I am not sure how, or even if, it does stop. I assume once the hot air from LLM company CEOs starts being treated as the flatulence that it is, things will wind down. The sentiment against generated content is not going away.
Is electronic music where the artist composes it on a screen and then hits 'play' music? I think it is, of course, but I have had experiences where I went to see a musician "live" and well... they brought the laptop with them. But I think it still counts. It was still fun.
AI slop is to AI art what point and shoot amateur photography is to artistic photography. The difference is how much artistic intent and actual work is present. AI art has yet to get people like Ansel Adams, but it will -- actual artists who use AI as a tool to make novel forms and styles of art.
(I used an emdash!)
This is an outstanding read: https://medium.com/@aaronhertzmann/how-photography-became-an...
Anti-photography discourse sounds exactly like anti-AI discourse to the point that you could search and replace terms and have the same rants.
Another thing I expect to see is novelists using AI to create at least passable live action versions of their stories. I don't think these will put real actors or actresses out of work for a long time, but I could see them serving as "sizzle reels" to sell a real production. If an author posts their AI-generated film of their novel and it gets popular, I could see a studio picking it up and making a real movie or TV show from it.
Electronic music is analogous to digital art made by humans, not generated art.
Early synthesizers weren't that versatile either. Bands like Pink Floyd actually got into electronics and tore them apart and hacked them. Early techno and hip-hop artists did similar things and even figured out how to transform a simple record player into a musical instrument by hopping the needle around and scratching records back and forth with tremendous skill.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnRVmiqm84k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekgpZag6xyQ
Serious AI artists will start tearing apart open models and changing how they work internally. They'll learn the math and how they work just like a serious photographer could tell you all about film emulsions and developing processes and how film reacts to light.
Art's never about what it does. It's about what it can do.
Also, photography has the added benefit of documenting the world as it is, but through the artist's lens. That added value does not exist when it comes to slop.
When's the last time someone who said something like that was right?
How many subjects exist in the world to be photographed? How many journeys might one take to find them? How many stories might each subject tell with the right treatment?
> Serious AI artists will start tearing apart open models and changing how they work internally. They'll learn the math and how they work just like a serious photographer could tell you all about film emulsions and developing processes and how film reacts to light.
I agree that "AI art" as it exists today is not serious.
"The early adopters of new technologies are usually porn and the military." Forget where I heard that but it's largely true.
https://youtu.be/A2H62x_-k5Q?si=EHq5Y4KCzBfo0tfm
https://youtu.be/rzCpT_S536c?si=pxiDY4TPhF_YLfRc
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGIvO4eh190 (warning, lots of disturbing imagery)
Artists use their medium to communicate. More often than not, everything in a piece is deliberate. What is being communicated here? Who deliberated on the details?
Those videos are as much "art" as Marvel's endless slop is "art".
This is like saying a director isn’t really an artist simply because all they do is direct things.
I mean you are building a prompt and tweaking it. I mean even if you didn't do that you could still argue that finding it is in itself a creative akin to found art [1].
I'm genuinely amazed at how some people perceive art.
Not saying you have to agree, but it is a distillation of how some portion of the world sees the world.
Art shouldn't make you feel comfortable and safe. It should provoke you and in this sense AI art is doing the job better than traditional art at the moment here.
Other than the technological aspect, there's nothing new under the sun here. And at its very worst, AI art is just Andy Warhol at hyperscale.
https://wbpopphilosopher.wordpress.com/2023/05/07/andy-warho...
It's exciting being able to say that I am an artist, I always wondered what my life would have been had I gone into the arts, and now I can experience it! Thank you techmology.
Now if you wanted to define art to require 100% bodily fluids and solids 100% handcrafted to be the only real art, now that I'd understand.
Similarly, I'm not sure that argument is making the point those who deploy it intend to make.
But TBF, performance art theatre is art as well.
The end game IMO will be incorporation of AI art toolsets into commercial art workflows and a higher value placed on 100% human art (however that ends up being defined) and then we'll find something new and equally idiotic to trigger us or else we might run out of excuses and/or scapegoats for our malaise.
I don't even really believe serious artists need to totally exclude themselves from using genAI as a tool, and I've heard the same from real working artists (generally those who have established careers doing it). Unfortunately, that point inhabits the boring ideological center and is drowned out by the screaming from both extremes.
jumpscares and weapons being used at others aren't art
You seem so sure that you'll always be able to tell what you're looking at, and whether it's the result of prompting or some unspecified but doubtlessly-noble act of "creativity."
