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Comment by cautiouscat | Hacker News Reader

I think for me it's just missing the "essence". Making a film is hard, but that labor with multiple people who are passionate about the project is just as important as the end result.

I've been trying to generate concept art for a game idea. I figure, I can't draw so why not have something else bring my vision to life. After dozens of failed attempts and burned tokens I decided to just hire someone. The experience was night and day. They provided thoughtful details to help tell a story in the image. They got to tell me what they added and why, etc. This isn't even their project but their passion for it showed in the end result.

These models are impressive, but I think people watch movies because of the essence as much as the movie itself.

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This is the same level of arguing that only painting is the real art and photography is just clicking the button

AI prompting can be an art form when someone makes something actually capable of evoking emotion from me. So far I have seen exactly 0 good pieces of serious media created with prompts.

The only reaction I have to prompts is "wow, its impressive that humans created a machine that can mimic art".

It isn’t. Photographers take the time to seek out things they want to photograph, decide how to compose the shot, maybe pick a subject and have them pose certain ways. Choose their lighting and color grading. That is their essence.

To play devil's advocate: couldn't people generating AI image/video take the time to consider what they want to generate, decide how to prompt it, ask for edits to have subjects pose certain ways, and specify lighting and color grading (or tweak it afterwards with the same tools digital photographers use)? Wouldn't that give them an 'essence' in the same way?

Some of the post generation editing, for sure. For the rest of it in my opinion, they're not actually physically doing any of it. There's no friction. Friction is usually viewed as a negative thing but in the arts the constraints that we have are what make it more interesting. You don't get that accidental abberation in the shot (okay maybe you do if you count an extra finger ;). You don't get to talk back and forth with your subject about different poses or backgrounds.

I don’t understand that. Even in my short clips that I do for my kiddo I iterate a lot. Yes, right now it’s mostly prompt and reference images but soon (I think/hope) it will be same tools that are used in real life - things like ability to draw on frames and tell what/how to change etc. reshoots exist in real life for a reason.

Look into photo editing where ai based tools can remove subjects, do generative fills and even transform 2d to 3d/video. Same will come to other ai art too. And this will again differentiate amateurs “prompt 3 lines” and pros “I have vision and I will pursue it using tools available to me”. AI is secondary here.

As I said before - ai helps to raise the floor, not ceiling.

Your original point was:

> This is the same level of arguing that only painting is the real art and photography is just clicking the button

And my point was that these two comparisons aren’t the same. They aren’t the same because photography is an art form and so is painting. They both have essence that I think AI generated art won’t capture.

For example, if someone showed you a photograph of a buffalo that had a bird also in the frame on a fence post. How would you react?

Then let’s say they go “oh well, I actually photoshopped that in from another photograph I took.”

You might be a little less impressed but they still took this picture of a bird.

Then instead of them saying they cut and paste the bird in they say “Oh Photoshop generatively added that in.”

I think many if not most people would think that’s far less interesting than the other two scenarios. Maybe you don’t, and that’s fine.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-45202-3 is a good read on this with regards to the “value” of art.

You argue with a point that I don’t make.

If a director during montage or review will say: “that shot will be better if camera was 2 feet higher, we need to reshoot” or “that extra takes too much attention from main character, can we remove it digitally”, and the author will prompt the same to ai, for their generated videos (that I’m quite sure will be enabled in next years) - this is the same art. creative process is constrained by available tools, but they don’t define it.

Do you think that people posed for medieval family paintings at the same time?

I see your reasoning a lot in many areas, and in my pov it’s just a final, conceding attempt of gatekeeping.

Painters telling photographers that there is no soul in photography. Film photographers telling the same to digital photographers. Woodworkers telling that cnc’s are not woodworking. Musicians telling that only live music matters and recording doesn’t capture all nuances 100 years ago. Guitarists owning and used hundreds of pedals and amps telling that to digital modeling.

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