Comic-Con Bans AI Art After Artist Pushback
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If anything, an AI artwork booth should be manned by the engineers that built and trained the image model and well as scraped the training data. Then they can meet all the people they non-consensually took artwork from :P
Digital artwork being presenting at an oil painting conference would cause similar confusion and outrage for the same reasons.
This time around the response as been aggressively adversarial. Not only do they disapprove of the new thing but anyone who express a contrary opinion is considered a target.
This too will pass. Soon everything is going to be rendered at 60hz in real time, and demands that everything needs to be rendered by hand will be as absurd as claiming every frame of a 3D game needs to be hand rendered in Photoshop.
I can vouch for myself and others - that we are there to just buy cool shit and not ‘connect’ with the artist.
“Why would you want to see a booth showing artworks that weren't even created by the person in front of you but by an AI?”
Um, because they are cool?
Who is "we"? Art, to me, is about pouring your heart and soul into something in a way that AI can trivially emulate, which makes it dangerous when placed next to art that actually has a lived experience attached to it.
I can slap a prompt into AI and get some graphic design slop that to the untrained eye looks "close enough" to the vendor next to them that actually made the art themselves. This is dangerous and spits in the face of people who pour themselves into their work.
At best, put the AI art generators into their own little special corner. But don't put one-shotted AI art next to actual crafted human created art right next to one another and say that they're equal. The brush strokes are imaginary. That's a grift.
Some years ago, around the time I became aware that AI art is a thing, the artist scene around Finnish cons had already decided to ban it. And the reason was obvious, as the same people are also very eager to police others who might be selling pirated products.
They don't care legal constructs such as intellectual property. They don't really care about economic constructs such as copyright. What they care about are authors' moral rights. If the model was trained without obtaining a permission from the authors of every work in the training data, they think using the model to create art is immoral.
Art is not created in isolation. It is a result of the artist's exposure (aka training), both intentional and incidental. If an artist wants an AI model to get permission before training on their work, then the artist should get permission from all the artists they were exposed to that shaped their artistic expression.
It's training and copying all the way down.
Oh and this happens in a very underhanded way. Courts, governments and companies (including OpenAI and others) demand copyright is respected by humans. They impose great penalties when humans cheat, and then this happens:
https://torrentfreak.com/nvidia-contacted-annas-archive-to-s...
https://torrentfreak.com/authors-accuse-openai-of-using-pira...
https://torrentfreak.com/meta-torrented-over-81-tb-of-data-t...
If these companies were forced to abide by the rules courts impose on humans, they would have to buy billions worth of books. But of course, "that's not how copyright works". Of course, these companies ARE using copyright to avoid reciprocating:
https://openai.com/policies/row-terms-of-use/
So this is yet another "rules for thee, not for me" situation involving companies worth billions of dollars. A situation that's really hurting people's livelihoods ...
I have an almost unshakable conviction that LLM-type AI systems should become a repository of all human knowledge. When LLMs give you an answer, you should be able to ask, what are the sources behind your answer? People won't do this, but curious, wanting-to-learn people will. Which leads to one of the important questions. How do you keep people curious?
> About $750 to $30,000 per copyrighted work
> Can go up to $150,000 per work if it’s considered willful
... it was definitely willful. And these are amounts that would bankrupt even OpenAI. But I guess only you and me will have to pay these sorts of amounts, not big companies ...
or
(so is J.K. Rowling)
"aka training" is doing A LOT of work here
(Not to take away from human artist's unhappiness - it's completely understandable).
This is a good change in society towards protectionist IP, which was long due for fixing, but was never done.
Honestly, they aren't even that logical. Most of the anti-ai rhetoric is anti any usage, even that which is fully licensed.
I'd suggest people learn about Andy Warhol's factory where they mass produced "art." Art is obsessed with "thing-ness," that is, being able to hold and own the artistic object. It's why people without record players buy vinyl that they listen to on spotify. And the way I see it, the main problem with AI art is that (1) it's all digital, and (2) there hasn't been an artist willing to develop a model themselves in order to create unique pieces that exist in the real world.
Don't get me wrong, I think the visual arts are going through a shift that will rival the advent of the photograph, but we are at the birth of this new period. I think it's fair to say that we are in the "this is bad" period before new art movements using the technology start to emerge (e.g. photography), as well as art movements that move away from the medium (e.g. modern art). Art has always been in conflict between being about the idea and being about the skill to bring that idea to life.
https://guyhepner.com/news/318-andy-warhol-inside-the-factor...
https://www.thecollector.com/how-photography-transformed-art...
