Another reason why AI makes me sad: take for example images. There is really no reason anymore to look at any posted art, image or article illustration, since, while it may look like an image, it may not be an image in the sense of an opus operatum. There is no sense in investigating and uncovering the decisions and choices that made the image, its composition, style, etc., thus opening the image to an experience, as a projection of human experience and thought, since there were no such choices made. If there are no (strong) con-textual hints at this being an actual image, there is really no sense in looking at it, anymore. And now much the same for video. – For an ardent fan of visual media, it's just depressing.
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None of what you describe has ever been my reasons for looking at an image, and yet I immensely enjoy looking at images.
Do you like procedurally generated content in games? Or do you quickly find it boring and empty, devoid of soul?
I thought about it, and while part of my overall dislike of procgen in games comes from it being lazy and repetitive (too easy to spot the patterns), another part comes just from realizing there's nothing behind it. No mind, no plan, just RNG that I can keep rolling to get variations of the same theme.
(There's also a sense of loneliness - when everyone is consuming unique content, it stops being a topic of conversation, because there's no shared experience anymore.)
What about taking a solitary walk in the forest. Assuming no Intelligent Design, the trees and everything else there was created without any guiding plan. And if it's a large forest, it's reasonably likely that by the time the next person goes there, even if they end up following the same path, the vegetation will look entirely different. Does that uniqueness of "content" make the forest devoid of soul?
And if you do accept Intelligent Design, then arguably the RNG of AI images is also guided by it to the same extent.
With nature, I believe it's interesting because unlike something like Minecraft, where a single chunk is entirely dictated by math, everything in nature is dictated by life. A fully grown tree exists because a previous animal didn't eat it as a sapling. A hole which was dug by rabbits now houses snakes. A path has been created by various animals moving between the trees, so there's less vegetation there, and it allows for an easier walk through the forest...but that path wasn't there originally and animals had to choose to go that way and make the path.
Whether there is intelligent design or not, you can see the effects of life existing and changing in a forest. You can detect choices, individual and collective.
We could argue the universe follows mathematical laws in the same way. It's more a matter of how complex those laws are. With gen AI we finally see human-created mathematical rules that approach the scale of natural ones.
I can say with some surety that I find things that on the whole has not been visible affected by life as beautiful as those that have.
And I've found many Minecraft landscapes beautiful too.
I strongly disagree with this comparison but I’m having a hard time putting my finger on why.
Part of it is that all current AI generated imagery is an imitation of something, but an imitation that doesn’t and can’t follow the rules of the original or understand the meaning of the original. It’s fake.
Nature feels like the opposite. It’s real and brutal and, for living things, it is driven by millions of years of evolution. It’s entirely grounded in the physical laws of our universe.
AI is entirely grounded in the physical laws of our universe too.
And all art is imitation - that is how we learn to follow and follow rules, how the rules come into being, and how we communicate.
It's reasonable to think that they are not good artists who consistently know when to follow rules and when and how to break them, but I don't see how this is any different than anyone else making mistakes while learning.
(As for understanding, I'd bet ChatGPT could give a more convincing analysis of an artwork than most people)
It makes me sad to think that some people don't make the difference between life ("nature") and some kind of interpolation of data (as impressive as it may be).
Maybe that's why we are destroying the biodiversity and most tech people seem to love it!
I can't answer that - I'm bored out of my skull by nature. Always have been. Solitary walks in forests or parks, I find them great for clearing out my thoughts - I'll be thinking about lots of things, but at no point I'll be thinking about nature around me. Which is perhaps preferable to taking a walk in an urban neighbourhood, because I'll always find something interesting there that will let me avoid uncomfortable thoughts.
(Except in context of biotech or dynamic systems; those are lenses that make me appreciate nature, but I realize this is an engineer's point of view - I'm excited about possibility of applying what we're learning, and/or repurposing what's already there.)
My issue with procedurally generated content is that it is often a replacement for effort, and so the problem is not lack of a mind behind it, but as you note that it is often lazy and repetitive, and so simply not good. Humans can be lazy and make repetitive crap too, and when they do I'll consider it just as crap whether or not their underlying ideas were amazing.
Humans may be lazy and produce crap, but AI is lazy and produces crap. See the difference?
No, I don't agree that's a meaningful difference.
