Makes sense to me, the whole structure of the artist booth is about connecting with the person that made the art. Why would you want to see a booth showing artworks that weren't even created by the person in front of you but by an AI?
If anything, an AI artwork booth should be manned by the engineers that built and trained the image model and well as scraped the training data. Then they can meet all the people they non-consensually took artwork from :P
>Why would you want to see a booth showing artworks that weren't even created by the person in front of you but by an AI?
I'd suggest people learn about Andy Warhol's factory where they mass produced "art." Art is obsessed with "thing-ness," that is, being able to hold and own the artistic object. It's why people without record players buy vinyl that they listen to on spotify. And the way I see it, the main problem with AI art is that (1) it's all digital, and (2) there hasn't been an artist willing to develop a model themselves in order to create unique pieces that exist in the real world.
Don't get me wrong, I think the visual arts are going through a shift that will rival the advent of the photograph, but we are at the birth of this new period. I think it's fair to say that we are in the "this is bad" period before new art movements using the technology start to emerge (e.g. photography), as well as art movements that move away from the medium (e.g. modern art). Art has always been in conflict between being about the idea and being about the skill to bring that idea to life.
I'd suggest people learn about Andy Warhol's factory where they mass produced "art."
Ditto for Picasso, and many artists even going back to the Renaissance when great painters and sculptors sometimes had apprentices finish or duplicate paintings/sculptures for them.
But this isn't that. AI is something else entirely.
I don't recommend using the Warhol argument. It's become a trope used by AI-über-alles people who have little knowledge of and often zero experience in the arts.
My entire point is that art is an inherent contradiction. Art can be anything. Fucking Duchamp’s readymades should make any concern about AI worthless. He was literally putting someone’s trash in a gallery and it was art.
The reason why artists are mad about AI is the same reason artists were mad about the photograph… they were selling a product like craftsmen, but calling themselves artists. Yes, there is a crisis for getting paid to be someone else’s creative, but there is no crisis in creativity. In fact, there has never been more freedom than now.
I don't think the question is really about whether AI art is real art. (But it could be about that, as I'm not familiar with commercial cons in the US.)
Some years ago, around the time I became aware that AI art is a thing, the artist scene around Finnish cons had already decided to ban it. And the reason was obvious, as the same people are also very eager to police others who might be selling pirated products.
They don't care legal constructs such as intellectual property. They don't really care about economic constructs such as copyright. What they care about are authors' moral rights. If the model was trained without obtaining a permission from the authors of every work in the training data, they think using the model to create art is immoral.
> What they care about are authors' moral rights. If the model was trained without obtaining permission from the authors of every work in the training data, they think using the model to create art is immoral.
Art is not created in isolation. It is a result of the artist's exposure (aka training), both intentional and incidental. If an artist wants an AI model to get permission before training on their work, then the artist should get permission from all the artists they were exposed to that shaped their artistic expression.
I'm old enough to remember when such arguments were had about 'real art' coming from pens, pencils and brushes, not programs. Took a good long time for 'digital art' became a category.
I don't think it did take that long actually? And I don't think it's even a good comparison. AI art vs human art isn't the same jump as physical media to digital.
There was also a brief moment where digital art wasn't cheating as long as you didn't use layers and the clipboard.
This too will pass. Soon everything is going to be rendered at 60hz in real time, and demands that everything needs to be rendered by hand will be as absurd as claiming every frame of a 3D game needs to be hand rendered in Photoshop.
I remember this as well, but I also remember those who thought that merely expressed their disapproval.
This time around the response as been aggressively adversarial. Not only do they disapprove of the new thing but anyone who express a contrary opinion is considered a target.
"I can vouch for myself and others - that we are there to just buy cool shit and not ‘connect’ with the artist."
Who is "we"? Art, to me, is about pouring your heart and soul into something in a way that AI can trivially emulate, which makes it dangerous when placed next to art that actually has a lived experience attached to it.
I can slap a prompt into AI and get some graphic design slop that to the untrained eye looks "close enough" to the vendor next to them that actually made the art themselves. This is dangerous and spits in the face of people who pour themselves into their work.
At best, put the AI art generators into their own little special corner. But don't put one-shotted AI art next to actual crafted human created art right next to one another and say that they're equal. The brush strokes are imaginary. That's a grift.
Today there's a (mostly) clear line between "AI" and "not AI" art in terms of process, but I believe as time goes on we'll see more and more blurring of that. I'm thinking the equivalent of the spell-check tool for art, something that takes explicit human input and tidies the details in an interactive, human-in-the-loop sort of way.
That's a weird comparison because it's a mechanical and deterministic task. Bad autocomplete is just a bad algorithm. As far as I know, (word) artists are usually following the grammatical (or orthographic) rules of their target language by default, and if they want to do something else they would disable that. But it's not really a question of style if you misspell certain words. Your example would be like letting a Thesaurus suggest different words in every sentence.
> But it's not really a question of style if you misspell certain words.
Sure it is. Flagging vernacular, phonetic spelling for accents, punning, signalling a character's use of a word they are unfamiliar with, and so on and so forth. Intentionally misspelling words can definitely be a stylistic choice.
Maybe a linter is a more accurate allegory. I think there are parts of art that could sometimes be suggested in terms of anatomy, symmetry, shading, color theory, etc. You'd configure your art linter to your preferences/style (or target style) and it would point out the things you're doing wrong and offer suggested fixes.
Hi, it looks like you are drawing a human. Humans do not have eyes of this size. Also the nose can't just be an upside down v. Why are you even drawing Manga, freak? Don't forget to color this panel.
I think you misunderstood term art. AI cannot generate something like art. Otherwise it's just an image. Or kitsch.
I'm not sure if there is clear line in creative process to tell what is too much of AI and what is not. Which leads to above mentioned. AI is just a tool.
There's been a schism for some time between "Artists" (that's with a capital "A", mind you) and, oh, graphic designers, photographers… The latter are not real artists.
While I suspect the AI fracas within the art community will never go away, I suspect within a decade AI-assisted art (or whatever you want to call it) will be a non-issue for everyone else.
Photography, computer graphics, Photoshop, synthesizers, samplers, and others have all been considered "not real art."
The irony is that the kind of genre art you see at Comic-Con is mostly reproductions of commercial properties or standard tropes and formulas, with very little original vision and creativity. Being able to draw something recognisable as [genre character name goes here], even with some skill, is not that high a bar, and it lives in a tiny niche in the art world as a whole.
AI brought something fresh to art for a while, but now I think creative people are more aware of the limitations. It's in a strange mid-way place between being fascinating, and being frustratingly limited compared to what it could be.
I suspect we'll start seeing meta-art soon with a much more interesting mix of creation, original thought, and execution.
A key difference is that each of the mediums you mentioned are deterministic and unbiased (to a certain degree.) The the work created can therefore be inferred to be a "pure" expression of the artists intent. A pro photographer and my mom will get wildly different results even with the same equipment. Not so with AI, which very much has it's own bias and is eager to inject it.
The other question is, is AI a tool or a medium? I often hear people say "Well EDM was looked down on when it first came out," but EDM is not a tool, it's a genre. I think most artists wouldn't really care about "AI" becoming a genre of art, but it's silly to think that all future art will be AI just as it would have been silly to think EDM would have replaced all future music.
> A pro photographer and my mom will get wildly different results even with the same equipment. Not so with AI, which very much has it's own bias and is eager to inject it.
That particular AI models have their own bias and are eager to inject it is among the reasons why a skilled user and an unskilled user will have very different results, not a reason why that isn’t true.
> The other question is, is AI a tool or a medium?
Is oil paint on canvas a set of tools or a medium? In art, a tool ot set of tools often characterizes, or even defines, a medium; they are different but not orthogonal concerns. (And the cultural phenomenon of identification of a regularly-used tool or combination of tools as defining a medium generally only happens well after that tool or combination has been in significant use for a while.)
AI is a broad category of tools. Particular combinations of those (either with eachother or with other tools) may also come to be be understood as particular media.
>That particular AI models have their own bias and are eager to inject it is among the reasons why a skilled user and an unskilled user will have very different results, not a reason why that isn’t true.
Not quite what I mean. If you and I both take a photo of the same controlled scene with the same camera, the result will be essentially identical. If you and I both type the exact same prompt into Nano Banana, we will both get very different images. So, how is one supposed to know what parts of the AI image are intentional or incidental? If the AI image is "good," is it good because of or despite the prompter?
>Is oil paint on canvas a set of tools or a medium? In art, a tool ot set of tools often characterizes, or even defines, a medium
Agreed, and this is basically what I'm saying. I'm fine with siloing AI art into it's own category and I'm sure some cool work can be done there. But it's fundamentally odd to think that AI will, for some reason, replace or displace other art.
All due respect to your mother, but a pro photographer would certainly achieve better results. Your mom may recognize something is not right but be unable to articulate it clearly to the tool. Same problem that's always been. The bar has been lowered, not removed.
Thing is, image generators might be better than when SD came out years ago, there's been zero progress on actually meaningfully integrating AI into artists' workflow.
The problem is AI assisted art does not yet exist the same way you can get an LLM to help you finish a project you started by hand, where you can arbitrarily decide how much control you want to exercise over the output.
> Thing is, image generators might be better than when SD came out years ago, there's been zero progress on actually meaningfully integrating AI into artists' workflow.
That’s an interesting opinion, but I have no idea what, other than ignorance, it is based on.
> The problem is AI assisted art does not yet exist the same way you can get an LLM to help you finish a project you started by hand, where you can arbitrarily decide how much control you want to exercise over the output.
Except it exactly exists in that way, and (while the tooling was more clumsy than today) it has at least since SD1.5 was SOTA.
If you are judging image generation by the native web interfaces provided as the public face of the big hosted models, you really have no understanding of what is out there, and if you aren't doing that, I don't know where your claims could come from.
Except none of this stuff is good enough to be used in production. Yes, I know of Lora-s, embeddings, Controlnet and ComfyUI, dozens of text-to-3d models etc.
I'd say this is at the level of ChatGPT 4 - interesting and shows promise, but only usable with major concessions.
You know why people complain about AI art and not AI code?
Because AI art is quite noticeable. It still doesn't fit into any real artists workflow (someone who is skilled at drawing, and wants to accelerate their workflow without major loss of quality).
The burden of proof lies on you, I suggest you include it next time instead of insulting the person who asks a question.
