AI chuds are literally just Syndrome
Art isn’t about making something pretty, nor is it really about design, it’s about wanting to do or make something with no ulterior motive, or going beyond what you have to go make something inspiring (these are the same thing when you think about it).
Clip art, a lot of corporate design, a lot of architecture and more isn’t meant to be art, it’s meant to fulfill a purpose and maybe look pretty doing it. That’s not what art is.
Cameras largely killed off commissioned portrait because people don’t care about the process, they just want a picture of themselves, therefore the portrait wasn’t art, it was utility.
That doesn’t mean that it’s impossible for a portrait to be art, nor that photography isn’t art, just that unskilled people were suddenly able to make what they were looking for to a “good enough” standard much more conveniently.
The same can be seen for so many things, including AI being used for clip art or supplementary images in articles. In the case of AI, if all you want is any picture that help support part of an article you’re writing, you didn’t want art in the first place. If you use AI to help you make a statement, or to match a vision you have in your head, or even do things like poke around at the internals to distort the output, then that is art.
I have a different take.
AI today is basically a mechanical school. AI students are trained to give a specific answer. This is at the heart of how all machine learning works, including generative AI. Even image generators do this.
“Here’s a million examples of what the pixelated representation of a hand looks like; now go and make a derivative copy.”
This is fine for objective facts, like physics and history. It is useless for art.
Merely drawing a hand is not art, it’s an objective truth (do typical humans have 5 or 6 fingers?). But art school is not about objective truths. Art school teaches creativity. Specifically challenging ideas and expression.
AIs can’t fundamentally challenge ideas and express themselves because they lack personal experience, personality and individuality.
Society at large has been fooled into thinking that speech (LLM) and other generative AI lead to AGI. But the reality is that these models have more in common with encyclopedias and stock image libraries than intelligence.
The ”AI democratizes art” argument is always a disingenuous one. Art is already the most democratic form of human expression available. There’s zero barrier of entry to just express yourself in any of the myriad ways humans have invented, music, drawing, painting, dancing, it’s quintessential to humanity. There’s no need to democratize something that is already, by definition, universal.
It doesn’t really feel like “art” in the making. When I’ve used AI to create an image, it doesn’t feel different from using search terms and tags on an imagebooru, or trying to find a piece of clip art for a presentation.
I think there might be fruit for exploration in digital collage, training ones on models in creative ways… I’m not really seeing anyone using these tools to really “do art” though. I’m seeing lots of anime girls, porn, ShrimpJesus Facebook slop, hamfisted political comics, and occasionally an “artist” crowing over like a generic image of a tiger. I’d like to see better, but I’m not.
Also - if you like making art, I don’t understand the appeal of taking out “process.” You type some keywords, you adjust them if you don’t like what you see.
This might be more personal preference, but something that I’ve come to enjoy working with paint is that you have to wait for it to dry. That it splatters and doesn’t always go where you want it. That the image you have in your head will not ultimately be the image you get on the canvas. That sometimes it’s a process of weeks of dialogue between you and the canvas.
A lot of AI art enthusiasts do seem fixated on product, not process. I don’t know if you are really an “artist” if there isn’t some element of “process” that you are involved with.
I’m curious how you feel about something like this https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/19d8uwo/inpainting_is_a_powerful_tool_project_time_lapse/
I disagree with Art having to have a process. Couldn’t absence of any process be a process. AI is a tool, just like an iPad.
Is a McDonald’s commercial art? Usually no but could it be yes.
I’m conflicted, I appreciate what AI can do. But using AI in any means to advance capitalism disgusts me.
Technology hasn’t improved my life in a long time, it’s only bought another yacht for some rich asshole.One of my favourite small indie bands trained and used AI to make music videos for their most recent album. They were very upfront about it basically saying it was the only way they could have made the type of video they wanted as they simply wouldn’t have had the resources to do it another way.
I still don’t like AI art and I don’t feel great about it but this is the closest to a legitimate application of AI art I’ve come across.
Except everyone still appreciates the art that takes effort more than the AI stuff, so they’re failing at pulling a Syndrome
Technically, so did Syndrome.
If everyone is syndrome, no one is.
Everyone is an artist even without AI, based on modern art, as long as you can talk intellectual about it, you can call any kind of scribble or paper scrap an art piece, and sometimes the piece in and of itself is not the art, but the act of convincing other that it is art, is the art itself.
machines today can be programmed to make the most intricate sculptures, and recreate the most famous of paintings on mass. and yet, actual artists are still here, because we know that it’s not the finished piece that matters the most, it’s the journey we went on to be able to draw what’s in our minds that matters, it’s human expression, painting, drawing, sculpting exactly in the way that we want to, flaws and all. every piece is a self-portrait, if/when AI aquires a self, then we’ll have this discussion
Why art? I prefer if Ai did my boring job instead so I could take more time to paint or create digital art myself. But it usually takes hours to do anything.
If Jean-Michel Basquiat can be a famous artist then it was already meaningless.