Ditto for Picasso, and many artists even going back to the Renaissance when great painters and sculptors sometimes had apprentices finish or duplicate paintings/sculptures for them.
But this isn't that. AI is something else entirely.
I don't recommend using the Warhol argument. It's become a trope used by AI-über-alles people who have little knowledge of and often zero experience in the arts.
The reason why artists are mad about AI is the same reason artists were mad about the photograph… they were selling a product like craftsmen, but calling themselves artists. Yes, there is a crisis for getting paid to be someone else’s creative, but there is no crisis in creativity. In fact, there has never been more freedom than now.
Duchamp's R Mutt is an abstract commentary.
The actual vehicle of this commentary, the upside down urinal, is wholly arbitrary.
I don't claim others misunderstand art. I'm saying that art as a product that can be sold for income, where people want to own it, is tied to thingness.
>The actual vehicle of this commentary, the upside down urinal, is wholly arbitrary.
Yes. I agree. I'm generally confused by what you're trying to say here. I also know there are a many copies of Fountain... which again, demonstrates the concept of thingness in art I'm trying to talk about.
You typically can't hang a performance art piece in a gallery all day. You certainly can't sell a print to people at home. The fact that they care about the original instead of holding equal value to the print is exactly what I'm talking about. Digital creations don't have the same thingness, because you'd literally need to do something like get the original RAM that rendered the piece to identify it as "the original."
Defining "concerns about AI" broadly as "is it art?" while obstinately denying the possibility for real concerns about imagegen tech: theft of intellectual property by the wealthy, environmental, economic, expressive, and on and on.
> I don't claim others misunderstand art.
> gp: I'd suggest people learn about ...
Is a passive aggressive way to say "you misunderstand this due to your ignorance".
> I also know there are a many copies of Fountain... which again, demonstrates the concept of thingness
> gp: Fucking Duchamp’s readymades should make any concern about AI worthless.
If anything this "demonstrates the thingness in consumerism".
My point was you are ex post facto conflating your opinion of the items in the gift shop with the named artist's own expression.
Critique, yes. Celebrate, wat?
I tend to categorize Warhol as an artist that if you hate their work you should love it because the point is to coerce you to hating it to lead you to the realization that the arc of factory mass production bends toward lowering quality.
I highly doubt Warhol used his chosen soup brand because he felt it was the pinnacle of soup and represented how even mass produced quantities can have excellence in quality.
More likely he was saying this piece is to art as this brand's product is to soup.
While I suspect the AI fracas within the art community will never go away, I suspect within a decade AI-assisted art (or whatever you want to call it) will be a non-issue for everyone else.
The irony is that the kind of genre art you see at Comic-Con is mostly reproductions of commercial properties or standard tropes and formulas, with very little original vision and creativity. Being able to draw something recognisable as [genre character name goes here], even with some skill, is not that high a bar, and it lives in a tiny niche in the art world as a whole.
AI brought something fresh to art for a while, but now I think creative people are more aware of the limitations. It's in a strange mid-way place between being fascinating, and being frustratingly limited compared to what it could be.
I suspect we'll start seeing meta-art soon with a much more interesting mix of creation, original thought, and execution.
What fresh new ideas did it bring? Most of what I see is generic AI slop pictures tossed in articles I mostly ignore.
...expect "tools of artifice" to help them discern between fresh and rotten.
Unaware how obviously fake and bad their "assisted output" is.
https://www.youtube.com/@thearchiveinbetween/shorts
While the pictures/videos are AI generated, there is a coherent multiverse that builds itself into a story over many videos.
Derivative (much!) but I've been impressed with the turn the "fan films" have taken with AI, like this: https://youtu.be/eJu8rYLjNak
The other question is, is AI a tool or a medium? I often hear people say "Well EDM was looked down on when it first came out," but EDM is not a tool, it's a genre. I think most artists wouldn't really care about "AI" becoming a genre of art, but it's silly to think that all future art will be AI just as it would have been silly to think EDM would have replaced all future music.
That particular AI models have their own bias and are eager to inject it is among the reasons why a skilled user and an unskilled user will have very different results, not a reason why that isn’t true.
> The other question is, is AI a tool or a medium?
