Submitted 14 hours ago by cyrano@piefed.social to technology@lemmy.world
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art
What a beautiful read. I feel the same about AI art and I remember a longer talk I had with my tattoo artist: ‘I need the money so I will do AI based tattoos my clients bring to me. But they have no soul, no story, no individuality. They are not a part of you.’
I feel the same.
Also I like Oatmeal’s reference to Wabi Sabi: The perfection of imperfection in every piece of art.
“Yes, but I’ll be quick, I promise.”
Isn’t quick.
I made a comment about a week ago about how copying people’s art is still art, and it was a bit of an aha moment as I pinpointed for myself a big part of why I find image generators and the like so soulless, inwardly echoing a lot of what Inman lays out here.
All human made art, from the worst to the best, embodies the effort of the artist. Their intent and their skill. Their attempt to make something, to communicate something. It has meaning. All generative art does is barf up random noise that looks like pictures. It’s impressive technology, and I understand that it’s exciting, but it’s not art. If humans ever end up creating actual artificial intelligence, then we can talk about machine made art. Until then, it’s hardly more than a printer in terms of artistic merit.
It’s impressive technology, and I understand that it’s exciting, but it’s not art.
I would add that a lot (most?) graphical elements we encounter in daily lives do not require art or soul in the least. Stock images on web pages, logos, icons etc. are examples of graphical elements that are IMO perfectly fine to use AI image generation for. It’s the menial labour of the artist profession that is now being affected by modern automation much like so many other professions have. All of them resisted so of course artists resist too.
The most generic logo from ten years ago still was made with choices by a designer. It’s those choices that make a difference, you don’t choose how things are executed with ai
I’d argue that logos are a hugely expressive form. It’s just that 90% of them are basic ass shit tier stuff.
AI has basically raised the level of “shit tier” pretty high. I sometimes go check out Hotone Audio’s Facebook page to see if there are new firmware updates for my device, but they mainly peddle pointless AI slop marketing images. I’m sure there are tons of companies like this.
It’s the literal example of the marketing person being able to churn out pictures without an artist being involved, and thus the output is a pile of crap even more vapid than stock photos.
The impact on livelihoods is important, but it’s ultimately unrelated to defining what art is. My consideration of art is not one born of fear of losing money, but purely out of appreciation for the craft. I don’t think it’s entirely fair to suggest all the criticisms against generated art is solely borne of self-preservation.
In regards to corporate “art”, all the things you listed, even stock images, are certainly not the purest form of artistry, but they still have (or, at least had) intent suffusing their creation. I suppose the question then is - is there a noticeable difference between the two for corporations? Will a generated logo have the same impact as a purposefully crafted on does? In my experience, the generated products I’ve noticed feel distinctly hollow. While past corporate assets are typically hollow shells of real art, generated assets are even less. They’re a pure concentration of corporate greed and demand, without the “bothersome” human element. Maybe that won’t matter in their course of business, but I think it might. Time will tell.
I forgot how loooong Oatmeal cartoons are. I don’t think I have made it to the end of one in years.
Wanna go ride a bicycle?
As a passable quality 3D artist who does it for a living I’ve found AI art (which can do 3D now to some degree) has kind of narrowed the scope for me. If you want generic Unreal style pseudo-realism or disney toon then AI can do that for you* I’ve had to focus much more on creating a unique style and also optimizing my work in ways that AI just doesn’t have the ability to do because they require longer chains of actual reasoning.
For AI in general I think this pattern holds, it can quickly create something generic and increasingly do it without extranious fingers but no matter how much you tweak a prompt its damn near impossible to get a specific idea into image form. Its like a hero shooter with skins VS actually creating your own character.
*Right now AI models use more tris to re-create the default blender cube than my entire lifetime portfolio but I’m assuming that can be resolved since we already have partially automated re-topology tools.
I was kinda against their argument at first, then I was with them and continued reading. But then they went into all sorts of detail, weighing pros and cons etc., and after reading more than half I evtl. gave up.