Nothing had changed on that front. No one's doing non-literal semantic deconstruction and reconstruction of art. This is perhaps due to irresponsible and thoughtless atmospheres surrounding AI image generators and its core developer circles selectively filtering out those with relevant backgrounds.
Maybe some Google products are a bit of an exception, but they're default 5-10 years ahead until it stops updating 15 years before going open source, so that's besides the point.
Other than that, it's all techbros making tangential changes and claiming changes were made. Changes maybe, improvements, not really happening.
> there's been zero progress on actually meaningfully integrating AI into artists' workflow.
This simply isn't true. An easy way someone who does most of their art more "traditionally" can use Krita to very much just use AI to help finish a project.
ComfyUI was also designed from the ground up to follow the same sort of node-based workflow that many CG artists are used to with things like Houdini, Blender, Substance Designer, etc., and includes all sorts of ways you can arbitrarily control where and how much the AI is used for.
People without taste hide behind skill. They do everything technically correctly and still make something bad. This is the threat of new mediums to them — it takes away their only strength.
But at the same time, something like AI suddenly enables people with neither taste nor skill to produce. I don’t want to see AI art right now — AI art is currently a lot of noise.
The sentiment of photography not being real art hasn’t been a thing for a while now though.
For me, the killer feature would more be _autocomplete_ for art. I love to cartoon and doodle, but don’t have the time/patience/skillset to build professional digital assets. If I could go from my pencil drawn sketch to a flashy png, that would be awesome! I think it’d be a nice use of AI, since it just allows me to do more with my own creativity.
Unfortunately whenever I’ve tried uploading a sketch to ChatGPT or Gemini, it seems to fixate on details of my sketch, and recreates my mistakes in high fidelity. It fails to take a creative leap toward a good result. I’ve heard some professionals have gotten good results building custom workflows in ComfyUI.
No, seems to be about "turns X into Y", while what parent seems to want, is something that just makes making X easier/better, instead of doing those sort of "transformations" which is usually where the human feeling gets lost.
Interesting. It seems that in industries where productivity/output isn't the primary goal (so not Software, Analytics, etc), people care more about *where* their content comes from. It's quite indiscriminate in Software, for sure, I feel like people don't care whether you used an AI to write your code as long as it works. But I don't see AI getting real footing really ever in the creative world because people want authenticity there. It's why I think Suno, for example, is never really going to go anywhere.
An example is there's a split in the woodworking community between people who use power tools and those who use hand-tools only. The latter often seeing it as more pure.
Those same power-tools users might in turn look down on something made entirely with a CNC machine.
The end result might be the same table. Indeed, the pure uniform lines from a CNC machine might be what both the others strive towards, but they're unlikely to regard the CNC output as being in better taste.
The effort and craft itself is well regarded and valued, even if it is hard to capture in the final output. Even if the signs of hand-crafting are fewer the higher the quality craft!
I think the effort is indeed a big piece of it. For example, consider sports. I don't imagine that a lot of sports fans would be interested in watching completely AI-generated video of their favorite teams playing, even if it's totally believable. Surely the main point of the whole thing has something to do with humans at the top of their skill, measuring up against each other, and experiencing it together with them?
For me it's the same with music. I am sure I will be fooled by some AI generated music now and then, but what does that prove?
That's a bit different than art. I put it closer to "why do you care if your girlfriend is AI or real? Isn't it just the end emotions you care about?". There is a deep human connection to art, creativity, expression of human emotions and feelings. Reading a poem about losing a loved one and connecting with it, only to find out it was written by a machine is a deep betrayal of that. Its like finding out the love letter you got in school was actually a mockery by the person you had a crush on -- what does it matter? the letter made you feel good right, and that's all you were after. It matters because intention and emotion of other humans matters to most people.
Not everything is purely about being able to output a product and/or produce a tangible good or service. Some things are about people and how people feel.
Another example. I run a charity that takes money, but just generates AI videos simulating helping children. What does it matter? Ultimately the person donating just wants to feel like they made a difference, and they get the same feeling either way, believing the money is well spent. It matters because no one is really being helped, no virtue is actually being enacted in the world.
In the same way, generating all our art and music from AI would represent a massive harm in the world -- effectively extinguishing massive portions of human creativity, and all the people who get to feel useful in creating, editing, and distributing it. In a cold capitalist view, what does it matter, I just want to see a pretty picture for a moment. In terms of actual real value in the world, it is negative and selfish, assuming the only value is my temporary enjoyment of product.
Firstly, thank you for posting this! I'm one of the people who primarily values the art on its own merits, and not on whether it was made by a human chiseling with rocks and ground up flower petals for ink, or an AI generating something. The primary part of that value assessment is definitely how it makes me feel. Your post is the first time I felt I may actually understand the other side.
Speaking only for myself, I can absolutely understand where you are coming from. It makes a lot of sense when put this way. But, I think the difference here is that what you are describing is deceit, and it's the deceit rather than the output, that would bother me in all of your scenarios.
For example, your strongest point in my opinion, is the AI girlfriend versus the real girlfriend. That's a phenomenal argument because it is in my opinion an accurate analogy so how's the logic side strong, and it's also a horrifying one, so it hits hard on the emotions as well as the logic side. The beauty of this is not lost on me, you have created amazing art with that argument! That's the kind of art that really resonates with me.
But zooming in on that scenario, I think the key is disclosure. If the person dating the AI girlfriend knows that it's an AI girlfriend, that doesn't float my boat but I know people who would actually prefer an AI girlfriend to a real one. Again, not for me, but I recognize that it is for some people.
Same with seeing a pretty picture on the screen. If it's being presented to me with deceit behind it, either a person claiming they snapped the photo or made the art digitally when it is actually just AI, then it does ruin the art for me. If it's disclosed though that it is made by AI, I can evaluate it on its merits. Just like in your table example above, I may appreciate the effort and personality behind a more flawed piece that was made by hand, but I also appreciate the precise lines and geometry of a machined output. The key is the honesty and disclosure behind who created it. I get a different value out of the handcrafted piece than I do the AI generated piece. One isn't necessarily better than the other, just different.
Where I do feel a little hesitant on the AI side, though is as you get at the capitalist destruction of art. Without a doubt, the middle level of artists will be hollowed out. I suspect there will always be a place for the traditional artist, but I do worry it will be diminished. On the flip side, I've been able to use AI to take photos of my pets or family, and reimagine them in interesting ways. I know it's not real, I know it's computer generated, and I'm not hanging those pictures on my wall. I simply do not get the same joy from seeing those pictures as I do the originals. I could be wrong here, but I feel like that is the heart of your point, and I think it's a good one.
> I feel like people don't care whether you used an AI to write your code as long as it works
Oh, some do; for sure they do. Some put a "no ai" badge on their sites; others add disclaimers to their repos if ai has been used to write the code. But I agree with you about the productivity/output. Developers who refrain from using AI are probably more interested in the very process of coding than in its output. They pride themselves on their craft and craftsmanship.
We also typically value things that are not tied to productivity/output, like product quality/reliability, security, and our own agency.
I want to be free to read, write, run, and share code, now and in the future. Relying on centralized services to do it for me (by extracting knowledge from countless other people) is certainly not a resilient strategy.
> But I don't see AI getting real footing really ever in the creative world because people want authenticity there. It's why I think Suno, for example, is never really going to go anywhere.
Oh I bet it will go somewhere. There is already plenty of low-budget direct-to-dvd movie, cheap soap opera telenovelas, and elevator music used as background in public places. These don't care about quality, they were always about making the cheapest product possible that can generate revenue / be used as a backdrop. Gen AI is going to be a race to the bottom for this field.
But for "labour of love" art/media, they might have a place in the toolbox (to generate a texture, fill some unimportant background, etc), but full gen AI media won't cut it. Intention, direction, realization is what matter.
And since most community are about those labour of love, it shouldn't be a surprise that most people who attend conferences are heavily against gen AI.
> It's quite indiscriminate in Software, for sure, I feel like people don't care whether you used an AI to write your code as long as it works.
This is starting to change, thanks to the staggering decline in average software quality in recent years (likely partly driven by vibe coding and similar). It’s getting so bad that even non-technical users who’ve traditionally just silently suffered through poor software experiences are starting to take note and voice frustration. Demand for quality “handcrafted” software will almost certainly increase as long as this trend continues.
It's less about productivity and output (those are still desired in many art fields) but more about creativity and personality, more humane traits.
Not to say that coding doesn't have those two, but I'd argue developers have been caring less and less for it over the years. Their relationship with code has changed.
You can look at a comic and immediately identify the illustrator if you're well versed in the artists. Now would that still happen in 20 years if Gen AI became standard today? Will we keep getting new artists and new art styles? Or will their relationship with art become more like newer coders have with code?
I don't think it's an easy question to answer and no one likely has an answer.
>Not to say that coding doesn't have those two, but I'd argue developers have been caring less and less for it over the years.
I think this is both hindsight bias and survivorship bias.
There has always been massive buckets of buggy shit code out there. Now, one thing we had in the past was very tight computing limitations that worked as a decent evolutionary death function. As computing resources grew, the selection function became less effective and we get to see these hulking crap monsters lumber around our CPUs.
I can listen to music and recognize the artist or a singer’s voice. It doesn’t mean as much without that relationship. Depending on the style of music some of the charm is in production imperfections or sloppy playing that brings a distinctly human quality to it.
> It's quite indiscriminate in Software, for sure, I feel like people don't care whether you used an AI to write your code as long as it works.
I don't think that is really the case.
We are seeing pushback on games developed using AI. Communities like /r/selfhosted is very much pushing back against AI slop code.
While right now it seems like for the most part the concern is from more technical people, we are seeing issues of vibe coded applications shipping bugs because the quality is poor (just look at the bugs shipped in Claude Code).
I think we will be getting to a point of people questioning the quality of the application they are using and whether or not a human was actually involved if bugs start shipping more often.
Is the backlash among gamers to AI code or to AI-made visuals / assets, which are often kind of sloppy or nonsensical if looked at closely? I had only heard about the latter.
> We are seeing pushback on games developed using AI.
Yes, people whine but still buy the games, as long as they're fun. Expressed preference of "AI is always bad" vs revealed preference of "It's fine if the product is still good."
One of the things I find interesting as well, is that among many of my friends outside the western world, they typically see: "knowing how something is made" as a western cultural thing. Many of them adopt a "why do you care how it's made, you are a not a manufacturer" type of response. Which i find very interesting.