Is oil paint on canvas a set of tools or a medium? In art, a tool ot set of tools often characterizes, or even defines, a medium; they are different but not orthogonal concerns. (And the cultural phenomenon of identification of a regularly-used tool or combination of tools as defining a medium generally only happens well after that tool or combination has been in significant use for a while.)
AI is a broad category of tools. Particular combinations of those (either with eachother or with other tools) may also come to be be understood as particular media.
Not quite what I mean. If you and I both take a photo of the same controlled scene with the same camera, the result will be essentially identical. If you and I both type the exact same prompt into Nano Banana, we will both get very different images. So, how is one supposed to know what parts of the AI image are intentional or incidental? If the AI image is "good," is it good because of or despite the prompter?
>Is oil paint on canvas a set of tools or a medium? In art, a tool ot set of tools often characterizes, or even defines, a medium
Agreed, and this is basically what I'm saying. I'm fine with siloing AI art into it's own category and I'm sure some cool work can be done there. But it's fundamentally odd to think that AI will, for some reason, replace or displace other art.
Andy Warhol…
People without taste hide behind skill. They do everything technically correctly and still make something bad. This is the threat of new mediums to them — it takes away their only strength.
But at the same time, something like AI suddenly enables people with neither taste nor skill to produce. I don’t want to see AI art right now — AI art is currently a lot of noise.
The sentiment of photography not being real art hasn’t been a thing for a while now though.
The problem is AI assisted art does not yet exist the same way you can get an LLM to help you finish a project you started by hand, where you can arbitrarily decide how much control you want to exercise over the output.
This simply isn't true. An easy way someone who does most of their art more "traditionally" can use Krita to very much just use AI to help finish a project.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly6USRwTHe0
ComfyUI was also designed from the ground up to follow the same sort of node-based workflow that many CG artists are used to with things like Houdini, Blender, Substance Designer, etc., and includes all sorts of ways you can arbitrarily control where and how much the AI is used for.
That’s an interesting opinion, but I have no idea what, other than ignorance, it is based on.
> The problem is AI assisted art does not yet exist the same way you can get an LLM to help you finish a project you started by hand, where you can arbitrarily decide how much control you want to exercise over the output.
Except it exactly exists in that way, and (while the tooling was more clumsy than today) it has at least since SD1.5 was SOTA.
If you are judging image generation by the native web interfaces provided as the public face of the big hosted models, you really have no understanding of what is out there, and if you aren't doing that, I don't know where your claims could come from.
Maybe some Google products are a bit of an exception, but they're default 5-10 years ahead until it stops updating 15 years before going open source, so that's besides the point.
Other than that, it's all techbros making tangential changes and claiming changes were made. Changes maybe, improvements, not really happening.
I'd say this is at the level of ChatGPT 4 - interesting and shows promise, but only usable with major concessions.
You know why people complain about AI art and not AI code?
Because AI art is quite noticeable. It still doesn't fit into any real artists workflow (someone who is skilled at drawing, and wants to accelerate their workflow without major loss of quality).
The burden of proof lies on you, I suggest you include it next time instead of insulting the person who asks a question.
-- the Clippy for comics
Sure it is. Flagging vernacular, phonetic spelling for accents, punning, signalling a character's use of a word they are unfamiliar with, and so on and so forth. Intentionally misspelling words can definitely be a stylistic choice.
Unfortunately whenever I’ve tried uploading a sketch to ChatGPT or Gemini, it seems to fixate on details of my sketch, and recreates my mistakes in high fidelity. It fails to take a creative leap toward a good result. I’ve heard some professionals have gotten good results building custom workflows in ComfyUI.
I'm not sure if there is clear line in creative process to tell what is too much of AI and what is not. Which leads to above mentioned. AI is just a tool.
Because it's hard to tell whether the app you're using is vibecoded or not. Is an app buggy because it was vibecoded? Or the developer just sucks?
Oh I bet it will go somewhere. There is already plenty of low-budget direct-to-dvd movie, cheap soap opera telenovelas, and elevator music used as background in public places. These don't care about quality, they were always about making the cheapest product possible that can generate revenue / be used as a backdrop. Gen AI is going to be a race to the bottom for this field.
But for "labour of love" art/media, they might have a place in the toolbox (to generate a texture, fill some unimportant background, etc), but full gen AI media won't cut it. Intention, direction, realization is what matter. And since most community are about those labour of love, it shouldn't be a surprise that most people who attend conferences are heavily against gen AI.