And who described, designed and built AI algorithms? See the connection? /s
So what is it that you enjoy, when looking at a certain image (especially, when it comes to this particular image, as compared to any other representation of the same subject matter), if not the artistic choices? A weighted average? I'm skeptical…
> So what is it that you enjoy, when looking at a certain image (especially, when it comes to this particular image, as compared to any other representation of the same subject matter), if not the artistic choices?
Things can be visually interesting without intent or artistic meaning. Even if you've never stared into a fire, surely would agree that many people do it? Or the ocean? Or hills covered in snow? Or trees? Or other people having lunch? Or a pretty face? People have gazed contentedly at things that are just pretty without any worry about "artistic choices" since people have existed.
I'd argue, there's a difference between media and the world as-is. Media are crucially a projection, transposing an impression as an expression into another space, implying a difference in these two spaces and their respective dimensionality. This is, what makes media interesting to us. All what is implied in this: human experience, narrative strategies, focus, depth, texture, skill, choices, etc. Otherwise, we're just immersing in the world as-is, enjoying ourselves and our own choices. But, for art as an act of communication, this doesn't work. It even doesn't work for media, which is why immersive media, like 3D TV, regularly fail: it simply misses the media part.
What it looks like. Whether the image itself appeals to me or moves me
Whether those are "artistic choices" or random chance or a set of heuristics does not affect my enjoyment.
It does not mean I don't find knowing about the choices of an artist or their process interesting at times, but for the vast majority of art I see I have idea about them. They are separate to my enjoyment of a given image.
I don't know why you are skeptical - to me the notion that anything but the image itself should be necessary for me to enjoy it is a bizarre notion and I suspect it would be for a whole lot of people. Most people would not be able to name whomever created the vast majority of art they've seen, nor name the style, and do not spend time thinking about either.
I would say that the default mode of consuming art is on a surface level where you don't pick apart why it's "good" or how it came to be, you either like it or dislike it in an unconscious/intuitive way.
I can understand your mode of art consumption, but I'm not sure I understand why you're so skeptical about this.
lmao, so glad to see this comment. I was about to post that not all of us are art snobs but your post captures the idea succinctly.
I used to get angry at my Norwegian teacher when we were forced to analyze poems, because I like writing poems but never once felt compelled to insert the kind of forced symbolism he kept insisting we rip apart and shred and murder poetry to identify.
Because it wasn't what I wrote or read poems for.
Sometimes I'd even seek out a certain translation of a work because I enjoyed the beauty of the choice of word of the translator more than the authors underlying ideas.
(I've never gotten through the original of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, because I find it trite, but there's a particular Norwegian translation I loved - the authors intent was identical, but one presentation of it was beautiful to me in ways the other has never been because of the patterns of words rather than meaning)
Whether or not that intent or symbolism was there in a given poem, I found the process inherently destructive for my enjoyment of those poems, and I utterly detested the process because it felt like violence.
The one time I wrote a poem with a message was as a task in his class, and it was a sharp denunciation of the analysis of poetry. No analysis was necessary - the intent was brutally apparent and quite rudely expressed.
It is also the only poem of mine I've performed in 'public', which was a mistake of him, because it's perhaps the one thing that I have written that has met with the most universal approval among those who heard it, and it hardly improved the attitude towards the analysis of poetry.
I still find pulling art apart to often be brutally destructive and occasionally insulting in it's often shallow insistence of knowing intent that usually is without actual evidence and mired in dogma.
I don't mind people finding meaning in knowing more about how it was created when the creator of a piece of art wants that context to be known or part of the work, but I feel very strongly about assuming intent even for human art, because to me at least, for what I wrote, my intent usually was to write without any deeper meaning or symbolism, to evoke emotion.
For me, for what I wrote, picking it apart ruins that on every level in ways people rarely are able to undo for themselves.
It's like trying to reassemble a cadaver.
People can find their own meaning in anything, and make their own choices, but so much art snobbery revolves around that assignation of a dogmatic interpretation of intent as "correct" and objective that often feels outright disrespectful to assume to me.
Please mind that I wasn't addressing symbolism at all, nor deconstruction. It was more about, "for what I wrote, my intent usually was (…) to evoke emotion."