They still care about the quality of the product, just not the process as much. Not sure if this the case for all people or a generalization. Just something I noticed.
Art is mostly bought by wealthier people currently, they don't like the idea of proles having access to what they do, so requiring it to be organic gives them artificial exclusivity.
This is an IS statment, not an OUGHT statement: Artists are very high-status / high-prestige. As such, their work and livelihoods are more important and more deserving of protectionism.
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How much AI is too much? Are you allowed to use Photoshop to create your digital art? Almost every tool there is now powered by AI in some way (some a lot more than others). Can you use its auto-fill button? What percent of the image can you use it for?
Can you generate something with AI and then manually edit it in Photoshop? How much manual editing is required before it's not considered AI anymore?
My point is, AI is another tool in the toolbox, it can be used well or poorly. How much is too much? Just like back in the day, using Photoshop wasn't allowed, until it was.
This isn't a "gotcha" experiment, it's a real question. And the problem with "I know it when I see it" is that right now people are biasing towards "if it's good it must be AI" and accusing legit artists and writers of being AI.
I happened to me. I spent 10 minutes writing a reddit comment. I researched it, I sourced it. It had sections with headlines, bullets, and even em dashes. 100% written by me.
As soon as I posted it, it was downvoted and I got PMs saying "don't post this AI slop!".
The problem is the AI has been trained on well executed material, and when you execute well, you look like an AI.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (recently game of the year) got caught leaving a small amount of placeholder AI content in their game and everyone lost their mind
I’m sure reasonable artists agree with you, but many today do not
The first is that all “AI” is not equal. It’s specifically generative AI that most take issue with, mostly due to questionable ethics in training. Image editors have employed techniques marketed as “AI” for many years that are mostly or entirely unrelated to modern generative AI.
The second is that whether something is “AI art” is a spectrum, not binary. On one end you have creations in which generative AI played no role and on the other you have images that were generated off of nothing but a prompt or vague scribbles. In the middle you have things like images where the artist traced over an AI image or used bits and pieces of generated imagery. Probably the closest shorthand for where an image lands on the spectrum is to what degree the creator engaged their artistic skills.
A great many of digital artists would be happy to use Photoshop 7/CS1/CS2, all long predating generative AI, if those ran on modern operating systems. Some prefer modern simplistic (and without AI) tools like Paint Tool SAI.
For many of us, even if drawing that line exactly is debatable, a prompt-generated image, where the "artist" didn't interact with any of the pixels is across the line for "too much AI".
It can definitely take creativity and fortitude to get an AI model to draw what you want it to. But if you worked at a fantasy publishing house and commissioned a cover painting, it might take a fair amount of work for you to get the artist to create something in line with what you envisioned. But you wouldn't get artistic credit for the resultant painting; the artist would! If AI is creating the piece, it is the artist; and you're merely the commissioner of the work.
> But if you worked at a fantasy publishing house and commissioned a cover painting, it might take a fair amount of work for you to get the artist to create something in line with what you envisioned.
If you do this infrequently, you're a commissioner of work.
If you do it daily, in-house, for your own products... you might just have the title "Art Director."
And the best Art Directors today almost all have a background in creating art themselves, in some fashion. I suspect that will remain true in the AI world as well, at least for the foreseeable future.
This argument resonates with me - but it's the same argument that has been made and artists have ignored or put up the same (unconvincing, in my opinion) arguments against the whole time. As you pointed out, this same discussion has been had every step of the way with digital art - from things like photoshop, to the tools that have been gradually introduced inside of photoshop and similar, to even things like brush packs, painting over kitbashes, etc. The traditionalist viewpoint holds strong, until the people arguing blink and realize everyone else eventually stopped caring and did what worked best for them.
At this point, I believe it's not a matter of intellectual honesty or actually disagreeing with any of it - it's just about outcomes. They don't want to see their work devalued, their sources of income drying up. It's an understandable fear. No one who enjoys the work they do enjoys the prospect of potentially having to change careers to keep making a living. Hell, most people that don't enjoy what they do have no desire to have to try and find a new career.
But humans are selfish. The same artists who are worried about technology taking their job will laud praise on technology in other areas that have eliminated jobs, with my recurring example being how happy they are for no longer having to pay a web dev to build them a portfolio site and can instead just go to squarespace and pay them a fraction of the cost. No one laments how there are basically no independent web designers building small sites anymore - it's just not a viable career. It's all been consolidated into shops working for big clients or pumping out themes for Wordpress, Squarespace, and Shopify. And of course, there are countless examples of this throughout history.
I'm not sure AI is going to be the great job destroyer we fear it is. I'm not sure it isn't, either. So I get it. This has a chance to force an issue on a massive scale that usually is much more limited in blast radius.
But to answer the question - I don't think it actually matters to them what the line is from any sort of rational perspective. It will move and shift based on the conversation to wherever they think it needs to be to protect themselves.
The main argument artists use isn’t that it is taking their job. The problem is that it was trained on their work without their consent and without compensation. This is fundamentally different from a Wordpress or squarespace and arguably different from models trained on open source software only.
A result of a prompt you can’t, I believe you can’t trace over a copyrighted work and claim it as your own either so I say that tracing over an AI generated image would not fly either. But IANAL so the details to be fleshed out. Also would probably break if one uses a model that is not trained on any copyrighted data.
It's not that deep, if someone thinks it's AI it loses value to them. If you're able to utilize AI tools in a way that doesn't make the output look like AI to the average person you'll be fine.
Eventually no one will be able to really tell the difference and all of this will go away (though likely at the expense of more people's livelihoods).
I see that as being partially true. There will be people like Walter Keane that take the art of others and state it is their own work. [0] AI will assist those individuals.
AI will have a home on people's desktops for those that accept it.
Art that has value will not be AI art. Artist like Margaret Keane will continue to be viewed as exceptional along with their works. [1]
Personally, I view AI art as lacking passion and an attempt to short circuit the path to profit / greed. I wish to not fund that circuit.
Well I think we're just describing taste and craft. AI tools will get better, more granular, and become better integrated into the actual workflows of people over time. A good tool shouldn't take over my sense for taste and craft.
It's a good thing people are pushing back against the slop if we want there to be any incentives for AI tools to not be geared towards helping make slop.
It's funny you chose that as your example, because there are very strict definitions of when day becomes night. I think what you were looking for was "when does someone become bald" or "when does an acorn become a tree".
There is a reason those are classic philosophical questions. Because they highlight the fact that while it is easy to identify the ends of the spectrum, it's impossible to find the midpoint, because everyone has a different lived experience.
Luckily the AI artists can set up their own conventions. Considering how unevitable AI art is, I think the cons will be absolutely swarming with visitors!
I thought the use of AI in the Secret Invasion title sequence was actually really appropriate, even "meta", maybe even a bit ahead of its time.
The seemingly purposeful AI style made it seem unnatural (on purpose), and like a facsimile of an otherwise trustworthy thing (on purpose), which was exactly in line with the idea of the show.
The execution of that show and that idea was pretty bad, but one of the few positives of it was, to me, an example of using AI art overtly, and leaning into its untrustworthy nature.
I wish this wasn't so doomed. Coming soon to Comic Con: 1) AI art sufficiently "human-looking" to pass. 2) Human artists falsely accused of using AI. Would there be grounds for a lawsuit in the latter case?
"Artists" are currently trying to create false scarcity, not totally unlike the DeBeers/diamonds false scarcity.
Historically, Artists have often had (mostly) uncredited assistants that handled a lot of the grunt work. This is particularly common, IME, for physical media artists that do large sculptures and similar pieces. "The Artist" will do the initial design, and then "artists" working under their direction will do a lot of cutting and welding, for example.
AI is upending a lot of this because it is letting more people become Artists in the sense of bringing a vision into reality via the use of various external helpers.
In the end all visual artists are just manipulating how photons hit our eyes, and there are lots of ways to make that happen pleasantly.
> Historically, Artists have often had (mostly) uncredited assistants that handled a lot of the grunt work. This is particularly common, IME, for physical media artists that do large sculptures and similar pieces. "The Artist" will do the initial design, and then "artists" working under their direction will do a lot of cutting and welding, for example.
I'd say the right thing to do in such cases would be to credit the whole team, like movies do when the credits roll, rather than conclude that the term "artist" is meaningless anyway because some people take credit for the work of others.
When you say "Art" can only come from a person who drew a line directly with their own hand, vs. a person who told a computer to draw a line, it's false scarcity. Both lines could wind up looking identical, but the Artist is trying to make the world believe only one of those lines is truly valuable.
I'd be interested to see you expand your comment beyond what you wrote. I don't have a horse in this race, I'm a terrible Artist and have no interest in using my time to create visual baubles with AI. I just see it as an interesting thing that is playing out.
AI feels like it's bringing the Matrix to the real world. Imagine you are in a space, and all the posters and text are AI-generated slop. They tickle your dopamine sensors and look good out of focus. But upon closer inspection, they are lacking a substance we didn't even know was there before. It's like living in a simulacrum of the real world. Instead of our energy being harvested, it's our attention.
My wife draws comics and exhibits at comic con, and her website is basically being ddossed by AI scrapers to the point of NEEDING cloudflare to keep the site online.
Then people get to use the models that stole her work and crashed her site to sell derivative works right next to her booth?
> According to Ortiz, the convention is a sacred place she didn’t want to see desecrated by AI.
Maybe tone down the religious framing of what is essentially a cashgrab show for the industry. Also: Does that AI ban apply to e.g. Disney in its entirety? Because if it does, it'll be a very small and pretty bleak Comic Con this year.
Creating art, even via using something like Photoshop, is a skill that takes years of learning and practice to do well. Most people who appreciate art appreciate not only the art itself, but the time and skill that went into its creation.
When someone short-circuits the whole creative process by putting a prompt into a machine and having it spit out an art, there's nothing to appreciate.
And on top of those things, I'd add that good artists use that time to deepen the work and their understanding of the work.
If you're doing, say, factory work, you can just zone out. You do the same thing over and over, and you do it well enough, but your mind is somewhere else.
But somebody who's truly during art is present in the work as they're doing it. They're up to something. I think that's a big part of why the work of serious artists changes over time. It's an exploration.
In contrast, look at some kitch producer like Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light™. He was clearly successful financially. But I'd argue that there is little more to it than "AI" "art".