It seems all “why AI is bad” articles seem to go this way.
It seems all “why AI is bad” articles unwillingly even support the hype.
Fuck AI “art”, it’s not art you morons, it’s automation, which takes away real people’s jobs. The current implementations made by greedy companies also very obviously steal. 'nuff said.
I know that art is an art of it’s own and a way to express human creativity.
However people also complained once the loom was invented. It took lots of jobs.
The job argument is usually a stupid one.
The lack of creativity and quality is of course a much better argument against AI art.
The job argument is usually a stupid one.
The what? It’s the only one that objectively makes sense.
I want to touch on how he mentions ticking the button to automatically make music on a Casio keyboard.
i fully realize I’m being reductive to the point of being offensive but that’s not my intent, when I say: that’s at least in part, the very first seed to becoming a professional DJ. That’s not nothing.
Using AI to generate art can be the same thing if it’s extrapolated out into complexity and layered nuance. It might not make you an artist exactly, in the same way that a DJ might not be a musician but it IS a skillset that potentially has value.
And even if you think I’m totally off-base in saying so? I liked pretending with the little automatic music button on the keyboard.
I think pushing the button on a Casio keyboard is more akin to tracing your favorite comics panel than using an LLM image generator.
I mean…I liked doing that too. Free Spider man coloring book pages.
Are you speaking from experience? 'Cause that’s not even vaguely related to how any of the DJs I know (including a couple of professionals) got started. The prime motive for most DJs is sharing cool music, and Casio keyboards don’t do that…
If I recall correctly it was a part of how Feel Good Inc. was made. That is tangential at best, I realize, but still a fun story.
No. Not from experience at all. I saw a small documentary once saying DJs remixed and sometimes create almost entirely new music sometimes using computer based audio tools. I’m probably thinking of a different profession. My ignorance, sorry.
Thanks for sharing! I haven’t read much of the Oatmeal in quite a while but I’ve always liked their style and humor.
That was a beautiful read.
But do i find myself conflicted about dismissing it as a potential technical skill all together.
I have seen comfy-ui workflows that are build in a very complex way, some have the canvas in different zones, each having its own prompts creating a collage. Some have no prompts and extract concepts like composition or color values from other files.
I compare these with collage-art which also exists from pre existing material to create something new.
Such tools take practice, there are choices to be made, there is a creative process but its mostly technological knowledge so if its about such it would be right to call it a technical skill.
The sad reality however, is how easy it is to remove parts of that complexity “because its to hard” and barebones it to simple prompt to output. At which point all technical skill fades and it becomes no different from the online generators you find.
All of that’s great and everything, but at the end of the day all of the commercial LLM art generators are trained on stolen art. That includes most of the LLMs that comfui uses as a backend.
So even if it has some potentially genuine artistic uses I have zero interest in using a commercial entity in any way to ‘generate’ art that they’ve taken elements for from artwork they stole from real artists. Its amoral.
If it’s all running locally on open source LLMs trained only on public data, then maybe - but that’s what… a tiny, tiny fraction of AI art? In the meantime I’m happy to dismiss it altogether as Ai slop.
How is that any different from “stealing” art in a collage, though? While courts have disagreed on the subject (in particular there’s a big difference between visual collage and music sampling with the latter being very restricted) there is a clear argument to be made that collage is a fair use of the original works, because the result is completely different.
only a note: LLMs are for text
If you download a checkpoint from non trustworthy sources definitely and that is the majority of people, but also the majority that does not use the technical tools that deep nor cares about actual art (mostly porn if the largest distributor of models is a reference).
I am willing to believe that someone with a soul for art and complex flows would also make their own models, which naturally allows much more creativity and is not that hard to do.
I think there’s a stark difference between crafting your own comfyui workflow, getting the right nodes and control nets and checkpoints and whatever, tweaking it until you get what you want, and someone telling an AI “make me a picture/video of X.”
The least AI-looking AI art is the kind that someone took effort to make their own. Just like any other tool.
