xor99

H/w I can't stand the current hipster bs around "pure" artists and muscians (e.g. I only show at X or I'm an IDM genius since I was eight etc). It's very silly and enforces an artificial scarcity that's not good for anyone. You don't have to be a pure artist to be successful, there is no such thing.

I agree in relation to both non-digital visual arts (kind of) and digital visual arts (especially). This may also apply to CAD, game design, ui/ux and 3D animation too. So it is a big deal. However, there's no real AI replacement metric if your art is outside of these, very digitally orientated categories. A big shark in formaldehyde, psychedelic peeing reindeer, silver bromide developing on a metal canvas, titanium pellets that roll through a game machine etc (e.g. all recent artworks). They're all art, mostly good (at least to many people in the art market or critics), and AI is in not really relevant in terms of labour replacement.

On the other hand, small startups selling to customers who need to produce proprietary content could incur a risk with AI generated products. Aka the customer won't want to risk their product by including potentially infringing items (like with Co-Pilot's potential use of unpaid labour or open source code and other licences).

I think DALL-E is a win-win by pushing digital art to some further extreme and forcing people who are open to art beyond the digital to try new things. Digital art had reached a point of maximum inertia before this imo.

Ultimately you are talking about art as a product and that means you think all art is captured by Warhol's system of art. Which is what all digital artists overreacting to this also think. It's not the totality of what art is. I like DALL-E. Good work, but now what else is there beyond digital art? Or by pushing digital art to some more extreme outcome?

I can bring up a form of art that is not captured by this conceptual scheme. Carsten Holler's SOMA:

The exhibition Soma was installed at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin in 2010. Its main element were 12 reindeer in two pens running the length of the former railway station. Half of the reindeer were fed the fly agaric mushrooms in their food, which are part of their customary diet in the wild, and turn their urine into a hallucinogen. The reindeer urine was collected by handlers and then stored in on-site refrigerators for use. The experiment was extended to canaries, which were housed in two hanging cage pieces, to mice, and to flies. A mushroom-shaped Elevator Bed was installed in the middle of the space, and visitors could spend the night on the premise for a fee.

Do you see what I mean by this digital art vis a vis the collapse of all art being an overreaction? Carsten Holler is a real artist, the art is good, and its not reproducible in the way digi-physical stuff is. It's experiential art and presented in a gallery. Conceptually, its about as far away from DALLE-E as possible but its still art and not "captured". I think art is not over and DALL-E is not poison for artists.

The problem with being shocked by Dall-E, in my view, is that it shows an ignorance about the historical development of art and its incredible diversity of practice + the final productions and forms of art. OpenAI have sort of Warholised digital art in a way and that's just very standard in art history. People went crazy when Warhol productised art but in reality this was an overreaction and plenty more stuff came after that which completely different in its orientation towards art (e.g. something like Hans Haacke). Dalle-E is a system for producing digital art in the way that Warhol's practice was a system for producing visual art as a commercial product.

This is literally the opposite of the main editorial push in this article and headline. Misrepresenting researchers in this way to beef up a silly mainstream narrative about ML/DL is definitely uncritical STEM worship-type territory.

This is some really cool work in that direction. Very high voltages though as usual.