For me appreciating art always involves reaching for an understanding of the artist and the humanity we share. An Ansel Adams print is lovely, but ultimately I end up thinking not just about the image or the landscape. I think about being in the landscape. About the process of getting that one perfect photo. About what drives a person to seek that and to go to such incredible lengths. About how Adams saw the world.
If I'm going to think hard about some GenAI output, I'm going to appreciate the technology that went into it. But there's no more to think about the prompter than there is about somebody picking out clip art.
How to you estimate the 'time and skill' that went into the creation of a random piece of art? Is a portrait that took 50 hours to paint inherently more worthy than a virtually identical one that took 5 hours? Is the slower artist the better artist? Is a Bob Ross 'happy little trees, body of water, mountain in background'-image not artistically valuable because he does it in 20 minutes?
As for skill: I would argue that a random Banksy takes a lot less skill than the average Artemisia Gentileschi (admit it: you had to look her up). Yet, one is celebrated art, the other is virtually unknown and at best 'one among many baroque northern-Italian painters'.
Those are earnest questions, I want to understand the recently-recurring time-and-skill argument. What sort of people honestly look at a picture and ask 'yes, but how long did it take to make? How long had the artist to be trained for this?'
> one is celebrated art, the other is virtually unknown and at best 'one among many baroque northern-talian painters'.
Who claims that 'baroque northern italian painters' are not artists? If anything, an unknown painter is much closer to art with capital A than Banksy, in the traditional hierarchy. So this is a weird framing.
As for time, this is both time taken to create and time spent practicing to reach a certain level of artistry. A speed painter is still an artist, and they reached their speed not by using an AI shortcut but by spending long hours practicing.
The underlying question is how do we tie art and legitimacy: society has always tied both, which is why we have institutions tasked with assigning legitimacy (museums), a hierarchy of art forms where the longest lived are seen as superior (painting over photography), and artists gain prestige not from a single art piece, but from a consistent production of works that are tied together by a shared identity.
On the other hand, a lot of the "pro" AI art discourse I've seen often boiled down to attempts to disconnect art from legitimacy. That's a tough hill to climb.
Pretty strong statement, an as such needs a non-tautological proof. Rich people buying rare things as what society should consider art may not exactly fit that bill.
The thing is what is considered art at any particular time is very nebulous and quite often tied to what the rulers of a country would allow. Trying to say that modern institutions get to decide what art is and isn't is also going to cause definition problems. Does folk art not recognized by museums count at art. The said people who like it would say it does.
Does a person who spends a small amount of time creating something that others consider art, even though that's not what they do, nor will they do it again, have they actually made a piece of art?
Simply put trying to put these rules on the ethereal concept of art quickly devolves into pedantry that makes actual enemies in fields were factions say their ideas are the only true art, and other factions that attempt to destroy the concept altogether.
I was pointing out that time and skill are not universal markers of 'worthy' art. The fact that a random graffiti guy is celebrated, a "big A" artist is unknown is a direct indication that time and skill needed are of little concern in the long run.
> a hierarchy of art forms where the longest lived are seen as superior (painting over photography),
I think this is a bold take - comparing an art form that has been around in a meaningful way for 2000 years to one that has been around for 100 years. Also, if that was true, and not just survivorship bias, shouldn't we consider sculptures and cave wall paintings superior to oil paintings?
Photography, by the way, was considered 'unworthy' by 'real artists' for decades because 'there is no art involved in pointing a box at a tree and pressing a button'. That sounds awfully like the AI debate of today, doesn't it?
> artists gain prestige not from a single art piece, but from a consistent production of works that are tied together by a shared identity.
Or is it that an artist does produce more than one piece of art over their lifespan, so they can, in fact, survive, and, once they become popular with one painting, their other stuff is retroactively elevated?
Art one-hit wonders (or low-hit wonders) do exist. Van Gogh is known for the night sky and the sunflowers, virtually nothing else (unless you are an afficiado). Da Vinci is known for the Mona Lisa - if you are an enthusiast, you might know the Salvator Mundi - the Vitruvian Man I consider less art and more technical drawing. Dürer is known for the hands, the rabbit, and a self-portrait. Shepard Fairey is only known for the "Hope / Yes, we can"-poster.
> On the other hand, a lot of the "pro" AI art discourse I've seen often boiled down to attempts to disconnect art from legitimacy.
That may be related to the circumstance that most of the Anti-AI backlash comes from mediocre artists who do mostly derivative works. If your portfolio consists of furry porn and a broody Heath-Ledger-Joker sitting down, with 'HA HA HA' scribbled over it, sorry, that makes you a 'media / creative', but not an artist with a bit A ... You are essentially doing what the AI is doing: Take an idea, rehash it, minimally, then put it down on paper/your Wacom tablet. If all you bring to the table is 'I suffered for this', your market just shrank to people who enjoy your suffering.
Art is not artistry, art is the idea. As such I find the concept of a 'Street-art Darth Vader' covered in colorful tags that's basically an AI image directly or post-processed more interesting than the 'real artist with colored pencils' Darth Vader in a classical pose that the artist got from a superman comic book cover.
> How to you estimate the 'time and skill' that went into the creation of a random piece of art?
You don't. Unless that's the kind of thing you're into, I guess.
> Is a portrait that took 50 hours to paint inherently more worthy than a virtually identical one that took 5 hours? Is the slower artist the better artist? Is a Bob Ross 'happy little trees, body of water, mountain in background'-image not artistically valuable because he does it in 20 minutes?
You can't quantify art that way. People work at different speeds. I can appreciate that something took some number of hours without knowing the precise number of hours.
> As for skill: I would argue that a random Banksy takes a lot less skill than the average Artemisia Gentileschi (admit it: you had to look her up). Yet, one is celebrated art, the other is virtually unknown and at best 'one among many baroque northern-Italian painters'.
Maybe, but I'm not qualified to make that comparison. Both are beyond my level of artistic ability (I've never studied art nor practiced much). I don't know why one thing or artist gets more popular than another while another who's just as talented (or maybe even moreso) languishes in obscurity. Skill is a factor, sure, but there's no formula that I'm aware of.
> What sort of people honestly look at a picture and ask 'yes, but how long did it take to make? How long had the artist to be trained for this?'
Maybe some people think of it that way. I don't know. I've never asked those questions about any art I consume. I just think something like, "wow, this looks nice, it must have taken a while" or "what would it take to make something like this, I wonder"
> Maybe some people think of it that way. I don't know. I've never asked those questions about any art I consume. I just think something like, "wow, this looks nice, it must have taken a while" or "what would it take to make something like this, I wonder"
I think this raises an interesting question about form vs. function in art.
I was running a AD&D game on Friday. At one point, I was holding up the book to show the artwork of a monster to the group. None of us were looking at it and taking the time to contemplate the effort involved, thinking it must have taken a while, etc. I'm sure some people do - old school D&D art is definitely an area that a subset of the hobby is passionate about - but the majority of people are looking at it to help with formulating things in their mind's eye, getting a feel for things, etc.
But I will appreciate a piece of "standalone" art in a very similar manner as to how you describe.
Do most readers spend appreciable time looking at the art on the cover of their book? Do people spend a ton of time looking at album art while listening to music on Spotify? How about the art in a video game - how much of it is the point vs. something that facilitates the point - the last few times I loaded up Dwarf Fortress, it was the ASCII tileset, not the graphical version.
Do AI creations have a place where the art is supposed to be functional vs. being made for the sake of being art?
My personal experience: As an artist throughout my life, whether it be drawing, painting, or sculpting, I have been asked again and again how long it took me to make a piece. It is probably the most common question I get when I interact with people over my art. My experience has shown me people value the effort and time it takes to make something beautiful and unique.
I recently began attending events/cons to share my sculpting and it was eye opening. Not only did people frown on A.I. generated art at these events, but I had to broadcast that my sculpting was not 3D printed. Quite a few visitors to my table let me know they appreciated my work was handmade.
Makes sense to me, the whole structure of the artist booth is about connecting with the person that made the art. Why would you want to see a booth showing artworks that weren't even created by the person in front of you but by an AI?
If anything, an AI artwork booth should be manned by the engineers that built and trained the image model and well as scraped the training data. Then they can meet all the people they non-consensually took artwork from :P
>Why would you want to see a booth showing artworks that weren't even created by the person in front of you but by an AI?
I'd suggest people learn about Andy Warhol's factory where they mass produced "art." Art is obsessed with "thing-ness," that is, being able to hold and own the artistic object. It's why people without record players buy vinyl that they listen to on spotify. And the way I see it, the main problem with AI art is that (1) it's all digital, and (2) there hasn't been an artist willing to develop a model themselves in order to create unique pieces that exist in the real world.
Don't get me wrong, I think the visual arts are going through a shift that will rival the advent of the photograph, but we are at the birth of this new period. I think it's fair to say that we are in the "this is bad" period before new art movements using the technology start to emerge (e.g. photography), as well as art movements that move away from the medium (e.g. modern art). Art has always been in conflict between being about the idea and being about the skill to bring that idea to life.
https://guyhepner.com/news/318-andy-warhol-inside-the-factor...
https://www.thecollector.com/how-photography-transformed-art...
I'd suggest people learn about Andy Warhol's factory where they mass produced "art."
Ditto for Picasso, and many artists even going back to the Renaissance when great painters and sculptors sometimes had apprentices finish or duplicate paintings/sculptures for them.
But this isn't that. AI is something else entirely.
I don't recommend using the Warhol argument. It's become a trope used by AI-über-alles people who have little knowledge of and often zero experience in the arts.
My entire point is that art is an inherent contradiction. Art can be anything. Fucking Duchamp’s readymades should make any concern about AI worthless. He was literally putting someone’s trash in a gallery and it was art.
The reason why artists are mad about AI is the same reason artists were mad about the photograph… they were selling a product like craftsmen, but calling themselves artists. Yes, there is a crisis for getting paid to be someone else’s creative, but there is no crisis in creativity. In fact, there has never been more freedom than now.
I don't think the question is really about whether AI art is real art. (But it could be about that, as I'm not familiar with commercial cons in the US.)
Some years ago, around the time I became aware that AI art is a thing, the artist scene around Finnish cons had already decided to ban it. And the reason was obvious, as the same people are also very eager to police others who might be selling pirated products.
