> it's about what you created
But you didn't create anything in this case. Not the images at least. Which then casts doubt on the rest of the writing in said blog post.
But you didn't create anything in this case. Not the images at least. Which then casts doubt on the rest of the writing in said blog post.
I never said there wasn't, but I also wasn't talking about human roles where people in larger creative teams have some kind of artistic say in the final output of a much larger process involving other talented humans. That is a very different example and I think you know that.
A director does a hell of a lot more than select what goes in a frame and then sit back and watch it come together.
The gatekeeping on this is crazy. I really wonder how artists discussed photography and other advances.
If you compare this scenario to photography and art, it's pretty clear you've not actually participated in that community
I was comparing this to when photography first came onto the scene not today, but I'm tired of the gatekeeping (which you retreated back into) which says this isn't art when as with every creative process, it is derivative and creative.
People already splice together videos of generated clips. Is that not creative? It's just gatekeeping. People in a few years (or already) or in a generation won't be this pedantic about it.
You're using your definition of "creative" and "art" interchangeably, which lacks nuance and respect for art. The reference to the arrival of photography similarly lacks nuance and respect for artists and art.
Art and creativity have a human element, they evoke emotions. As soon as you delegate the process to an LLM, you've disrespected that human element if you try to pass it off as creative or art. You can call it "gatekeeping" if you want to, but I see it as basic respect for other humans and human imagination and effort.
If somebody spends hours prompting various resources and curating it, is that then "slop"? I don't think it is, it's just as sustained a creative effort, regardless of the tool used. You are saying that the 10-20 minute clips that people have put together of generated vid of various series (like Star Wars) isn't art? There are entire stories told using this method. It's not art?
> If somebody spends hours prompting various resources and curating it, is that then "slop"?
In my opinion, yes. Some people may disagree with the term "slop" in this case, but that does not step it all the way up to "art". It can still be non-slop, non-art.
You're right, I don't gatekeep art that same way. I don't lack respect for art, I lack respect for your standards which I think are artificial.
Someone that pretends prompting is "effort" will always just be that, regardless of how you, personally, set your standards.
Don't you see how this can be said for your feelings about AI art?
Everything you're saying about AI art, someone once said about some other emergent art form. Photography, CGI, digital illustration, synthetic music... with just as much conviction as you're displaying here. But you'd agree those other things have become artforms, yes?
To preempt the typical retort "Yeah but in those cases humans put in some extra X" okay why can't humans put in some extra X while using AI as a tool as well?
You're also making an assumption that AI's acceptance WILL follow, just because the others were later accepted. You can't make that assumption at all.
Neither of these arguments are in good faith.
But a meaningful discussion requires good faith, not dismissal to disingenuous argument.
Whatever definition you bring into scope will not resolve it because a colloquial definition only describes how a word is commonly used, and doesn't establish rule for every disputed case, which is what we have here.
Definitions are generally not normative, but even if we agreed on one, it would not exclude a works solely because of the tool used to produce it. But you are saying that every work produced using AI is illegitimate as art, regardless of its intention, composition, context, expressive content, or any other quality ordinarily associated with art.
What necessary property does accepted art possess that no AI-assisted work could possibly possess? Or to state it another way closer to my original question (which was not disengenuous), what additional human contribution makes photography or CGI art, and why couldn’t an AI-assisted process contain that contribution?
Until that property is identified, saying AI images cannot be art is largely just a stated conclusion.
Instead, you did not engage with this concept until now and relied on logical fallacy. When I pointed this out, you did not revise or adapt to show good faith, but decided to pivot to falsely classifying the discussion as just a matter of my opinion with no merit. Now we're finally circling back.
There are a number of necessary qualities missing in AI works to qualify as "art". Let's take photography, as an example. In photography, the camera captures the images for a human, but the "art" is the unique (original), intentional depiction of the scene that captures the artist's perspective. Art conveys the artist's thoughts to others. This is true of CGI as well. It is still the artist using their skills to provide a unique perspective in a digitized world.
AI works lack these qualities. It is impossible to create unique AI art - it isz at best, a collection of derivative parts. Sometimes art is intentionally derivative, yes, but that leads to the next point. AI art cannot carry intentionality that art can. It carries a distillation of intention, tokenizing and associating the intention back to its training set. It disconnects the prompt author from the output in a definitionally important way. It is randomized, not reproducible. It is an approximation of the prompter's thoughts, ideas, and emotions - not a translation. It cannot reflect the human experience in its output, just a statistical guess at them.
> saying AI images cannot be art is largely just a stated conclusion.
Yes, it's called a thesis. I have one, I've stated it, and I've supported it. You're welcome to contribute to the discussion
Assuming you aren't, this is called a "false analogy" or "category error". Pigments are raw materials for painting in the same way that letters are raw materials for writing. Pigments make no claim to be art, never have. AI-generated text, on the other hand, is a fully-realized product that lacks the human intent that makes it art, but can be passed off as "art".
I've heard it all before.
Gate keepers wanna keep the gate as long as they can.
Isn’t that what a prompt literally is?
[Edit: Further, these don't really line up with what the comment you're responding to is saying. If all you did was write a prompt for an image, it gives the impression that you may have done the same for the text. At that point, if I care about what the AI has to say, I can just write a prompt to an AI myself.]
Most serious AI artist are not just writing a prompt for an image. They usually have their own process and can describe it in the same detail any trad artist would.