Unfortunately, gen AI is a tool that gives relatively good results without any skill at all. So most people won’t bother to do the work to make it their own.
I think that, like nearly everything in life, there is nuance to this. But at the same time, we aren’t ready for the nuance because we’re being drowned by slop and it’s horrible.
One part that gets me is when they stated that they took art classes. Just, what is the point of taking art classes today? There have been artists whose stories I've read about and heard of, who spent years practicing their craft to get to where they are. The idea of taking an art class for an otherwise approachable hobby just always feels odd to me and always will. There are countless ways to improve one's art and craft, not by AI though.
And then right after, they mention about practicing. So again - what's the point of taking art classes?
I stopped reading about half way through, because my mind went "yeah yeah yeah..." since nothing this comic artist was saying anything new that I hadn't heard of in regards to anti-AI.
Here's my stance on AI Art and it's going to rub people the wrong way but I don't care. I was told by an artist friend whom I've known and has done pictures for me before. They started raising their prices a smidge for their commissions and this artist was and is on their way of being recognized as a good artist in their community (they're furry). We got into a conversation about how I brought up that prices could be hard to achieve because of the economy and blah blah.
They told me in response that 'Art is a luxury'. And you know what? It kinda is. It is a luxury and sets a baseline as to what one can and can't afford. If someone is frustrated enough that they can't afford some $300 commission piece (yes those people do exist), they're going to go to AI because they know they can do it at home. Now it doesn't excuse the fact that they could've just picked up art as a hobby and actually practice, there is that argument. However, not everyone is an artist and not everyone is going to practice it.
And if someone isn't going to practice art and isn't able to afford high prices asked of the artists who have open commissions - what do you honestly expect them to do?
As far as things regarding like studios function and how this all relates to them, that's a whole can of worms of its own. How many times have we heard animation studios or other studios get shut down because the funding dried up? "Oh we planned 2 seasons in advance - oh wait - we can only do one season now" and then that's a wrap of that series.
I don't know where I want to go with that and this has been lengthy anyways so I'll just summarize it as this. I don't have a big problem with AI Art because Art and Creativity in of itself, is a luxury. It's an expensive luxury at that, that has its limits. That is why people have turned to AI in droves. I don't agree with a lot of the reasons behind what people do with AI Art and proclaiming themselves as 'artists' when they're not (I prefer to call them envisonists because you are still inputting and projecting the imaginations of your mind into an input that can visualize it for you).
I was going to read this but stopped halfway through because my mind went “yeah that yeah another person who never bothered trying to draw having a hot take that’s just sucking off a tech bro”
what’s the point of taking art classes?
The point is the same as taking classes for any other skill, from baseball to carpentry: you have to learn technique before you can engrain the skill through practice. Some people can pick it up on their own if they’re motivated enough, by studying other people’s art, watching artists working, reading books, etc., but it’s more difficullt and time-consuming without an instructor’s feedback. Sometimes they even figure it out wrong, and develop a very difficult and time-consuming method of doing something when a much simpler one exists.
So it’s optimal to both have the classes and do extensive practice outside of them. One is not a substitute for the other.
I think AI art serves a different purpose from the art we talk about when we say “real art has heart” or “the process of creating the art affected me when I looked at it”.
I think about how I feel when I’m scrolling through pictures in some app on my phone - some will be memes, some will be cats, but then some will be there for artistic purposes. As I’m scrolling through, such a picture will spark a brief glimmer of emotion - “huh, that looks neat” for example. I’m not looking close and examining the brush strokes, not thinking about what troubles the artist went through, and not thinking about the process of its creation at all.
In that context I don’t think it makes much difference that it’s AI-generated. I’d kind of like to know, and I don’t want to see a dozen different outputs of the same prompt because whoever hit the button couldn’t even apply the modicum of effort require to pick their favourite, but AI-generated images are just as able to instigate that glimmer of “hey that looks cool” that any image can.
Sounds like you’re not very skilled at art appreciation.
There’s zero need to throw insults around; I made the context absolutely clear in my comment and it has nothing to do with what I do when at an art gallery or something.