They don't care legal constructs such as intellectual property. They don't really care about economic constructs such as copyright. What they care about are authors' moral rights. If the model was trained without obtaining a permission from the authors of every work in the training data, they think using the model to create art is immoral.
> What they care about are authors' moral rights. If the model was trained without obtaining permission from the authors of every work in the training data, they think using the model to create art is immoral.
Art is not created in isolation. It is a result of the artist's exposure (aka training), both intentional and incidental. If an artist wants an AI model to get permission before training on their work, then the artist should get permission from all the artists they were exposed to that shaped their artistic expression.
It's training and copying all the way down.
AI generative art doesn't exist by definition. You cannot generate art. Actually we have a term for this - kitsch.
I'm old enough to remember when such arguments were had about 'real art' coming from pens, pencils and brushes, not programs. Took a good long time for 'digital art' became a category.
I don't think it did take that long actually? And I don't think it's even a good comparison. AI art vs human art isn't the same jump as physical media to digital.
Honestly I'm okay with "AI art" becoming a category. The issue is when it's presented as handmade, causing confusion.
Digital artwork being presenting at an oil painting conference would cause similar confusion and outrage for the same reasons.
I disagree. AI art is oxymoron. You cannot generate art by definition.
There was also a brief moment where digital art wasn't cheating as long as you didn't use layers and the clipboard.
This too will pass. Soon everything is going to be rendered at 60hz in real time, and demands that everything needs to be rendered by hand will be as absurd as claiming every frame of a 3D game needs to be hand rendered in Photoshop.
I remember this as well, but I also remember those who thought that merely expressed their disapproval.
This time around the response as been aggressively adversarial. Not only do they disapprove of the new thing but anyone who express a contrary opinion is considered a target.
“The whole structure of the artist booth is about connecting with the person that made the art.”
I can vouch for myself and others - that we are there to just buy cool shit and not ‘connect’ with the artist.
“Why would you want to see a booth showing artworks that weren't even created by the person in front of you but by an AI?”
Um, because they are cool?
Yeah. The problem is that AI images are widely considered uncool, like hyper uncool. That's it.
"I can vouch for myself and others - that we are there to just buy cool shit and not ‘connect’ with the artist."
Who is "we"? Art, to me, is about pouring your heart and soul into something in a way that AI can trivially emulate, which makes it dangerous when placed next to art that actually has a lived experience attached to it.
I can slap a prompt into AI and get some graphic design slop that to the untrained eye looks "close enough" to the vendor next to them that actually made the art themselves. This is dangerous and spits in the face of people who pour themselves into their work.
At best, put the AI art generators into their own little special corner. But don't put one-shotted AI art next to actual crafted human created art right next to one another and say that they're equal. The brush strokes are imaginary. That's a grift.
You could save yourself some time and jingle keys in front of your face.
Today there's a (mostly) clear line between "AI" and "not AI" art in terms of process, but I believe as time goes on we'll see more and more blurring of that. I'm thinking the equivalent of the spell-check tool for art, something that takes explicit human input and tidies the details in an interactive, human-in-the-loop sort of way.
That's a weird comparison because it's a mechanical and deterministic task. Bad autocomplete is just a bad algorithm. As far as I know, (word) artists are usually following the grammatical (or orthographic) rules of their target language by default, and if they want to do something else they would disable that. But it's not really a question of style if you misspell certain words. Your example would be like letting a Thesaurus suggest different words in every sentence.
> But it's not really a question of style if you misspell certain words.
Sure it is. Flagging vernacular, phonetic spelling for accents, punning, signalling a character's use of a word they are unfamiliar with, and so on and so forth. Intentionally misspelling words can definitely be a stylistic choice.
Maybe a linter is a more accurate allegory. I think there are parts of art that could sometimes be suggested in terms of anatomy, symmetry, shading, color theory, etc. You'd configure your art linter to your preferences/style (or target style) and it would point out the things you're doing wrong and offer suggested fixes.
Hi, it looks like you are drawing a human. Humans do not have eyes of this size. Also the nose can't just be an upside down v. Why are you even drawing Manga, freak? Don't forget to color this panel.
-- the Clippy for comics
You could argue red and blue squiggles have been nudging us that way for a few decades.
I think you misunderstood term art. AI cannot generate something like art. Otherwise it's just an image. Or kitsch.
I'm not sure if there is clear line in creative process to tell what is too much of AI and what is not. Which leads to above mentioned. AI is just a tool.
There's been a schism for some time between "Artists" (that's with a capital "A", mind you) and, oh, graphic designers, photographers… The latter are not real artists.
While I suspect the AI fracas within the art community will never go away, I suspect within a decade AI-assisted art (or whatever you want to call it) will be a non-issue for everyone else.
Photography, computer graphics, Photoshop, synthesizers, samplers, and others have all been considered "not real art."
The irony is that the kind of genre art you see at Comic-Con is mostly reproductions of commercial properties or standard tropes and formulas, with very little original vision and creativity. Being able to draw something recognisable as [genre character name goes here], even with some skill, is not that high a bar, and it lives in a tiny niche in the art world as a whole.
AI brought something fresh to art for a while, but now I think creative people are more aware of the limitations. It's in a strange mid-way place between being fascinating, and being frustratingly limited compared to what it could be.
I suspect we'll start seeing meta-art soon with a much more interesting mix of creation, original thought, and execution.
"…computer graphics, Photoshop, synthesizers, samplers…"
Andy Warhol…
A key difference is that each of the mediums you mentioned are deterministic and unbiased (to a certain degree.) The the work created can therefore be inferred to be a "pure" expression of the artists intent. A pro photographer and my mom will get wildly different results even with the same equipment. Not so with AI, which very much has it's own bias and is eager to inject it.
The other question is, is AI a tool or a medium? I often hear people say "Well EDM was looked down on when it first came out," but EDM is not a tool, it's a genre. I think most artists wouldn't really care about "AI" becoming a genre of art, but it's silly to think that all future art will be AI just as it would have been silly to think EDM would have replaced all future music.
> A pro photographer and my mom will get wildly different results even with the same equipment. Not so with AI, which very much has it's own bias and is eager to inject it.
That particular AI models have their own bias and are eager to inject it is among the reasons why a skilled user and an unskilled user will have very different results, not a reason why that isn’t true.
> The other question is, is AI a tool or a medium?
Is oil paint on canvas a set of tools or a medium? In art, a tool ot set of tools often characterizes, or even defines, a medium; they are different but not orthogonal concerns. (And the cultural phenomenon of identification of a regularly-used tool or combination of tools as defining a medium generally only happens well after that tool or combination has been in significant use for a while.)
AI is a broad category of tools. Particular combinations of those (either with eachother or with other tools) may also come to be be understood as particular media.
>That particular AI models have their own bias and are eager to inject it is among the reasons why a skilled user and an unskilled user will have very different results, not a reason why that isn’t true.
Not quite what I mean. If you and I both take a photo of the same controlled scene with the same camera, the result will be essentially identical. If you and I both type the exact same prompt into Nano Banana, we will both get very different images. So, how is one supposed to know what parts of the AI image are intentional or incidental? If the AI image is "good," is it good because of or despite the prompter?
>Is oil paint on canvas a set of tools or a medium? In art, a tool ot set of tools often characterizes, or even defines, a medium
Agreed, and this is basically what I'm saying. I'm fine with siloing AI art into it's own category and I'm sure some cool work can be done there. But it's fundamentally odd to think that AI will, for some reason, replace or displace other art.
All due respect to your mother, but a pro photographer would certainly achieve better results. Your mom may recognize something is not right but be unable to articulate it clearly to the tool. Same problem that's always been. The bar has been lowered, not removed.
He explicitly said they would get different results.
> AI brought something fresh to art for a while,
What fresh new ideas did it bring? Most of what I see is generic AI slop pictures tossed in articles I mostly ignore.
I write like some of the retro stuff people are doing with AI, like: https://youtu.be/yt1DVkV3muQ and https://youtu.be/uRzNHSBDdgU
Derivative (much!) but I've been impressed with the turn the "fan films" have taken with AI, like this: https://youtu.be/eJu8rYLjNak
I mean, I find some channels like this fun
https://www.youtube.com/@thearchiveinbetween/shorts
While the pictures/videos are AI generated, there is a coherent multiverse that builds itself into a story over many videos.
Those unable to see or create the art in graphic design, photography, architecture, or writing...
...expect "tools of artifice" to help them discern between fresh and rotten.
Unaware how obviously fake and bad their "assisted output" is.
Thing is, image generators might be better than when SD came out years ago, there's been zero progress on actually meaningfully integrating AI into artists' workflow.
The problem is AI assisted art does not yet exist the same way you can get an LLM to help you finish a project you started by hand, where you can arbitrarily decide how much control you want to exercise over the output.
> Thing is, image generators might be better than when SD came out years ago, there's been zero progress on actually meaningfully integrating AI into artists' workflow.
That’s an interesting opinion, but I have no idea what, other than ignorance, it is based on.
> The problem is AI assisted art does not yet exist the same way you can get an LLM to help you finish a project you started by hand, where you can arbitrarily decide how much control you want to exercise over the output.
Except it exactly exists in that way, and (while the tooling was more clumsy than today) it has at least since SD1.5 was SOTA.
If you are judging image generation by the native web interfaces provided as the public face of the big hosted models, you really have no understanding of what is out there, and if you aren't doing that, I don't know where your claims could come from.
Except none of this stuff is good enough to be used in production. Yes, I know of Lora-s, embeddings, Controlnet and ComfyUI, dozens of text-to-3d models etc.
I'd say this is at the level of ChatGPT 4 - interesting and shows promise, but only usable with major concessions.
You know why people complain about AI art and not AI code?
Because AI art is quite noticeable. It still doesn't fit into any real artists workflow (someone who is skilled at drawing, and wants to accelerate their workflow without major loss of quality).
The burden of proof lies on you, I suggest you include it next time instead of insulting the person who asks a question.
Nothing had changed on that front. No one's doing non-literal semantic deconstruction and reconstruction of art. This is perhaps due to irresponsible and thoughtless atmospheres surrounding AI image generators and its core developer circles selectively filtering out those with relevant backgrounds.
Maybe some Google products are a bit of an exception, but they're default 5-10 years ahead until it stops updating 15 years before going open source, so that's besides the point.
Other than that, it's all techbros making tangential changes and claiming changes were made. Changes maybe, improvements, not really happening.