If I know as a reader that there is no genuine expression behind this, no intent of evoking anything, that it's rather patched together, based on stochastic heuristics in order to mend seamlessly, this just doesn't work. Much the same, I mentioned earlier in another comment that I believe AI generated images to occupy pretty much the negative space of abstract expressionism and informal painting. (Both styles withstand quite robustly any attempts of simple analysis.) It's really about this particular stretch, transposing inner and outer impressions into expressions, what I'm concerned with. This sort of establishes kind of a net, in which we, as humans, may suspend in. (E.g., if you are enjoying yourself in nature, does it matter, whether this is organic, has eroded and grown in certain ways, in a polylog of beings and forces, or if this is just a generated prop made of plastic? I bet, it does.)
For a more concrete example, take light in figurative art. All images are modelled from and by light, and it's quite natural that we should explore an image along its lines. Light and the way it spreads emphasises the image, even if there was no intention of doing so, just by "how it works". These are choices, equally if made intentionally and consciously or not. It's the trace and trait of a human being. But, if there was no intent, if it's just patches mended to meet up, based on weighted averages, a transferred texture? Even if there are sculpted objects and dark and light patches to look at, is there light, at all? Is it even worth noting? How should this work for me? Is there any meaning in looking closely at this?
This is like a painter lamenting the invention of the camera because it takes away their ability to enjoy realist paintings. Now we laud photographer’s choices and denigrate the ones made by folks producing AI images.
DALL-E is the disposable camera of AI images. There are plenty of artists working with more complex tool chains that take lots of effort and energy to create, and form their own type of AI art.
The rudimentary knobs on generative AI tools almost guarantee low quality output but they can do it with such speed and in such volume that trained artists are concerned it will overwhelm the market.
Yes, photography was similar in how it overwhelmed painting, but the difference is that photography, from day one, offered a gloriously rich set of tools for making pictures while DALL-E is a peg-board toddler toy by comparison and the results speak for themselves. Just compare the first few years of photography to the middling pablum we have that's spit out from these generative AI models. Despite the models stealing the entire history of world art and putting all of that at the fingertips of untrained artists, the results are still embarrassingly naive and mostly boring. The reason is that art isn't about the tools, it's about the mind and people with no training and no experience in art cannot make consistently good art without training, even with tools that let them create sophisticated collages of other people's real art.
Photography still takes a ton of skill though. It's still ultimately a human creation. AI art is the antithesis of this.
Like with photography, you can put in zero effort, or you can spend hours, days, weeks tweaking details. Some people just churn out images they happen to like from low-effort prompts, some people fine-tune their own models to get just the look they want.
I think that if photography takes skill compared to painting, then AI art takes skill compared to photography. Just different skills.
Nah, it really doesn’t take skill. My 4 year old takes photographs all the time.
And of course that is a frequent criticism of some other types of art too.
E.g. my son loves art, but gets exasperated at anything remotely abstract. Part of my enjoyment of taking him to art exhibitions is things like when he walked past a Picasso with a look of utter disdain and loud audible huff. Or the conversations we had about Matisse's sculptures, or the paper cutouts from his later years.
(I don't really like Matisse either - the thing I enjoy most of the visual experiences of the Matisse museum in Nice is the olive garden, despite the total lack of intent behind how the tree-branches grow)
This is what painters said about photographers.
Low quality photography is not elevated to the status of art. Low quality AI generations are not elevated to the status of art.
The actual art will be made by people with something to say or show and it will take energy and effort - it won’t be made by typing your idea into DALL-E, it’ll happen with complex workflows on fine-tuned models.
It is just another tool with different strengths, weaknesses, and constraints.
> it won’t be made by typing your idea into DALL-E, it’ll happen with complex workflows on fine-tuned models.
I'm not convinced that this is what will happen long-term, but if it is, I'd completely agree that it's a new art form.
...until all photography is AI-enhanced also https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23637401/samsung-fake-moo...
Anytime I see a photo taken on actual film, even though it's been digitized for posting online, there's a visceral reaction of beauty. To you point of DALL-E being the disposable camera, I feel those images are in fact "disposable". I feel nothing.
I don’t really buy your claim that you have a “visceral” reaction to every image you see captured on actual film. Ignoring the oddity of that statement, even if you did, I’m not sure why what you feel is supposed to determine what is or isn’t art.
Are you sure you can recognise it?
