses it is something that really steals your attention, perhaps because we have becomes so used to the constraints of our reproduction technology and this is not that. The Prussian blue pigment sucks you into the astral realm and the gold is hypermodern reference to the Apollo program. It started a lot of conversations.

The work is a critique of photography, prints and screens and all of postmodernism. It also is also a warning about being satisfied with mediocrity.

I always find it philosophically entertaining when I see a material in real life that can't be photographed with a phone like this. (Of course that includes gold foil, mirrors, blue LED concert lights, the sun, the moon… so, pretty common.)

But try making one that can't be videoed or 3D scanned with Polycam.

I agree wholeheartedly.

As a photographer I am shocked to see other photographers who are AI proponents making the comparison to the beginning of the photography era. (Though it's usually the very bad photographers or those who haven't actually done any reading about the impact of photography on art who make this point)

Art's one hope to avoid this parasitism is to move back into the realms of the purely physical, I think (and as a photographer that includes me).

The fact is that it is much like that, because no one then knew what was going to happen and it seemed to them like an existential threat. The mechanism of how it works or its relationship with our previous technology is irrelevant. The comparison is about everyone freaking out because no one knows how this is going to play out.

But history has shown time and again that carving out a niche in art by using technology is always fleeting and any security you think you had was illusory. Just looking at Hollywood, you have: (a) transition to sound (b) emergence of televisions (c) transition to color (d) effects revolution (e) digital replacing practical effects (f) digital replacing film

Each one of those transitions obsoleted a generation of specialists with niches, yet Hollywood and the people it employs are still doing just fine.

Which is precisely the point

The majority of people complaining are complaining that their “specialness” is being commodified

What actually happened was they commodified themselves and their work, in order to gat paid and maintain their position in the world as an “artist”

They are now pretending that that what they were doing had more value than it actually does simply because it takes skill and craft and they define themselves by it

Guess what, making metal fenders by hand takes a shit load of skill and craft, same with exterior plaster artists same with molding and crowning artistry - 100% of those kinds of workers were replaced perfectly by Machines.

You cannot replace demand for art qua art - because you are selling a moment in time of an artist expressing a fully felt emotional release. You can’t buy that because it cannot be created via money. It is a unique and temporal experience that can only be done by one person at one time in the world.

you can however, replace demand for art in service to commerce and it is a function of capitalism that that will be replaced because by function, it is in service of promoting a commercial behavior, not the expression of an artist in communicating themselves

Do we want art to be highly valued? Doesn't that make it out of reach for the masses? I think making art more approachable is a good thing. I probably would not have gotten into visual art if I could not use a camera, and had to paint or even dance. The camera de-valued painting by saturating the visual art ecosystem. Image generation does the same once again.

Consider: generative art technologies (as all good technologies) raise the skill floor, without lowering the skill ceiling.

At a certain point, art sells because of the artist not the art. Picasso's sell because they are Picasso's. An artist starts by creating a style that separates them from the pack but eventually turn into a brand that sells because they artwork is from that artist. For people that successfully are able to turn into a brand, great, but I feel new artist are going to be heavily kneecapped by AI.

I’m no artist, but I’m not sure I agree. As an example, Cubism (Picasso) or stuff by Pollack (arguably another ‘great’) seems quite distinct and therefore reproducible – at least visually if not physically (paint texture, etc.).

what if ai is the next great master

Then I believe that’s quite the feat of engineering and we should all rejoice in the birth of AGI

Goodluck replicating and replacing a leyendecker or a Gibson or a Rockwell. Getting to that level of technical proficiency is more than just settling into a style.