> there's been zero progress on actually meaningfully integrating AI into artists' workflow.
This simply isn't true. An easy way someone who does most of their art more "traditionally" can use Krita to very much just use AI to help finish a project.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly6USRwTHe0
ComfyUI was also designed from the ground up to follow the same sort of node-based workflow that many CG artists are used to with things like Houdini, Blender, Substance Designer, etc., and includes all sorts of ways you can arbitrarily control where and how much the AI is used for.
“Good” is some mix of taste and skill.
People without taste hide behind skill. They do everything technically correctly and still make something bad. This is the threat of new mediums to them — it takes away their only strength.
But at the same time, something like AI suddenly enables people with neither taste nor skill to produce. I don’t want to see AI art right now — AI art is currently a lot of noise.
The sentiment of photography not being real art hasn’t been a thing for a while now though.
For me, the killer feature would more be _autocomplete_ for art. I love to cartoon and doodle, but don’t have the time/patience/skillset to build professional digital assets. If I could go from my pencil drawn sketch to a flashy png, that would be awesome! I think it’d be a nice use of AI, since it just allows me to do more with my own creativity.
Unfortunately whenever I’ve tried uploading a sketch to ChatGPT or Gemini, it seems to fixate on details of my sketch, and recreates my mistakes in high fidelity. It fails to take a creative leap toward a good result. I’ve heard some professionals have gotten good results building custom workflows in ComfyUI.
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@dang I'm pretty sure this is a troll account
Try https://vizcom.ai, it might be closer to what you are looking for.
No, seems to be about "turns X into Y", while what parent seems to want, is something that just makes making X easier/better, instead of doing those sort of "transformations" which is usually where the human feeling gets lost.
Got a warning about vizcom.ai wanting to connect to any device on my local network...
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Interesting. It seems that in industries where productivity/output isn't the primary goal (so not Software, Analytics, etc), people care more about *where* their content comes from. It's quite indiscriminate in Software, for sure, I feel like people don't care whether you used an AI to write your code as long as it works. But I don't see AI getting real footing really ever in the creative world because people want authenticity there. It's why I think Suno, for example, is never really going to go anywhere.
People put value in effort for efforts' sake.
An example is there's a split in the woodworking community between people who use power tools and those who use hand-tools only. The latter often seeing it as more pure.
Those same power-tools users might in turn look down on something made entirely with a CNC machine.
The end result might be the same table. Indeed, the pure uniform lines from a CNC machine might be what both the others strive towards, but they're unlikely to regard the CNC output as being in better taste.
The effort and craft itself is well regarded and valued, even if it is hard to capture in the final output. Even if the signs of hand-crafting are fewer the higher the quality craft!
I think the effort is indeed a big piece of it. For example, consider sports. I don't imagine that a lot of sports fans would be interested in watching completely AI-generated video of their favorite teams playing, even if it's totally believable. Surely the main point of the whole thing has something to do with humans at the top of their skill, measuring up against each other, and experiencing it together with them?
For me it's the same with music. I am sure I will be fooled by some AI generated music now and then, but what does that prove?
That's a bit different than art. I put it closer to "why do you care if your girlfriend is AI or real? Isn't it just the end emotions you care about?". There is a deep human connection to art, creativity, expression of human emotions and feelings. Reading a poem about losing a loved one and connecting with it, only to find out it was written by a machine is a deep betrayal of that. Its like finding out the love letter you got in school was actually a mockery by the person you had a crush on -- what does it matter? the letter made you feel good right, and that's all you were after. It matters because intention and emotion of other humans matters to most people.
Not everything is purely about being able to output a product and/or produce a tangible good or service. Some things are about people and how people feel.
Another example. I run a charity that takes money, but just generates AI videos simulating helping children. What does it matter? Ultimately the person donating just wants to feel like they made a difference, and they get the same feeling either way, believing the money is well spent. It matters because no one is really being helped, no virtue is actually being enacted in the world.
In the same way, generating all our art and music from AI would represent a massive harm in the world -- effectively extinguishing massive portions of human creativity, and all the people who get to feel useful in creating, editing, and distributing it. In a cold capitalist view, what does it matter, I just want to see a pretty picture for a moment. In terms of actual real value in the world, it is negative and selfish, assuming the only value is my temporary enjoyment of product.
Firstly, thank you for posting this! I'm one of the people who primarily values the art on its own merits, and not on whether it was made by a human chiseling with rocks and ground up flower petals for ink, or an AI generating something. The primary part of that value assessment is definitely how it makes me feel. Your post is the first time I felt I may actually understand the other side.
Speaking only for myself, I can absolutely understand where you are coming from. It makes a lot of sense when put this way. But, I think the difference here is that what you are describing is deceit, and it's the deceit rather than the output, that would bother me in all of your scenarios.
For example, your strongest point in my opinion, is the AI girlfriend versus the real girlfriend. That's a phenomenal argument because it is in my opinion an accurate analogy so how's the logic side strong, and it's also a horrifying one, so it hits hard on the emotions as well as the logic side. The beauty of this is not lost on me, you have created amazing art with that argument! That's the kind of art that really resonates with me.
But zooming in on that scenario, I think the key is disclosure. If the person dating the AI girlfriend knows that it's an AI girlfriend, that doesn't float my boat but I know people who would actually prefer an AI girlfriend to a real one. Again, not for me, but I recognize that it is for some people.
Same with seeing a pretty picture on the screen. If it's being presented to me with deceit behind it, either a person claiming they snapped the photo or made the art digitally when it is actually just AI, then it does ruin the art for me. If it's disclosed though that it is made by AI, I can evaluate it on its merits. Just like in your table example above, I may appreciate the effort and personality behind a more flawed piece that was made by hand, but I also appreciate the precise lines and geometry of a machined output. The key is the honesty and disclosure behind who created it. I get a different value out of the handcrafted piece than I do the AI generated piece. One isn't necessarily better than the other, just different.
Where I do feel a little hesitant on the AI side, though is as you get at the capitalist destruction of art. Without a doubt, the middle level of artists will be hollowed out. I suspect there will always be a place for the traditional artist, but I do worry it will be diminished. On the flip side, I've been able to use AI to take photos of my pets or family, and reimagine them in interesting ways. I know it's not real, I know it's computer generated, and I'm not hanging those pictures on my wall. I simply do not get the same joy from seeing those pictures as I do the originals. I could be wrong here, but I feel like that is the heart of your point, and I think it's a good one.
The thing is, all of those are valid ways to manufacture things and they each have their merits and values.
There is no problem with using hand tools, power tools or CNC.
The problem is people looking down on the others.
Of course the path you chose is a more pure reperestation of your values. That"s why you chose it.
I was speaking to an upholsterer yesterday and he was saying that using foam as stuffing is cheating.
> I feel like people don't care whether you used an AI to write your code as long as it works
Oh, some do; for sure they do. Some put a "no ai" badge on their sites; others add disclaimers to their repos if ai has been used to write the code. But I agree with you about the productivity/output. Developers who refrain from using AI are probably more interested in the very process of coding than in its output. They pride themselves on their craft and craftsmanship.
We also typically value things that are not tied to productivity/output, like product quality/reliability, security, and our own agency.
I want to be free to read, write, run, and share code, now and in the future. Relying on centralized services to do it for me (by extracting knowledge from countless other people) is certainly not a resilient strategy.
> But I don't see AI getting real footing really ever in the creative world because people want authenticity there. It's why I think Suno, for example, is never really going to go anywhere.
Oh I bet it will go somewhere. There is already plenty of low-budget direct-to-dvd movie, cheap soap opera telenovelas, and elevator music used as background in public places. These don't care about quality, they were always about making the cheapest product possible that can generate revenue / be used as a backdrop. Gen AI is going to be a race to the bottom for this field.
But for "labour of love" art/media, they might have a place in the toolbox (to generate a texture, fill some unimportant background, etc), but full gen AI media won't cut it. Intention, direction, realization is what matter. And since most community are about those labour of love, it shouldn't be a surprise that most people who attend conferences are heavily against gen AI.
>It's quite indiscriminate in Software, for sure, I feel like people don't care whether you used an AI to write your code as long as it works.
Because it's hard to tell whether the app you're using is vibecoded or not. Is an app buggy because it was vibecoded? Or the developer just sucks?
> It's quite indiscriminate in Software, for sure, I feel like people don't care whether you used an AI to write your code as long as it works.
This is starting to change, thanks to the staggering decline in average software quality in recent years (likely partly driven by vibe coding and similar). It’s getting so bad that even non-technical users who’ve traditionally just silently suffered through poor software experiences are starting to take note and voice frustration. Demand for quality “handcrafted” software will almost certainly increase as long as this trend continues.
It's less about productivity and output (those are still desired in many art fields) but more about creativity and personality, more humane traits.
Not to say that coding doesn't have those two, but I'd argue developers have been caring less and less for it over the years. Their relationship with code has changed.
You can look at a comic and immediately identify the illustrator if you're well versed in the artists. Now would that still happen in 20 years if Gen AI became standard today? Will we keep getting new artists and new art styles? Or will their relationship with art become more like newer coders have with code?
I don't think it's an easy question to answer and no one likely has an answer.
>Not to say that coding doesn't have those two, but I'd argue developers have been caring less and less for it over the years.
I think this is both hindsight bias and survivorship bias.
There has always been massive buckets of buggy shit code out there. Now, one thing we had in the past was very tight computing limitations that worked as a decent evolutionary death function. As computing resources grew, the selection function became less effective and we get to see these hulking crap monsters lumber around our CPUs.
I can listen to music and recognize the artist or a singer’s voice. It doesn’t mean as much without that relationship. Depending on the style of music some of the charm is in production imperfections or sloppy playing that brings a distinctly human quality to it.
> It's quite indiscriminate in Software, for sure, I feel like people don't care whether you used an AI to write your code as long as it works.
I don't think that is really the case.
We are seeing pushback on games developed using AI. Communities like /r/selfhosted is very much pushing back against AI slop code.
While right now it seems like for the most part the concern is from more technical people, we are seeing issues of vibe coded applications shipping bugs because the quality is poor (just look at the bugs shipped in Claude Code).
I think we will be getting to a point of people questioning the quality of the application they are using and whether or not a human was actually involved if bugs start shipping more often.
Is the backlash among gamers to AI code or to AI-made visuals / assets, which are often kind of sloppy or nonsensical if looked at closely? I had only heard about the latter.