Not to say that coding doesn't have those two, but I'd argue developers have been caring less and less for it over the years. Their relationship with code has changed.
You can look at a comic and immediately identify the illustrator if you're well versed in the artists. Now would that still happen in 20 years if Gen AI became standard today? Will we keep getting new artists and new art styles? Or will their relationship with art become more like newer coders have with code?
I don't think it's an easy question to answer and no one likely has an answer.
I think this is both hindsight bias and survivorship bias.
There has always been massive buckets of buggy shit code out there. Now, one thing we had in the past was very tight computing limitations that worked as a decent evolutionary death function. As computing resources grew, the selection function became less effective and we get to see these hulking crap monsters lumber around our CPUs.
I don't think that is really the case.
We are seeing pushback on games developed using AI. Communities like /r/selfhosted is very much pushing back against AI slop code.
While right now it seems like for the most part the concern is from more technical people, we are seeing issues of vibe coded applications shipping bugs because the quality is poor (just look at the bugs shipped in Claude Code).
I think we will be getting to a point of people questioning the quality of the application they are using and whether or not a human was actually involved if bugs start shipping more often.
Yes, people whine but still buy the games, as long as they're fun. Expressed preference of "AI is always bad" vs revealed preference of "It's fine if the product is still good."
They still care about the quality of the product, just not the process as much. Not sure if this the case for all people or a generalization. Just something I noticed.
Oh, some do; for sure they do. Some put a "no ai" badge on their sites; others add disclaimers to their repos if ai has been used to write the code. But I agree with you about the productivity/output. Developers who refrain from using AI are probably more interested in the very process of coding than in its output. They pride themselves on their craft and craftsmanship.
I want to be free to read, write, run, and share code, now and in the future. Relying on centralized services to do it for me (by extracting knowledge from countless other people) is certainly not a resilient strategy.
An example is there's a split in the woodworking community between people who use power tools and those who use hand-tools only. The latter often seeing it as more pure.
Those same power-tools users might in turn look down on something made entirely with a CNC machine.
The end result might be the same table. Indeed, the pure uniform lines from a CNC machine might be what both the others strive towards, but they're unlikely to regard the CNC output as being in better taste.
The effort and craft itself is well regarded and valued, even if it is hard to capture in the final output. Even if the signs of hand-crafting are fewer the higher the quality craft!
Not everything is purely about being able to output a product and/or produce a tangible good or service. Some things are about people and how people feel.
Another example. I run a charity that takes money, but just generates AI videos simulating helping children. What does it matter? Ultimately the person donating just wants to feel like they made a difference, and they get the same feeling either way, believing the money is well spent. It matters because no one is really being helped, no virtue is actually being enacted in the world.
In the same way, generating all our art and music from AI would represent a massive harm in the world -- effectively extinguishing massive portions of human creativity, and all the people who get to feel useful in creating, editing, and distributing it. In a cold capitalist view, what does it matter, I just want to see a pretty picture for a moment. In terms of actual real value in the world, it is negative and selfish, assuming the only value is my temporary enjoyment of product.
Speaking only for myself, I can absolutely understand where you are coming from. It makes a lot of sense when put this way. But, I think the difference here is that what you are describing is deceit, and it's the deceit rather than the output, that would bother me in all of your scenarios.
For example, your strongest point in my opinion, is the AI girlfriend versus the real girlfriend. That's a phenomenal argument because it is in my opinion an accurate analogy so how's the logic side strong, and it's also a horrifying one, so it hits hard on the emotions as well as the logic side. The beauty of this is not lost on me, you have created amazing art with that argument! That's the kind of art that really resonates with me.
But zooming in on that scenario, I think the key is disclosure. If the person dating the AI girlfriend knows that it's an AI girlfriend, that doesn't float my boat but I know people who would actually prefer an AI girlfriend to a real one. Again, not for me, but I recognize that it is for some people.
Same with seeing a pretty picture on the screen. If it's being presented to me with deceit behind it, either a person claiming they snapped the photo or made the art digitally when it is actually just AI, then it does ruin the art for me. If it's disclosed though that it is made by AI, I can evaluate it on its merits. Just like in your table example above, I may appreciate the effort and personality behind a more flawed piece that was made by hand, but I also appreciate the precise lines and geometry of a machined output. The key is the honesty and disclosure behind who created it. I get a different value out of the handcrafted piece than I do the AI generated piece. One isn't necessarily better than the other, just different.