I think that's 99% true right now, but it's not something that will be true forever. Almost all AI images that you see today are the result of a person typing a description into a prompt and getting an image back. If you're lucky, the person played with the prompt a bit until they got something that more closely matched their intention. However, there are tons of ways to integrate AI into a creative process in ways that allow an artist to iterate on an image and to be intentional about composition, color, style, and so on. Currently, it's only highly technical people who are able to do this, so the result is a lot of stuff that is technically impressive, but of low artistic value. (Quite similar to the output of the stereotypical camera nerd who has the latest camera and has its specs memorized, but takes uninteresting photos.) Eventually, these tools will find their way into the hands of artists and they will use it to make art.
I believe that when thinking about AI art, it's helpful to keep photography in mind as a source of analogies. For instance, both give anyone the ability to create images easily. Both gave existing artists heart attacks and were dismissed because they didn't require artistic training to use. Both resulted in a flood of images being created without thought or effort. The main difference is that we skipped straight to the smartphone camera age with AI.
This seems highly subjective. I'm DEEP in the AI Art space and yet I still love looking at traditional art, photography posts on instagram.
This is like saying that post-photography there was no reason to look at paintings anymore. And while the camera certainly disrupted art, it also led to a burst of creativity and gave us Picasso and Pollock.
I'd argue, AI art occupies the negative space of abstract expressionism and informal painting. It has more or less catapulted us back in time, before there was photography and subjective impression and expression became the actual subject. Even more so, in lack of a projecting author, in who's projection we may conversely project ourselves, thus constructing a collaborative work of art, it crucially lacks any transcendent qualities as the author of the prompt lacks any finer control over an output, which is merely a weighted average.
I think it depends greatly on a person’s intentions when viewing an image, or their expectations. When I look at stock images I couldn’t give a damn. When I’m looking for art for my wall or desktop wallpaper I may give more of a damn. When I’m looking for art as a gift I will give even more of a damn. For the vast majority of applications I think AI “art” is “good enough” but this is the part that makes me really sad and conflicted. I don’t know a way forward for most artists or folk that create “general” images.
Well, I get your point, but through prompting there are still a lot of choices that can be made by an artist using AI, even in an iterative way.
On top of that, real artists will often find that they surprise themselves, and those surprises will drive the eventual creation. So this is a similar process, except it goes through AI instead of the unconscious part of the brain of a real artist.
AI is not only a threat to generation of art, but also to consumption. For decades now, hollywood movies have been tested to "focus groups" to decide which way the stories should go to maximize profits. with AI, you can train it to maximize "engagement" to "discover trends". This could end up affecting even traditional artists. It could Hollywood-ize other forms of art.
Artists that I know work in the way of exploring and learning about a subject matter and creating art relating to it. When I see this kind of art, and talk to the artists, I get the sense of exploring the subject and learning with them. A lot of art isn't this, it simply exists for much more plain purposes, and that type of art seems to be what AI is able to generate. I feel disgust towards the idea that people will be able to create their own art using AI, as the current state of the art only allows for quite shallow creations. I'm not saying it's wrong, but I am disgusted.
> There is really no reason anymore to look at any posted art, image or article illustration
Given the demand for AI art, it's safe to say that most people disagree. Personally, I like looking at pretty pictures.
Also realize that death of the author was proposed many decades ago.
Well, there's nothing new in this per se, text theory suggested a quasi autonomous "weaving" of texts and imaginary content some 60+ years ago. (Well, it's all about semantic fields and the implications were well known. – BTW, Neal Stephenson wrote an hilarious parody on this as an academic mainstream phenomenon in his Cryptonomicon, look up "Text at War".) But there was still some agency and some effort involved, maybe even reputation, some capital, which served as regulating factors. Now it feels more like marketing blurb without a product and no careers to be pursued behind this.
Also, crucially, those representing the demand for AI art are not those who are meant to consume it. It's still too soon for any systemic feedback, other than economic factors and incentives.
I've looked at thousands of images created by people twiddling the rudimentary knobs on generative AI tools and it is universally garbage, often trumped by assembly line produced motel paintings. As someone with 5 years studying art and architecture in school, and 30 years of participating in art post school, I feel quite comfortable sharing that review.
Agreed. I think that the concern about disinformation stemming from AI images/video misses the bigger picture.
Humanity will adapt to these new technologies. We'll begin to trust what we see less and less. Which will prevent us from being fooled, but we also lose a massive part of the human experience in the process.
Soon the days of being able to view a photograph, a video, artwork, and appreciate it as human ability at its pinnacle will be gone.
The image is the image. The curtains are blue because the curtains are blue.