Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> She is often unsure if she or the computer is the artist.

Did she really say that? As a moonlighting digital artist, I feel like this is the same thing as a painter saying they’re not sure if the paintbrush is the artist. Maybe if I wanted a full time art career I should have leaned into it and fostered the dramatic narrative of the computer having intent. God knows there are a bunch of artists who actually know better say lots of stupid untrue stuff that anthropomorphizes computers, and they enjoy a lot of attention for it. I think this hyperbolic ghost in the machine crap is very short sighted and has influenced public opinion much for the worse.

Artists are undermining their own efforts and talents and spreading misinformation about what computers actually do when they tell the story this way. More importantly, they are undermining the efforts and talents of all artists, specifically of digital artists who don’t want to take part in the computer-as-artist narrative. I’ve stood next to my art at a gallery show and had people walk by and say out loud something like “ugh why is this here? this crap is just made by a computer”. I don’t expect people to understand how I use the computer, but the bias and lack of curiosity is pretty sad, and my computer was neither artist nor collaborator. It was a tool that I used to achieve a vision I had, the same way I use a paintbrush to make pictures.

We could talk about who made the tools, whether it’s a paintbrush, a camera, or computer hardware and software. There’s a Grand Canyon of space for credit that various other people might deserve, in between the artist and the art made using a computer. Jumping to the conclusion that the computer did anything on it’s own and deserves attribution is to be unintentionally (or sometimes intentionally) ignorant about what a computer is and what it does.

> As a moonlighting digital artist, I feel like this is the same thing as a painter saying they’re not sure if the paintbrush is the artist.

This is non-sensical. You hold the paintbrush and move it across the medium with your own hand. It is entirely within the artists control. With a computer, you tell it what to do and within it's own constraints, be that p5.js or an llm whatever algorithm will produce some result.

No it really isn't. Is Jackson Pollock entirely directing each drop of paint or is there some inherent randomness that is being guided and directed at a higher level? There's a clear analogy to digital art where there exists along a continuum things like traditional digital art tools -> algorithmic generative art -> LLM generated art at varying levels of direct control.

Sim to the other reply, Pollock flicks the paint, he doesn't instruct something to generate flicked paint...

Is your gripe purely that text is involved in the middle? If a paralyzed man painted by verbalizing commands -- left, right, up, down -- that "instructed" a simple machine to move the paintbrush, then by your definition he would simply be "instructing" a machine to "generate" the painting.

When Bob Ross scrapes his knife across a canvas to create a jagged rock field, he doesn't have a detailed plan for exactly which rocks will appear and where. But he knows that that it will create a a rough patchy area alternating between two colors that will look like shadows in the context where he's doing it.

When you use the pencil tool across the screen in photoshop, it works just as a pencil on paper.

The difference is not so clear as you imply.

The difference surely is that Bob scrapes the knife, not Bob instructs the knife to scrape paint?

I'm not sure there's a clear difference.

When using a wacom tablet, using the pencil tool in photoshop is very similar to using a pencil. You're "instructing" the pencil tool to move by moving the pencil controller with respect to the tablet.

I know AI slop art when I see it, and I have no interest it making or "consuming" it. But I don't think I could construct a robust definition that would stand up to adversarial scrutiny.

Physics and computing aren't all that different.

There certainly are some physical and process differences between computer art and traditional painting, but I’m not yet convinced you understood what I said. What you have not demonstrated in any way is why the computer should be credited as the artist, or where the computer has any intention. Could the art happen without the human artist? No, it cannot. No computer has ever made art on its own. Could the art happen without the computer? Yes it’s possible, to the degree the artist can imagine the work and create it in a different medium.

Shelley Lake did not use p5.js nor an LLM for The Last Starfighter, and I didn’t use either of those things either. She may not have written the software she was using, and generally speaking I do write the software. I don’t know that it matters who writes the software, but it does make it easier to diffuse artistic credit if you use complex tools you don’t build yourself. I have done quite a bit of both physical painting and digital art and in both cases I’m deciding what gets done, designing the outcome, making the tools myself, and like a paintbrush, the computer doesn’t participate in any of that. The computer is just as much a tool as a brush, and is no more an artist than the brush is.