Where I do feel a little hesitant on the AI side, though is as you get at the capitalist destruction of art. Without a doubt, the middle level of artists will be hollowed out. I suspect there will always be a place for the traditional artist, but I do worry it will be diminished. On the flip side, I've been able to use AI to take photos of my pets or family, and reimagine them in interesting ways. I know it's not real, I know it's computer generated, and I'm not hanging those pictures on my wall. I simply do not get the same joy from seeing those pictures as I do the originals. I could be wrong here, but I feel like that is the heart of your point, and I think it's a good one.
There is no problem with using hand tools, power tools or CNC.
The problem is people looking down on the others.
Of course the path you chose is a more pure reperestation of your values. That"s why you chose it.
For me it's the same with music. I am sure I will be fooled by some AI generated music now and then, but what does that prove?
FTFY.
Similar to organic or "artisan" food.
This is starting to change, thanks to the staggering decline in average software quality in recent years (likely partly driven by vibe coding and similar). It’s getting so bad that even non-technical users who’ve traditionally just silently suffered through poor software experiences are starting to take note and voice frustration. Demand for quality “handcrafted” software will almost certainly increase as long as this trend continues.
Can you generate something with AI and then manually edit it in Photoshop? How much manual editing is required before it's not considered AI anymore?
My point is, AI is another tool in the toolbox, it can be used well or poorly. How much is too much? Just like back in the day, using Photoshop wasn't allowed, until it was.
Where does one draw the line?
Eventually no one will be able to really tell the difference and all of this will go away (though likely at the expense of more people's livelihoods).
It's a good thing people are pushing back against the slop if we want there to be any incentives for AI tools to not be geared towards helping make slop.
AI will have a home on people's desktops for those that accept it.
Art that has value will not be AI art. Artist like Margaret Keane will continue to be viewed as exceptional along with their works. [1]
Personally, I view AI art as lacking passion and an attempt to short circuit the path to profit / greed. I wish to not fund that circuit.
This frees the lead artist up for more conceptual work. AI can potentially carry on this tradition, and at less of an expense.
The truth of many great artists is that they needed to produce a lot more work than they'd have liked to make a living for themselves.
Ivan Pavlov's assistants realized the dogs were salivating. Ronald Hare figured out how to mass produce penicillin and saved thousands of lives but no Nobel recognition for her triumph were those that got the prize failed. [0]
I personal will never fund AI art / AI artist. There is no personality in such works, only slop. Profits help artist is not why the create the art they do and if so, they lack soul in their works.
[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/penci...
> And as I learn about such individuals taking credit for others work I have nothing but disgust for them
Historically, this wasn’t considered "taking credit." Leonardo da Vinci’s studio for example, involved apprentices completing significant portions of works under him. Buyers were aware they were commissioning a studio work and not a pair of hands. Koons or Hirst do it today, and it's no secret... it's how prolific artists have operated for centuries, they just can't keep up with the demand for their work solo.
The real soloists, like Van Gogh for example, were mostly obscure while they were alive... didn't really have any patrons, and didn't produce enough work to live off of.
To call the destitute failures "true artists" and someone like da Vinci "soulless" is pointless, because we don't decide these things, history does.
> Ronald Hare figured out how to mass produce penicillin and saved thousands of lives but no Nobel recognition for her triumph were those that got the prize failed.
I don't think this is true? Hare found success from trying to replicate Fleming's results. Fleming, Florey and Chain were jointly awarded the Nobel for the original discovery.
> I personal will never fund AI art / AI artist. There is no personality in such works, only slop
There will come a point in the near future where you won't be able to tell the difference. I lived through the same argument with Photoshop in photography.
I happened to me. I spent 10 minutes writing a reddit comment. I researched it, I sourced it. It had sections with headlines, bullets, and even em dashes. 100% written by me.
As soon as I posted it, it was downvoted and I got PMs saying "don't post this AI slop!".
The problem is the AI has been trained on well executed material, and when you execute well, you look like an AI.
I’m sure reasonable artists agree with you, but many today do not
It can definitely take creativity and fortitude to get an AI model to draw what you want it to. But if you worked at a fantasy publishing house and commissioned a cover painting, it might take a fair amount of work for you to get the artist to create something in line with what you envisioned. But you wouldn't get artistic credit for the resultant painting; the artist would! If AI is creating the piece, it is the artist; and you're merely the commissioner of the work.