But to your point about Photoshop/autotune, the basis of most AI artwork pipelines is some other creative work, like a reference image, just like you're imaging is the basis for those other examples. So the argument isn't disingenuous, you're just not familiar with how AI artists work.
For example, if an AI artist wants an exact composition for a scene, they can first create that composition by taking a photograph, or arranging it in a 3D editor like blender. Then they can use AI to "fill in" some elements of it.
I don't see that as any different from an artist using autotune to make their voice sound different.
Moreover, what about the synth example? What goes into synth music is connecting a bunch of wires and adjusting a bunch of knobs to tune the generated output of the machine. That's the same mechanical process as AI art.
> you didn't create anything in this case. Not the images at least. Which then casts doubt on the rest of the writing in said blog post.
The topic is "AI-generated images" in blog posts. Which, no, most of those aren't being generated with any of the more sophisticated techniques you're listing. And if they are, they're less likely to be the images people are complaining about and that are being discussed here.
People are complaining that search engines are overwhelmed by AI-generated writing and images. Several people in this thread are stating that they click-off when they see it. It may be developing similar to banner ad blindness, where people saw the pattern of spam and low quality output and developed a reflexively mental filter and stronger dislike of them. What number of potential readers is an acceptable loss? Most blogs are small, so probably not many. But even worse, as many have said here, it also harms their perception of the blog.
Outside of the many outright spam blogs generating tons of images, a lot of people creating the "AI-looking" art that people say looks "bad" or "obvious" are actually also putting time and energy into it too. Those things don't automatically equal quality or trust. In some cases they consider themselves the serious AI artists. These creators don't always know that their images "look like AI," which is part of why it's becoming a perceived quality signal. They'll say it doesn't, but people mistake some of my pieces (not AI) as AI. Art is in the eye of the beholder. (Incidentally, if you're reading this, ensure you're actually getting meaningful, critical critique and feedback. That's something that's an important cultural component in many creative communities.)
I take issue with how poorly phrased the comment's arguments are. Saying that people "didn't create anything if they used Photoshop", they didn't create with whatever "synth" is supposed to be, or that scientific research isn't real because of calculators are bad comparisons and inaccurate.
The author may be trying to make a point similar to the photography one mentioned elsewhere or something like "Well if AI generated art isn't art, art must not exist?" I'm literally confused by the post and honestly can't make out the point with how hyperbolic and outright wrong it is. It just reads as mud-slinging to me.
> What about the synth example
Does "synth" mean synthesized music? What about it? A synthesizer is generally deterministic and the musician is making a decision about exactly what nodes are being played. The use of something like an arpeggiator is predictable and deliberate choice (I'm not going to go into the artistic integrity tier list of every synthesizer module.) Text prompt-based generation is a much higher level of abstraction which often makes several compositional and stylistic decisions for the user, even with advanced prompting.
Comparisons like these are unconvincing, which is part of why the other comment isn't good.
For some group of users, images they perceive as "AI" now carry a spam association. So, is your music actually rising above the cacophony? Do people even see your banner ad? Do they instantly get a bad taste in their mouth?
Go ahead and use AI-images in your blog post, I'm not gatekeeping or going to stop you. If they're so great, use a bunch of them everywhere. But, I (and people in this thread or that I know) will assume it's blogspam and click away. And, if it's commercial setting and I'm your competitor, I'm going to view that as potential opening for differentiation.
The person you originally replied to scoped their comment to "decent usage", which to me implied some more process than just prompting.
> Does "synth" mean synthesized music?
Yes.
> A synthesizer is generally deterministic and the musician is making a decision about exactly what nodes are being played.
Generally but not always. There's plenty of synthetic music that leverage stochastic components. The stochasticity is a useful design constraint and is part of the artform. There's nothing that says art has to be deterministic or that the artist can't leverage nondeterminism in their artwork.
> Text prompt-based generation is a much higher level of abstraction which often makes several compositional and stylistic decisions for the user, even with advanced prompting.
There's also a whole genre of synthetic music called "Live Coding" which is typing programs to create synthetic music in front of an audience. There's also nothing that says art is only about making low level decisions.
> Go ahead and use AI-images in your blog post, I'm not gatekeeping or going to stop you. If they're so great, use a bunch of them everywhere. But, I (and people in this thread or that I know) will assume it's blogspam and click away.
It all depends on who you're looking to attract. The people I've met in AI focused communities have been awesome, always looking to experiment, try new things. The people against them I find very conservative and resistant to change (not saying this is you, or that it's necessarily bad). Which is fine if that's your audience, you have to know your readership. It's sort of like the difference between startup culture and enterprise culture. One is known for being nimble and innovative, the other for being reliable and capable. Positive signals to one are anti signals to the other. Threats like "I and people I know and the people in this thread won't frequent your blog" are met with shrugs, because that just means you're not the target audience.
Prompting an entire article is a waste of time for everyone. Just outsource all thinking already. Oftentimes a generated illustration signals that. Laziness, lack of discernment. Low consciousness, cheating. (Not always of course, sometimes you just want an illustration for your blog, no big deal! Use AI!) That said, writing doesn’t need to be streamlined like a production line. People immediately feel when you haven’t put the work.
This point against “gatekeepers” is a very lazy argument.
And the same can be said about taste. Taste comes from learning and learning is practice. No wonder people are put off by generated “content”.