Maybe some people are having an experience like they are looking at a Rembrandt when they scroll through /c/pics or something, but I’m not. Do you also shit on people for being unable to appreciate music because they put something on in the background? Is it only OK to go to concerts and immerse yourself in it? If you’re in a shop and a tune you like comes on, do you park your cart to really appreciate the depths of emotion it’s inspiring in you?
Of course you don’t.
It was an ok read for me, but mostly because I enjoyed the art rather than relating to the entirety of the sentiment.
I’m an artist and I find AI art evocative and illustrating things in a way that I wish that I could illustrate, but feel that is only because it comes from real human artists. I agree that it is a void in terms of difficulty to process, but there is still skill involved in both using search engines and describing something to an llm.
I hate AI art because it is stealing from artists, not because it doesn’t feel right. It can have a million iterations and only needs to get it right once to count as feeling right to me. The relationship between the content and their artists to the ultimate product is removed, this to me is the wrongfulness of claiming new art from it. It is just stealing in a more wind-about manor. This isn’t like generating fractal art or something.
After all these years of corporations fucking up the literal social fabric and and how we communicate over IP law, for them to turn around and steal everything and just get a pass is an extra slap in face. Stealing only gets allowed2 one way in our society, and AI is just another example of that.
I’m honestly surprised to not see this take more from others and felt like i needed to mention it.
I watched a short saying you might be an art director, at best, but not really an artist. Because you have the vision but you’re only telling someone (something) to materialize it. I was kind of happy with that.
Vision is a strong word. I think it’s a vague idea in most cases
This was a great read! As someone who was initially excited about the possibilities of AI art, it’s been hit or miss with me.
I’ve come to realise over time that I like the connection that art offers. The little moment of ‘I wonder what the artist was thinking when they imagined this and what experiences did someone have to get to a place where they could visualize and create this?’
And I think that’s what missing with AI art. Sure, it can enable someone like me who has no skill with drawing to create something but it doesn’t get to the point of putting my actual imagination down. The repeated tries can only get to point of ‘close enough’.
For me, looking at a piece and then learning it’s AI art is basically realizing that I’m looking at a computer generated imitation of someone’s imagination. Except the imitation was created by describing the art instead of the imitator ever looking at it. An connection I could have felt with original human is watered down as to be non-existent.
That was excellent. Thanks for sharing… although I’m more into pottery, I’m sure some soulless shithead will want to “democratize” it with a janky robot hand controlled by a dumb algo.
That was a really good take on the whole thing. The Oatmeal is my people.
One thing I’ve found interesting with AI art is that it’s changed how I look at handmade art. It is similar in a way to appreciating a handmade piece of furniture or a machine compared to a mass produced commodity item. Art that I previously would have dismissed instantly sometimes makes me think for a second about the artist and how it was made, even when it lacks a professional level of quality. That said, I’ve also seen enough AI art that I can distinguish between garbage slop and something (at least a little) interesting made in Comfy UI. There’s always been a lot of low quality art out there, but I think the real issue is with people trying to pass off low effort generated slop as real art, rather than the gen-AI tech itself (environmental impact notwithstanding).
Haha. “Keith”.
Keith: The highbrow Kyle.
Gigasser@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
I often hear AI enthusiasts say that AI democratized art. As if art weren’t already democratized. Most anyone can pick up a pen, draw, write, type, move a mouse, etc. What AI democratizes in art, is the perception of skill. Which is why when you find out a piece of art was madeby inputting some short prompt into a generator, you brcomr disappointed. Because it would be cool, if the person actually had the skill to draw that. Pushing a few buttons to get that, not so much.
alternategait@lemmy.world 21 minutes ago
I have always felt that I’m not good at art (the practice I did got me not very far), and I’ve recently had reason to make little collages. One thing that I’ve done is uploaded pictures to Canva and traced them so I had something resembling recognizable images (my dog, me in a kayak). I don’t think tracing is making an art, AI is definitely not making an art.