> We are seeing pushback on games developed using AI.
Yes, people whine but still buy the games, as long as they're fun. Expressed preference of "AI is always bad" vs revealed preference of "It's fine if the product is still good."
One of the things I find interesting as well, is that among many of my friends outside the western world, they typically see: "knowing how something is made" as a western cultural thing. Many of them adopt a "why do you care how it's made, you are a not a manufacturer" type of response. Which i find very interesting.
They still care about the quality of the product, just not the process as much. Not sure if this the case for all people or a generalization. Just something I noticed.
Art is mostly bought by wealthier people currently, they don't like the idea of proles having access to what they do, so requiring it to be organic gives them artificial exclusivity.
Similar to organic or "artisan" food.
This is nothing new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsch
This is an IS statment, not an OUGHT statement: Artists are very high-status / high-prestige. As such, their work and livelihoods are more important and more deserving of protectionism.
>As such, their work and livelihoods OUGHT to be more important and more deserving of protectionism.
FTFY.
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I tried to read the article but a pop-up blocked me in the middle, demanding that I subscribe to a newsletter. I am not subscribed to any newsletter in general, but when the default setting of a webpage tries to force people into newsletter via pop-ups, then I'll simply perma-ban such websites rather than click on anything at all.
The x button is right there to dismiss it
How much AI is too much? Are you allowed to use Photoshop to create your digital art? Almost every tool there is now powered by AI in some way (some a lot more than others). Can you use its auto-fill button? What percent of the image can you use it for?
Can you generate something with AI and then manually edit it in Photoshop? How much manual editing is required before it's not considered AI anymore?
My point is, AI is another tool in the toolbox, it can be used well or poorly. How much is too much? Just like back in the day, using Photoshop wasn't allowed, until it was.
Where does one draw the line?
The art world is perfectly fine with "I know it when I see it" so I don't think these "gotcha" thought experiments really matter to it.
The art world is plagued not by subjectivity but an erroneous compulsion to treat subjectivity as objectivity.
This isn't a "gotcha" experiment, it's a real question. And the problem with "I know it when I see it" is that right now people are biasing towards "if it's good it must be AI" and accusing legit artists and writers of being AI.
I happened to me. I spent 10 minutes writing a reddit comment. I researched it, I sourced it. It had sections with headlines, bullets, and even em dashes. 100% written by me.
As soon as I posted it, it was downvoted and I got PMs saying "don't post this AI slop!".
The problem is the AI has been trained on well executed material, and when you execute well, you look like an AI.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (recently game of the year) got caught leaving a small amount of placeholder AI content in their game and everyone lost their mind
I’m sure reasonable artists agree with you, but many today do not
There’s two things to unpack here.
The first is that all “AI” is not equal. It’s specifically generative AI that most take issue with, mostly due to questionable ethics in training. Image editors have employed techniques marketed as “AI” for many years that are mostly or entirely unrelated to modern generative AI.
The second is that whether something is “AI art” is a spectrum, not binary. On one end you have creations in which generative AI played no role and on the other you have images that were generated off of nothing but a prompt or vague scribbles. In the middle you have things like images where the artist traced over an AI image or used bits and pieces of generated imagery. Probably the closest shorthand for where an image lands on the spectrum is to what degree the creator engaged their artistic skills.
A great many of digital artists would be happy to use Photoshop 7/CS1/CS2, all long predating generative AI, if those ran on modern operating systems. Some prefer modern simplistic (and without AI) tools like Paint Tool SAI.
This is like asking why FOSS maintainers don't like AI PRs because "they can't prove it anyways". The trash lets itself out sometimes
For many of us, even if drawing that line exactly is debatable, a prompt-generated image, where the "artist" didn't interact with any of the pixels is across the line for "too much AI".
It can definitely take creativity and fortitude to get an AI model to draw what you want it to. But if you worked at a fantasy publishing house and commissioned a cover painting, it might take a fair amount of work for you to get the artist to create something in line with what you envisioned. But you wouldn't get artistic credit for the resultant painting; the artist would! If AI is creating the piece, it is the artist; and you're merely the commissioner of the work.
> But if you worked at a fantasy publishing house and commissioned a cover painting, it might take a fair amount of work for you to get the artist to create something in line with what you envisioned.
If you do this infrequently, you're a commissioner of work.
If you do it daily, in-house, for your own products... you might just have the title "Art Director."
> If you do it daily, in-house, for your own products... you might just have the title "Art Director."
"Art director" seems accurate for what a skillful user of art generators with a specific vision does.
I have also thought that since people find "director" lofty (thanks to auteur theory?) and therefore pretentious to assume, one could borrow "producer" from Vocaloid: https://vocaloid.fandom.com/wiki/Producer (alternative front end: https://antifandom.com/vocaloid/wiki/Producer).
I would agree.
And the best Art Directors today almost all have a background in creating art themselves, in some fashion. I suspect that will remain true in the AI world as well, at least for the foreseeable future.
This argument resonates with me - but it's the same argument that has been made and artists have ignored or put up the same (unconvincing, in my opinion) arguments against the whole time. As you pointed out, this same discussion has been had every step of the way with digital art - from things like photoshop, to the tools that have been gradually introduced inside of photoshop and similar, to even things like brush packs, painting over kitbashes, etc. The traditionalist viewpoint holds strong, until the people arguing blink and realize everyone else eventually stopped caring and did what worked best for them.
At this point, I believe it's not a matter of intellectual honesty or actually disagreeing with any of it - it's just about outcomes. They don't want to see their work devalued, their sources of income drying up. It's an understandable fear. No one who enjoys the work they do enjoys the prospect of potentially having to change careers to keep making a living. Hell, most people that don't enjoy what they do have no desire to have to try and find a new career.
But humans are selfish. The same artists who are worried about technology taking their job will laud praise on technology in other areas that have eliminated jobs, with my recurring example being how happy they are for no longer having to pay a web dev to build them a portfolio site and can instead just go to squarespace and pay them a fraction of the cost. No one laments how there are basically no independent web designers building small sites anymore - it's just not a viable career. It's all been consolidated into shops working for big clients or pumping out themes for Wordpress, Squarespace, and Shopify. And of course, there are countless examples of this throughout history.
I'm not sure AI is going to be the great job destroyer we fear it is. I'm not sure it isn't, either. So I get it. This has a chance to force an issue on a massive scale that usually is much more limited in blast radius.
But to answer the question - I don't think it actually matters to them what the line is from any sort of rational perspective. It will move and shift based on the conversation to wherever they think it needs to be to protect themselves.
The main argument artists use isn’t that it is taking their job. The problem is that it was trained on their work without their consent and without compensation. This is fundamentally different from a Wordpress or squarespace and arguably different from models trained on open source software only.
Ask them how they feel about artists licensing their work for being training material.
Plenty of them are going to respond just as negatively to that.
One possible line: can you actually copyright it?
A result of a prompt you can’t, I believe you can’t trace over a copyrighted work and claim it as your own either so I say that tracing over an AI generated image would not fly either. But IANAL so the details to be fleshed out. Also would probably break if one uses a model that is not trained on any copyrighted data.
It's not that deep, if someone thinks it's AI it loses value to them. If you're able to utilize AI tools in a way that doesn't make the output look like AI to the average person you'll be fine.
Eventually no one will be able to really tell the difference and all of this will go away (though likely at the expense of more people's livelihoods).
I see that as being partially true. There will be people like Walter Keane that take the art of others and state it is their own work. [0] AI will assist those individuals.
AI will have a home on people's desktops for those that accept it.
Art that has value will not be AI art. Artist like Margaret Keane will continue to be viewed as exceptional along with their works. [1]
Personally, I view AI art as lacking passion and an attempt to short circuit the path to profit / greed. I wish to not fund that circuit.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Keane
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Keane
Well I think we're just describing taste and craft. AI tools will get better, more granular, and become better integrated into the actual workflows of people over time. A good tool shouldn't take over my sense for taste and craft.
It's a good thing people are pushing back against the slop if we want there to be any incentives for AI tools to not be geared towards helping make slop.
When does day becomes night?
Classic thought-stopping argument.
It's funny you chose that as your example, because there are very strict definitions of when day becomes night. I think what you were looking for was "when does someone become bald" or "when does an acorn become a tree".
There is a reason those are classic philosophical questions. Because they highlight the fact that while it is easy to identify the ends of the spectrum, it's impossible to find the midpoint, because everyone has a different lived experience.
>there are very strict definitions of when day becomes night
Hmm ... that has not been my experience.
>it's impossible to find the midpoint, because everyone has a different lived experience
Yes! That's the answer to your question.
Luckily the AI artists can set up their own conventions. Considering how unevitable AI art is, I think the cons will be absolutely swarming with visitors!
I thought the use of AI in the Secret Invasion title sequence was actually really appropriate, even "meta", maybe even a bit ahead of its time.
The seemingly purposeful AI style made it seem unnatural (on purpose), and like a facsimile of an otherwise trustworthy thing (on purpose), which was exactly in line with the idea of the show.
The execution of that show and that idea was pretty bad, but one of the few positives of it was, to me, an example of using AI art overtly, and leaning into its untrustworthy nature.
I wish this wasn't so doomed. Coming soon to Comic Con: 1) AI art sufficiently "human-looking" to pass. 2) Human artists falsely accused of using AI. Would there be grounds for a lawsuit in the latter case?
This is already here and embedded inside Adobe products.
"Artists" are currently trying to create false scarcity, not totally unlike the DeBeers/diamonds false scarcity.
Historically, Artists have often had (mostly) uncredited assistants that handled a lot of the grunt work. This is particularly common, IME, for physical media artists that do large sculptures and similar pieces. "The Artist" will do the initial design, and then "artists" working under their direction will do a lot of cutting and welding, for example.
AI is upending a lot of this because it is letting more people become Artists in the sense of bringing a vision into reality via the use of various external helpers.
In the end all visual artists are just manipulating how photons hit our eyes, and there are lots of ways to make that happen pleasantly.
> Historically, Artists have often had (mostly) uncredited assistants that handled a lot of the grunt work. This is particularly common, IME, for physical media artists that do large sculptures and similar pieces. "The Artist" will do the initial design, and then "artists" working under their direction will do a lot of cutting and welding, for example.