LOL. Not much else can be said, but... LOL.
If X composes something, X is an artist. The person playing a composed work is a performer. Some people have both the roles of artist and performer for a given work.
To say an AI composes something is anthropomorphizing a computer. If you enter a prompt to make a machine generate work based on existing artists' art, you're not composing (in the artistic sense) and neither is the computer. Math isn't art even if it's pretty or if mathematical concepts are used in art.
The term "director" instead of composer or artist conveys what's happening a lot better with telling machines to generate art via prompts.
It takes a rare genius to make a new style, and they come along a few times a generation. And even they will often admit they built on top of existing styles and other artists.
I'm not a fan of AI work or anything, but we need to be honest about what human 'creativity' usually is, which for most artists is basically copying the trends of the time with at most a minor twist.
OTOH, I think when you start entering the fringes of AI work you really start seeing how much it's just stealing other people's work though. With more niche subjects, it will often produce copies of the few artists in that field with a few minor, often bad, changes.
It bothers me that all of the AI "artists" insist that they are just the same as any other artist, even though it was the AI that did all of the work. Even when a human artist is just copying the styles they've seen from other artists, they still had to put in the effort to develop their craft to make the art in the first place.
It does not matter if they are labeled "composer" or "director ". It is the product that counts.
"....I know what I like"
If someone is entering a prompt to generate an image in a model I have access to, I don't really need to pay them to do it, and definitely don't need to pay them as much to do it as I would an actual artist, so it is deceptive for them to represent themselves as someone who could actually draw or paint that. If the product is what counts then truth in advertising is required so the market can work.
Sorry... It's all slop buddy. The medium is the message, and genAI's message is "I want it cheap and with low effort, and I don't care too much about how it looks"
There is a literal cliche "my six year old could've done this" about how some of the techniques do not require the years of training they used to.
And a literal cliche response about how the eye and execution is the current determining factor: "but they didn't."
If you haven't ever written a novel, or even a short story, you cannot possibly imagine how much of your own weird self ends up in it, and that is a huge part of what will make it interesting for people to read. You can also express ideas as subtext, through the application of technique and structure. I have never reached this level with any form of visual art but I imagine it's largely the same.
A prompt, or even a series of prompts, simply cannot encode such a rich payload. Another thing artists understand is that ideas are cheap and execution is everything; in practice, everything people are getting out of these AI tools is founded on a cheap idea and built from an averaging of everything the AI was trained on. There is nothing interesting in there, nothing unique, nothing more than superficially personal; just more of the most generic version of what you think you want. And I think a lot of people are finding that that isn't, in fact, what they want.
The logical implication of your view is that if someone or something has a halo, they can shit in your mouth and it's "good." The medium is the message, after all.
This is the same pretentious art bullshit that regular people fucking hate, just repackaged to take advantage of public rage at tech bro billionaires.
> Sorry... It's all slop buddy. The medium is the message, and photography's message is "I want it cheap and with low effort, and I don't care too much about how it looks"
Hmm... it seems like you have failed to actually make an argument here
Photography is neither cheap nor low effort. Ask AI about it.
> Hmm... it seems like I have succeeded at making an argument here
you enjoy your industrial effluent, I'm gonna stick to human artists making art
Decades later we still don't consider anyone using that function a musician.
>actual artists who use AI as a tool to make novel forms and styles of art.
writing a prompt lol
We don't compare Usain Bolt to Lewis Hamilton when talking about fastest runners in the world.
But hey think about how much money you could save on a wedding photographer if you just generate a few images of what the wedding probably looked like!
There is a "demo" button on synthesizers that plays a canned melody, therefore playing canned melodies is all synthesizers can do, therefore nobody that uses a synthesizer is a real musician.
If i commission Michelangelo to paint me a picture that doesn't make me a renaissance artist.
Among the traditional artists I follow, maybe 1 out of 10 posts is directly about selling something. With AI artists, it’s more like 9 out of 10.
It might take a while for all the grifters to realize that making a living from creative work is very hard before more genuinely interesting AI art starts to surface eventually. I started following a few because I liked an image that showed up in my feed, but quickly unfollowed after being hit with a daily barrage of NFT promotions.