If you do this infrequently, you're a commissioner of work.
If you do it daily, in-house, for your own products... you might just have the title "Art Director."
"Art director" seems accurate for what a skillful user of art generators with a specific vision does.
I have also thought that since people find "director" lofty (thanks to auteur theory?) and therefore pretentious to assume, one could borrow "producer" from Vocaloid: https://vocaloid.fandom.com/wiki/Producer (alternative front end: https://antifandom.com/vocaloid/wiki/Producer).
And the best Art Directors today almost all have a background in creating art themselves, in some fashion. I suspect that will remain true in the AI world as well, at least for the foreseeable future.
Classic thought-stopping argument.
There is a reason those are classic philosophical questions. Because they highlight the fact that while it is easy to identify the ends of the spectrum, it's impossible to find the midpoint, because everyone has a different lived experience.
Hmm ... that has not been my experience.
>it's impossible to find the midpoint, because everyone has a different lived experience
Yes! That's the answer to your question.
https://www.weather.gov/fsd/twilight
It's based on how many degrees the sun is below the horizon.
I can tell you for sure nobody will say "it's nighttime" during civil twilight.
Nautical twilight maybe like 50/50 ... but again "when does the night starts?" still applies.
At this point, I believe it's not a matter of intellectual honesty or actually disagreeing with any of it - it's just about outcomes. They don't want to see their work devalued, their sources of income drying up. It's an understandable fear. No one who enjoys the work they do enjoys the prospect of potentially having to change careers to keep making a living. Hell, most people that don't enjoy what they do have no desire to have to try and find a new career.
But humans are selfish. The same artists who are worried about technology taking their job will laud praise on technology in other areas that have eliminated jobs, with my recurring example being how happy they are for no longer having to pay a web dev to build them a portfolio site and can instead just go to squarespace and pay them a fraction of the cost. No one laments how there are basically no independent web designers building small sites anymore - it's just not a viable career. It's all been consolidated into shops working for big clients or pumping out themes for Wordpress, Squarespace, and Shopify. And of course, there are countless examples of this throughout history.
I'm not sure AI is going to be the great job destroyer we fear it is. I'm not sure it isn't, either. So I get it. This has a chance to force an issue on a massive scale that usually is much more limited in blast radius.
But to answer the question - I don't think it actually matters to them what the line is from any sort of rational perspective. It will move and shift based on the conversation to wherever they think it needs to be to protect themselves.
Plenty of them are going to respond just as negatively to that.
> They don't want to see their work devalued, their sources of income drying up.
You are literally saying the same thing. A job is a proxy for compensation.
A result of a prompt you can’t, I believe you can’t trace over a copyrighted work and claim it as your own either so I say that tracing over an AI generated image would not fly either. But IANAL so the details to be fleshed out. Also would probably break if one uses a model that is not trained on any copyrighted data.
The first is that all “AI” is not equal. It’s specifically generative AI that most take issue with, mostly due to questionable ethics in training. Image editors have employed techniques marketed as “AI” for many years that are mostly or entirely unrelated to modern generative AI.
The second is that whether something is “AI art” is a spectrum, not binary. On one end you have creations in which generative AI played no role and on the other you have images that were generated off of nothing but a prompt or vague scribbles. In the middle you have things like images where the artist traced over an AI image or used bits and pieces of generated imagery. Probably the closest shorthand for where an image lands on the spectrum is to what degree the creator engaged their artistic skills.
A great many of digital artists would be happy to use Photoshop 7/CS1/CS2, all long predating generative AI, if those ran on modern operating systems. Some prefer modern simplistic (and without AI) tools like Paint Tool SAI.
Let's be honest, its due to the massive economic impact it's having.
If training were purely ethical, the creative community probably still wouldn’t love generative AI, but it probably wouldn’t hate it nearly as much either. It’s the cavalier attitude towards violation of consent for the sake of profit that really seals the deal.
Historically, Artists have often had (mostly) uncredited assistants that handled a lot of the grunt work. This is particularly common, IME, for physical media artists that do large sculptures and similar pieces. "The Artist" will do the initial design, and then "artists" working under their direction will do a lot of cutting and welding, for example.
AI is upending a lot of this because it is letting more people become Artists in the sense of bringing a vision into reality via the use of various external helpers.
