Comment on AI art is not "made" by a person
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days agoI think that ultimately my push back is on the folks that argue that it can’t be art.
I’m not really jumping in on this discussion, but I did want to add one thing:
I can believe two things at once.
AI generated media can’t be art … because the whole purpose of a generative AI machine is to alleviate the burden of decision making. The fewer places you let something decide for you, the more “art” you can imbue into your project. Art is a communicative effort.
Artists can use AI generated media … but the points of interest, the meaning, would not (necessarily) be the decisions the machine made.
An example above, I forget if it was you or someone else, shows a pen sketch of a scene then filled in by the generator, and I think the artist there can be given credit for the perspective, the framing of the subject, the mech-suit, the sci-fi aesthetic; but I wouldn’t credit them with the tally marks on her left shoulder, or the shape details of her eyes, or the various light-up displays that dot the walls.
There’s also something to be said for choosing as opposed to creating outright, but I think we’re losing ourselves in myopic details at this point.
The bottom line is that, aside of any ethics issues, I’m not that upset about AI media that’s honest about what it is. I watch youtube channels that depend on AI for their performance art. But, AI proponents love selling this technology as a replacement for people, which is a sentiment I find… disgusting. Inhuman.
And, I find it really sad the way a person who spent the better part of their life perfecting a style and technique can be essentially shoved out of their own niche by the 10,000 style-copy images a generator can make in an afternoon. This isn’t like photography, where painters and camera-snappers can coexist in separate styles of image production: AI generators can replace both.
Sorry, I thought all that was going to be just two paragraphs.
bishbosh@lemm.ee 3 days ago
I know the feeling lol
Yeah I largely agree, the fact that it is replacing humans is rough and really speaks to such a depressing view of art in our society. Even before AI, the commercialization of art was hugely detrimental, and really sucks the soul out of much of what it touches. The fact that AI attacks the starting footholds for artists to find any money at all in the industry is particularly upsetting.
All that being saying, I guess I would still push back a little bit on the idea that it can’t be art when generated in it’s entirety. I would argue that while yes it does have less intentionality, even at the most base level of a prompt and picking your favorite generation, is enough to qualify it as art. I may be a bit of an absolutist in this regard, but I justify it by pointing to things like splatter or fluid acrylic painting. Where the exact lines of intentionality is hard to draw. All of that to say I don’t think there is much value in drawing a strict line that excludes AI work from art just because the discrepancy between choice of the artist and the choices on show is so vast.
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
The counter I would give here is that those are just techniques. The challenge, then, is whether the generation machine can be made to do things that are interesting and meaningful. I know it can produce spectacle, but spectacle and meaning are different concepts.
I don’t know much Pollock, but isn’t he valued largely for his process and expressionism? I’m not making this accusation of you, you do seem to actually care, but a lot of people who bring him up seem to think that his work actually is random and unintelligible—I don’t think that it is.
I will concede that the process of interacting with the generation machine to produce something is a creative one, I just don’t think it’s anywhere near what a lot of proponents claim it be.
I’ve used Suno, and my lasting impression of it is that it was fun, sometimes really funny, and overall kind of soul sucking. As a musician, there were essentially no times that I felt anything produced there was mine. It was just novelty. Some of it sounded really cool, but none of it was an expression of me or what I was really looking for.
bishbosh@lemm.ee 2 days ago
That’s fair, even while typing it, the point felt shaky. I still think there are pieces of art that fail to have intentionality or design, but I would still call them art. I could carelessly scribble on a page to pass time in a meeting and I think that would still qualify as art, even if absent conscious meaning or design.
May point was more against the process than Pollock specifically because I think much of the high art world is shaped by folks in power over anything else. I agree that folks are too quick to dismiss his work, and I completely believe it is art. I don’t think it’s random, and looking at his work you can see intentionality. I think I bring it up more to show the broad spectrum of art. Similarly, I think it’s completely valid to sign a urinal and call it art. Even if you have no sway over the structure of the porcelain beyond picking what toilet you think works best. A curation I would argue is equally valid when selecting what pieces of AI work best fit what one is going for.
I guess I don’t know what proponents claim the level of creativity is, but I also think that critics don’t realize the level of depth many of the folks that use AI go to for what people assume was a few tries at a prompt. I think this gets back to the original counter point above. Trying to make something similar to what folks show off, or trying to realize a vision with AI tools is harder than many realize. And I think without having worked with them too much, it can be easy to not see the intentionality that went into AI work, in the same way it can be easy to assume Pollock is random splatters. Now I will clarify again, I don’t hold it in that high of regard or say that it’s comparable to Pollock or any other painters really. More my point is to show that the specifics can be lost, particularly because AI does so much spectacle.
I think that it’s totally valid, and I don’t really think I take any ownership with AI work, I just enjoy it for what it is. Personally I use it as a DM in various ways, so maybe it doesn’t rub me as wrong because it is a smaller piece of everything else, rather than standalone art.