LLMs are brand new to art, they are not relevant to the top comment of this thread, and in terms of provenance of an image they are not understood by the public yet. I don’t feel that you’ve offered any clear thinking about how to attribute images produced using an LLM. It would be best to leave them out of the discussion for now, but FWIW they don’t change the calculus of computers vs intent and attribution much, they only muddy the water due to humans making all the training data.

So, here is some computer created art ("art"?): https://imgur.com/x4eR2HQ I have many many more like it. https://imgur.com/tCYhZEy

I wrote the program that creates that. When I wrote it, my goal was to make a procedurally generated gas giant planet of some sort, but I didn't even know if what I was attempting would work (and for a period of about a month, it didn't work). I had/have only rudimentary control over the output. I can control the colors that go into it. I can control, to some degree, the scale of the "swirliness", but not the details of the swirliness. I can control how long I let the "swirliness" progress, and a few other things. But, I never know ahead of time how it's going to come out, and it's hard to escape the obvious fact that the computer has done nearly all of the work, and I only gave it the vaguest of directions in terms of aesthetics, although I did give it very specific instructions about how to do everything it did, those instructions were so complicated and so many, that I had next to no idea what specific output those instructions might produce, except in the most general terms. When I run the program, there's an anticipation ... "oooh, I hope this one comes out good!" but I don't know ahead of time whether it will or not.

Why do you call it computer created, when you wrote the software? You’re giving away credit that is entirely yours, to a tool that doesn’t make any art without you. Your computer didn’t decide to make pictures of procedural gas giants, right? It doesn’t even pick the good ones from the boring ones. That’s all you.

You picked the subject matter and setup the camera and shading. You designed the software UI. You decided what level of control you wanted, and you can add more control if you want. I understand you’re using procedural rules and randomness, but that was your intention, and so the story that you don’t have control and don’t know what it’ll look like when run seems to me contrived at some level.

One of my main digital art projects centers on artificial evolution, which is notoriously difficult to control; I am deeply, intimately familiar with what you’re talking about, and I still say emphatically the computer is not the artist, I am, especially when I write the software. In a digital art project, the software is part of the art. You’re framing your control in terms of what happens only between starting up the software you wrote and getting one output image, but for some reason leaving out all the control and intention you exercised writing the software and deciding what kind of procedural pictures you wanted.

There’s a whole category of art called “generative art” that isn’t about computers specifically, but started long before computers existed, and is about setting up and releasing a system of rules, whether physical or logical. Generative art relies on some level of randomness, and the resulting artifact is rarely predictable. And yet, it is still deterministic. The rules might be complex, but the only intention comes from the humans involved who establish the rules, and then let them execute, and hold up the output as art.

Noticing the machine does the labor isn’t very relevant, IMO. Cars do a ton of complex work while driving with only vague directions, but we don’t anthropomorphize them, not seriously anyway. Knitting machines do all the complex work making clothes, but clothing designers don’t talk about collaboration with the machine, nor give design credit to the machine. Printers and copiers are very complex, but nobody waxes philosophical about them being collaborators. Just because an image might come out different every time a program runs that was designed to produce a different image every time it runs doesn’t make the machine an artist, it only shows that the computer is a useful, powerful, and reliable machine.

Yes. It's like saying that photography isn't an art because physics does all the work of producing the picture

i don’t buy it. what if i’m using a tablet and drawing in photoshop? computer art isn’t just code and ai…

whether it’s a physical or digital medium the artist is expressing their creativity and manipulating the tools to realize that vision.

I have no idea what your point is. Why else would I quote her?

It may have been in the 90’s if that makes it more credible for you.

I don’t see quote marks, it wasn’t clear if you are interpreting in your own way or remembering exactly what was said. My point is that calling a computer the artist is hyperbole and inaccurate, even more so from the 90s than today.

It was a statement made a long time ago. We have been talking about technology since the 80's. Some of the unease is that in real life drawing one has to understand perspective this isn't required. I think you may be too hung up on the term artist.

I assumed it might have been a statement made a long time ago, which is why I asked if that’s what was really said.

Not sure I understand what you mean about being hung up on “artist”. That’s the word you used. Do you want to suggest an alternative? Do you mean that Shelley did feel like the artist, and the computer meant something else to her?

Your very short story seemed to me to fit a pattern and language about digital art that I’ve seen many times elsewhere. It’s very common for people to say something very similar about computers being collaborators in the art process, rather than being what they are: inanimate tools, made by other people. I’m sorry if it it’s not really what you or Shelley meant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com