In the end all visual artists are just manipulating how photons hit our eyes, and there are lots of ways to make that happen pleasantly.
I'd be interested to see you expand your comment beyond what you wrote. I don't have a horse in this race, I'm a terrible Artist and have no interest in using my time to create visual baubles with AI. I just see it as an interesting thing that is playing out.
I'd say the right thing to do in such cases would be to credit the whole team, like movies do when the credits roll, rather than conclude that the term "artist" is meaningless anyway because some people take credit for the work of others.
The seemingly purposeful AI style made it seem unnatural (on purpose), and like a facsimile of an otherwise trustworthy thing (on purpose), which was exactly in line with the idea of the show.
The execution of that show and that idea was pretty bad, but one of the few positives of it was, to me, an example of using AI art overtly, and leaning into its untrustworthy nature.
Maybe tone down the religious framing of what is essentially a cashgrab show for the industry. Also: Does that AI ban apply to e.g. Disney in its entirety? Because if it does, it'll be a very small and pretty bleak Comic Con this year.
Then people get to use the models that stole her work and crashed her site to sell derivative works right next to her booth?
Art != business. They are separate things and only heartbreak will ensue when you operate on the assumption that artistic values is business value.
If what happened to my wife happened to Warhol the equivalent would be someone tearing his paintings off the gallery wall and selling xeroxed versions with sharpie written over them.
However your ultimate points are that art can’t be business, which in turn means artists shouldn’t necessarily be compensated, which defies reality and morality.
When someone short-circuits the whole creative process by putting a prompt into a machine and having it spit out an art, there's nothing to appreciate.
As for skill: I would argue that a random Banksy takes a lot less skill than the average Artemisia Gentileschi (admit it: you had to look her up). Yet, one is celebrated art, the other is virtually unknown and at best 'one among many baroque northern-Italian painters'.
Those are earnest questions, I want to understand the recently-recurring time-and-skill argument. What sort of people honestly look at a picture and ask 'yes, but how long did it take to make? How long had the artist to be trained for this?'
Who claims that 'baroque northern italian painters' are not artists? If anything, an unknown painter is much closer to art with capital A than Banksy, in the traditional hierarchy. So this is a weird framing.
As for time, this is both time taken to create and time spent practicing to reach a certain level of artistry. A speed painter is still an artist, and they reached their speed not by using an AI shortcut but by spending long hours practicing.
The underlying question is how do we tie art and legitimacy: society has always tied both, which is why we have institutions tasked with assigning legitimacy (museums), a hierarchy of art forms where the longest lived are seen as superior (painting over photography), and artists gain prestige not from a single art piece, but from a consistent production of works that are tied together by a shared identity.
On the other hand, a lot of the "pro" AI art discourse I've seen often boiled down to attempts to disconnect art from legitimacy. That's a tough hill to climb.
Pretty strong statement, an as such needs a non-tautological proof. Rich people buying rare things as what society should consider art may not exactly fit that bill.
The thing is what is considered art at any particular time is very nebulous and quite often tied to what the rulers of a country would allow. Trying to say that modern institutions get to decide what art is and isn't is also going to cause definition problems. Does folk art not recognized by museums count at art. The said people who like it would say it does.
Does a person who spends a small amount of time creating something that others consider art, even though that's not what they do, nor will they do it again, have they actually made a piece of art?
Simply put trying to put these rules on the ethereal concept of art quickly devolves into pedantry that makes actual enemies in fields were factions say their ideas are the only true art, and other factions that attempt to destroy the concept altogether.
> a hierarchy of art forms where the longest lived are seen as superior (painting over photography),
I think this is a bold take - comparing an art form that has been around in a meaningful way for 2000 years to one that has been around for 100 years. Also, if that was true, and not just survivorship bias, shouldn't we consider sculptures and cave wall paintings superior to oil paintings?
Photography, by the way, was considered 'unworthy' by 'real artists' for decades because 'there is no art involved in pointing a box at a tree and pressing a button'. That sounds awfully like the AI debate of today, doesn't it?
> artists gain prestige not from a single art piece, but from a consistent production of works that are tied together by a shared identity.
Or is it that an artist does produce more than one piece of art over their lifespan, so they can, in fact, survive, and, once they become popular with one painting, their other stuff is retroactively elevated?
