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Comment by vrypan | Hacker News Reader

Not to mention that I can also tell when a poster has been generated using Photoshop and not real artist tools, like brushes and pens. I've seen a lot of these Photoshop-generated posters, and they are in no way comparable to something DaVinci or Picasso would create.

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If the hole in the wall teriyaki restaurant’s menu wasn’t hand painted by Monet I turn right around and walk out. I want nothing to do with an eating establishment that can’t at least spring for a realistic rendition of chicken yakisoba hand painted by Michelangelo himself.

Photoshop basically destroyed a centuries-old artistic tradition of depicting six gyoza on a white plate. Now with all this AI nonsense, you might as well just make your food at home rather than stare at yet another “six finger hipster eating a vegetable spring roll” cranked out by ChatGPT.

> not real artist tools

Nice no true Scotsman fallacy. PS is a "real" artist tool.

I believe that comment is satire. Look at the last six words.

I agree.

To be precise, the tool and the artist are two different things. You can make crap with brushes or PS, and you can make art too.

AI is a tool too. What I build with it is orders of magnitude less important/interesting compared to what a talented artist can build with it.

Wouldn't say that, there is a huge shift in art style between what we got before Photoshop and what we got after. Just look at book covers in the 1970/80s and book covers in the 1990/2000s. The old stuff was full of custom illustrations, while the new stuff is often just copy&paste of generic stock images or some rather hideous early 3D renderings. Even the bad covers of the 80s (see /r/badscificovers/) still have some personality to them that is lacking in a lot of more modern ones.

It's not that you can't create good art with any tool, it's just that the economy and expectations change with the tools available, and the tools being faster/cheaper doesn't translate into better art.

This bullshit disingenuous false equivalency again.

In both photoshop and painting, the human using the tool decides what strokes to use. That isn't true with AI art. It's not "just another tool" for doing the activity when it does the entire activity for you.

> In both photoshop and painting, the human using the tool decides what strokes to use.

except for the million posters and album covers unironically made with a real photo passed into one of photoshop's "Artistic" filters to make it look like some impressionist painting

HEH. It seems like you don't remember the early days of Photoshop.

The analogy holds perfectly well. We can "no true Scotsman" this all day long.

Any "real" artist could dunk on PS: "Oh, you didn't have to go out and buy a canvas and paint and brushes. Hell, you probably don't even know how to properly mix paint on a palette! Not only do you not to clean your brushes, you don't even have brushes!"

And the right response is: "Who gives a shit?" The answer is "Some folks, but their opinion decreasingly matters." And the same exact logic applies to AI. You might as well be complaining that Google doesn't pay cartographers to hand draw Google Maps.

> when it does the entire activity for you.

This is total fiction, and has spawned an entire cult of "just give me the prompt" folks that think using AI requires no skill, and anyone using AI is just a "meat proxy". But that's not true, at all, as evidenced by years of commentary on this site with people getting radically different outcomes using AI. We've gone from "stochastic parrots" to "gonna destroy humanity" in 2 years.

AI will do jobs that we used to go to Fiverr for -- it'll eat the bottom of the market, just like automation does elsewhere. The bottom of the market is blog art, clip art, menus, commercial signage, event posters, and the like. That's completely natural, and hating it is shouting into the wind. The local cafe owner was never particularly incentived to have their menus crafted by some local artist.

Not to mention the local cafe owner probably paid some money (not much, but some) to a random designer to get a menu, which is often 10x worst than the AI generated version.

It is exactly “another tool”. Just like Abelton with an automated drum machine is another tool for creating music. As the posting shows the tool isn’t doing the entire activity for you. The author is reprompting the tool to generate a result more inline with their vision.

It's not "creative" in the sense of incorporating a drum track or photograph into a composition you're developing, it's "creative" in the sense of asking for a vague style and getting it, which is pretty much exactly the tool doing the entire activity. The author explains in detail that it's not their vision, its just a list of styles returned when asked for a list of styles, and they don't actually know what the Memphis Group even is...

Would you consider me to have "created" Billie Jean if I type "eighties music" into a music search engine and select "Michael Jackson" from the list. Or to have "designed a logo" if I pay a human to design some logos for me and pick one.

You can do that exact thing with Ableton if you want. If you want to put in low effort you can do that. You can find beats labeled “1980’s pop” and use presets from other people. You can put in high effort using AI tools and fine tune every aspect of the result if you want. It’s just another tool. You are conflating effort with the tool.

You forgot the /s.

Sadly, if it hadn’t gone on to DaVinci, I wouldn’t be sure.

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