I'd say the right thing to do in such cases would be to credit the whole team, like movies do when the credits roll, rather than conclude that the term "artist" is meaningless anyway because some people take credit for the work of others.
a false scarcity? sometimes this site makes me feel like i'm talking to aliens
When you say "Art" can only come from a person who drew a line directly with their own hand, vs. a person who told a computer to draw a line, it's false scarcity. Both lines could wind up looking identical, but the Artist is trying to make the world believe only one of those lines is truly valuable.
I'd be interested to see you expand your comment beyond what you wrote. I don't have a horse in this race, I'm a terrible Artist and have no interest in using my time to create visual baubles with AI. I just see it as an interesting thing that is playing out.
AI feels like it's bringing the Matrix to the real world. Imagine you are in a space, and all the posters and text are AI-generated slop. They tickle your dopamine sensors and look good out of focus. But upon closer inspection, they are lacking a substance we didn't even know was there before. It's like living in a simulacrum of the real world. Instead of our energy being harvested, it's our attention.
Absolutely idiotic take - ban drawing tablets too? What about paintbrushes?
My wife draws comics and exhibits at comic con, and her website is basically being ddossed by AI scrapers to the point of NEEDING cloudflare to keep the site online.
Then people get to use the models that stole her work and crashed her site to sell derivative works right next to her booth?
> According to Ortiz, the convention is a sacred place she didn’t want to see desecrated by AI.
Maybe tone down the religious framing of what is essentially a cashgrab show for the industry. Also: Does that AI ban apply to e.g. Disney in its entirety? Because if it does, it'll be a very small and pretty bleak Comic Con this year.
Anti-AI is a religious thing for many people.
They are only religious about it because it hurts their bottom line.
Comic production is already heavily machine assisted. I don’t really understand the FUD
Creating art, even via using something like Photoshop, is a skill that takes years of learning and practice to do well. Most people who appreciate art appreciate not only the art itself, but the time and skill that went into its creation.
When someone short-circuits the whole creative process by putting a prompt into a machine and having it spit out an art, there's nothing to appreciate.
And on top of those things, I'd add that good artists use that time to deepen the work and their understanding of the work.
If you're doing, say, factory work, you can just zone out. You do the same thing over and over, and you do it well enough, but your mind is somewhere else.
But somebody who's truly during art is present in the work as they're doing it. They're up to something. I think that's a big part of why the work of serious artists changes over time. It's an exploration.
In contrast, look at some kitch producer like Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light™. He was clearly successful financially. But I'd argue that there is little more to it than "AI" "art".
For me appreciating art always involves reaching for an understanding of the artist and the humanity we share. An Ansel Adams print is lovely, but ultimately I end up thinking not just about the image or the landscape. I think about being in the landscape. About the process of getting that one perfect photo. About what drives a person to seek that and to go to such incredible lengths. About how Adams saw the world.
If I'm going to think hard about some GenAI output, I'm going to appreciate the technology that went into it. But there's no more to think about the prompter than there is about somebody picking out clip art.
How to you estimate the 'time and skill' that went into the creation of a random piece of art? Is a portrait that took 50 hours to paint inherently more worthy than a virtually identical one that took 5 hours? Is the slower artist the better artist? Is a Bob Ross 'happy little trees, body of water, mountain in background'-image not artistically valuable because he does it in 20 minutes?
As for skill: I would argue that a random Banksy takes a lot less skill than the average Artemisia Gentileschi (admit it: you had to look her up). Yet, one is celebrated art, the other is virtually unknown and at best 'one among many baroque northern-Italian painters'.
Those are earnest questions, I want to understand the recently-recurring time-and-skill argument. What sort of people honestly look at a picture and ask 'yes, but how long did it take to make? How long had the artist to be trained for this?'
> one is celebrated art, the other is virtually unknown and at best 'one among many baroque northern-talian painters'.
Who claims that 'baroque northern italian painters' are not artists? If anything, an unknown painter is much closer to art with capital A than Banksy, in the traditional hierarchy. So this is a weird framing.
As for time, this is both time taken to create and time spent practicing to reach a certain level of artistry. A speed painter is still an artist, and they reached their speed not by using an AI shortcut but by spending long hours practicing.
The underlying question is how do we tie art and legitimacy: society has always tied both, which is why we have institutions tasked with assigning legitimacy (museums), a hierarchy of art forms where the longest lived are seen as superior (painting over photography), and artists gain prestige not from a single art piece, but from a consistent production of works that are tied together by a shared identity.
On the other hand, a lot of the "pro" AI art discourse I've seen often boiled down to attempts to disconnect art from legitimacy. That's a tough hill to climb.
>society has always tied both,
Pretty strong statement, an as such needs a non-tautological proof. Rich people buying rare things as what society should consider art may not exactly fit that bill.
The thing is what is considered art at any particular time is very nebulous and quite often tied to what the rulers of a country would allow. Trying to say that modern institutions get to decide what art is and isn't is also going to cause definition problems. Does folk art not recognized by museums count at art. The said people who like it would say it does.
Does a person who spends a small amount of time creating something that others consider art, even though that's not what they do, nor will they do it again, have they actually made a piece of art?
Simply put trying to put these rules on the ethereal concept of art quickly devolves into pedantry that makes actual enemies in fields were factions say their ideas are the only true art, and other factions that attempt to destroy the concept altogether.
I was pointing out that time and skill are not universal markers of 'worthy' art. The fact that a random graffiti guy is celebrated, a "big A" artist is unknown is a direct indication that time and skill needed are of little concern in the long run.
> a hierarchy of art forms where the longest lived are seen as superior (painting over photography),
I think this is a bold take - comparing an art form that has been around in a meaningful way for 2000 years to one that has been around for 100 years. Also, if that was true, and not just survivorship bias, shouldn't we consider sculptures and cave wall paintings superior to oil paintings?
Photography, by the way, was considered 'unworthy' by 'real artists' for decades because 'there is no art involved in pointing a box at a tree and pressing a button'. That sounds awfully like the AI debate of today, doesn't it?
> artists gain prestige not from a single art piece, but from a consistent production of works that are tied together by a shared identity.
Or is it that an artist does produce more than one piece of art over their lifespan, so they can, in fact, survive, and, once they become popular with one painting, their other stuff is retroactively elevated?
Art one-hit wonders (or low-hit wonders) do exist. Van Gogh is known for the night sky and the sunflowers, virtually nothing else (unless you are an afficiado). Da Vinci is known for the Mona Lisa - if you are an enthusiast, you might know the Salvator Mundi - the Vitruvian Man I consider less art and more technical drawing. Dürer is known for the hands, the rabbit, and a self-portrait. Shepard Fairey is only known for the "Hope / Yes, we can"-poster.
> On the other hand, a lot of the "pro" AI art discourse I've seen often boiled down to attempts to disconnect art from legitimacy.
That may be related to the circumstance that most of the Anti-AI backlash comes from mediocre artists who do mostly derivative works. If your portfolio consists of furry porn and a broody Heath-Ledger-Joker sitting down, with 'HA HA HA' scribbled over it, sorry, that makes you a 'media / creative', but not an artist with a bit A ... You are essentially doing what the AI is doing: Take an idea, rehash it, minimally, then put it down on paper/your Wacom tablet. If all you bring to the table is 'I suffered for this', your market just shrank to people who enjoy your suffering.
Art is not artistry, art is the idea. As such I find the concept of a 'Street-art Darth Vader' covered in colorful tags that's basically an AI image directly or post-processed more interesting than the 'real artist with colored pencils' Darth Vader in a classical pose that the artist got from a superman comic book cover.
> How to you estimate the 'time and skill' that went into the creation of a random piece of art?
You don't. Unless that's the kind of thing you're into, I guess.
> Is a portrait that took 50 hours to paint inherently more worthy than a virtually identical one that took 5 hours? Is the slower artist the better artist? Is a Bob Ross 'happy little trees, body of water, mountain in background'-image not artistically valuable because he does it in 20 minutes?
You can't quantify art that way. People work at different speeds. I can appreciate that something took some number of hours without knowing the precise number of hours.
> As for skill: I would argue that a random Banksy takes a lot less skill than the average Artemisia Gentileschi (admit it: you had to look her up). Yet, one is celebrated art, the other is virtually unknown and at best 'one among many baroque northern-Italian painters'.
Maybe, but I'm not qualified to make that comparison. Both are beyond my level of artistic ability (I've never studied art nor practiced much). I don't know why one thing or artist gets more popular than another while another who's just as talented (or maybe even moreso) languishes in obscurity. Skill is a factor, sure, but there's no formula that I'm aware of.
> What sort of people honestly look at a picture and ask 'yes, but how long did it take to make? How long had the artist to be trained for this?'
Maybe some people think of it that way. I don't know. I've never asked those questions about any art I consume. I just think something like, "wow, this looks nice, it must have taken a while" or "what would it take to make something like this, I wonder"
> Maybe some people think of it that way. I don't know. I've never asked those questions about any art I consume. I just think something like, "wow, this looks nice, it must have taken a while" or "what would it take to make something like this, I wonder"
I think this raises an interesting question about form vs. function in art.
I was running a AD&D game on Friday. At one point, I was holding up the book to show the artwork of a monster to the group. None of us were looking at it and taking the time to contemplate the effort involved, thinking it must have taken a while, etc. I'm sure some people do - old school D&D art is definitely an area that a subset of the hobby is passionate about - but the majority of people are looking at it to help with formulating things in their mind's eye, getting a feel for things, etc.
But I will appreciate a piece of "standalone" art in a very similar manner as to how you describe.
Do most readers spend appreciable time looking at the art on the cover of their book? Do people spend a ton of time looking at album art while listening to music on Spotify? How about the art in a video game - how much of it is the point vs. something that facilitates the point - the last few times I loaded up Dwarf Fortress, it was the ASCII tileset, not the graphical version.
Do AI creations have a place where the art is supposed to be functional vs. being made for the sake of being art?
My personal experience: As an artist throughout my life, whether it be drawing, painting, or sculpting, I have been asked again and again how long it took me to make a piece. It is probably the most common question I get when I interact with people over my art. My experience has shown me people value the effort and time it takes to make something beautiful and unique. I recently began attending events/cons to share my sculpting and it was eye opening. Not only did people frown on A.I. generated art at these events, but I had to broadcast that my sculpting was not 3D printed. Quite a few visitors to my table let me know they appreciated my work was handmade.
There’s a significant difference between automating minor or menial tasks and trying to automate the creative or artistic process entirely.