Art one-hit wonders (or low-hit wonders) do exist. Van Gogh is known for the night sky and the sunflowers, virtually nothing else (unless you are an afficiado). Da Vinci is known for the Mona Lisa - if you are an enthusiast, you might know the Salvator Mundi - the Vitruvian Man I consider less art and more technical drawing. Dürer is known for the hands, the rabbit, and a self-portrait. Shepard Fairey is only known for the "Hope / Yes, we can"-poster.
> On the other hand, a lot of the "pro" AI art discourse I've seen often boiled down to attempts to disconnect art from legitimacy.
That may be related to the circumstance that most of the Anti-AI backlash comes from mediocre artists who do mostly derivative works. If your portfolio consists of furry porn and a broody Heath-Ledger-Joker sitting down, with 'HA HA HA' scribbled over it, sorry, that makes you a 'media / creative', but not an artist with a bit A ... You are essentially doing what the AI is doing: Take an idea, rehash it, minimally, then put it down on paper/your Wacom tablet. If all you bring to the table is 'I suffered for this', your market just shrank to people who enjoy your suffering.
Art is not artistry, art is the idea. As such I find the concept of a 'Street-art Darth Vader' covered in colorful tags that's basically an AI image directly or post-processed more interesting than the 'real artist with colored pencils' Darth Vader in a classical pose that the artist got from a superman comic book cover.
You don't. Unless that's the kind of thing you're into, I guess.
> Is a portrait that took 50 hours to paint inherently more worthy than a virtually identical one that took 5 hours? Is the slower artist the better artist? Is a Bob Ross 'happy little trees, body of water, mountain in background'-image not artistically valuable because he does it in 20 minutes?
You can't quantify art that way. People work at different speeds. I can appreciate that something took some number of hours without knowing the precise number of hours.
> As for skill: I would argue that a random Banksy takes a lot less skill than the average Artemisia Gentileschi (admit it: you had to look her up). Yet, one is celebrated art, the other is virtually unknown and at best 'one among many baroque northern-Italian painters'.
Maybe, but I'm not qualified to make that comparison. Both are beyond my level of artistic ability (I've never studied art nor practiced much). I don't know why one thing or artist gets more popular than another while another who's just as talented (or maybe even moreso) languishes in obscurity. Skill is a factor, sure, but there's no formula that I'm aware of.
> What sort of people honestly look at a picture and ask 'yes, but how long did it take to make? How long had the artist to be trained for this?'
Maybe some people think of it that way. I don't know. I've never asked those questions about any art I consume. I just think something like, "wow, this looks nice, it must have taken a while" or "what would it take to make something like this, I wonder"
I think this raises an interesting question about form vs. function in art.
I was running a AD&D game on Friday. At one point, I was holding up the book to show the artwork of a monster to the group. None of us were looking at it and taking the time to contemplate the effort involved, thinking it must have taken a while, etc. I'm sure some people do - old school D&D art is definitely an area that a subset of the hobby is passionate about - but the majority of people are looking at it to help with formulating things in their mind's eye, getting a feel for things, etc.
But I will appreciate a piece of "standalone" art in a very similar manner as to how you describe.
Do most readers spend appreciable time looking at the art on the cover of their book? Do people spend a ton of time looking at album art while listening to music on Spotify? How about the art in a video game - how much of it is the point vs. something that facilitates the point - the last few times I loaded up Dwarf Fortress, it was the ASCII tileset, not the graphical version.
Do AI creations have a place where the art is supposed to be functional vs. being made for the sake of being art?
If you're doing, say, factory work, you can just zone out. You do the same thing over and over, and you do it well enough, but your mind is somewhere else.
But somebody who's truly during art is present in the work as they're doing it. They're up to something. I think that's a big part of why the work of serious artists changes over time. It's an exploration.
In contrast, look at some kitch producer like Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light™. He was clearly successful financially. But I'd argue that there is little more to it than "AI" "art".
For me appreciating art always involves reaching for an understanding of the artist and the humanity we share. An Ansel Adams print is lovely, but ultimately I end up thinking not just about the image or the landscape. I think about being in the landscape. About the process of getting that one perfect photo. About what drives a person to seek that and to go to such incredible lengths. About how Adams saw the world.
If I'm going to think hard about some GenAI output, I'm going to appreciate the technology that went into it. But there's no more to think about the prompter than there is about somebody picking out clip art.
I call BS on this. Most people like something striking or beautiful or thought proviking. For the vast majority, the time or skill barely comes into context. You meant connoisseurs perhaps.