Article about AI art I read. I want to hear your thoughts

[LunarScyphozoa]

I’d like to respectfully disagree with your third point there, because if ai art replaces real art then after a while it won’t have anything new to squish together and will eventually become way too Weird

[VibrantFox]

I firmly believe there is an inherent issue in the way that society views and measures the worth/value of art not just by means of profit but in a much broader sense (i.e. humanities and history) and I truly think the lack of more broadly available art education for the masses is what breeds this mindset because aside from the fact that this feels or reads as so painfully defeatist, as if machines replacing humans is some inevitability that can't be avoided (which is odd coz aren't we as humans the ones making them someone could easily stop tho it depends on who's making the choice), it also silently insists that there is no difference in the value of art produced by a human versus something made by a machine (tho as has been emphasized across numerous discussions is that it would not be possible if not for the humans work that it's taking from)

like this isn't targeted at you in specific but there's something that irks me about this specific train of thought and I can only boil it down to some lack of understanding of or respect for the arts and artists (even within artist communities)

this thread i feel kind of phrases it a bit better but like...
https://twitter.com/lwbean/status/1604986604732313600

edit: adding a point because i think there needs to be expanding on this

people who can live on making art will decline drastically

there's several kinds of art beyond just visual media seen in games, posters, concept art etc but story boarding, publishing, technical art and a myriad of other things and i highly doubt anyone with a lick of sense would put faith in a machine to produce accurate technical drawings for complex architecture or something of the same nature

like again it comes back to an understanding of art because there's so many fields it's applicable to but because it's not taught people don't get it and honestly it wasn't until it was pointed out to me early on that i was able to look and see these things

[Lensing]

Just look at what happened to music in the last 100 years and the value of music nowadays.
AI didn´t take over but technology and the internet did.
Jobs disappeared completely and the amount of people who can work in the music industry
is going down drastically and it goes faster and faster when you look at the evolution.
The same happens to handmade art over the last 100 years.

And like I wrote @AmeTsunami there will be handmade art and there will be creative
people who live on making art the same like there are musicians/composers/record labels/
producers/performers/audio engineers but it will be less and less people. It´s the unfortunate
future. This is not something I make up, it already happened to many creative fields, jobs disappear
completely and become a special interest thing, there are hundreds of examples

[Lensing]

Yes there is several kinds of art but the amount of humans that you need decreases drastically in every creative field

[VibrantFox]

nah. maybe it coz i'm drowsy but that to me it's just giving surface level analysis of something a lil deeper because none of those things have wholly dissipated. Music careers are still a thing and tech isn't really the beat people are battling but the industries controlling the jobs (which is a corporations and business heads issue and not a mechanical one). The argument about AI art in truth boils down to people turning art into a commodity not in the way that artists seek proper compensations for their time effort and labor but specific demographics only seeing the end product and the profit it produces and wishing to cut out the laborers producing it (artists) and skipping to the making money without having to pay someone else (which is exactly what the corps and big money guys funding these things are seeking and many of their arguments kind of prove this if you read between the lines [ex the dude who so eagerly made a children's book with no regard to potential kids reading it and only saw extra dollar signs coz there's no artist to compensate just them and their robot])

I'd say a better example of tech diminishing human labor (or even use of animals/cattle) would be cars and horses or automated call directories as opposed to human operators or automation of parts of production lines (though humans are still needed to operate the machines, maintain them and ensure what's being produced meets standards)

Plus lets be realistic, arts as a whole (be it music, theater, literature or visual arts) have always kind of been special interests it's nothing new but the way it's viewed has always been weird and minimizing. Meanwhile there's always this hyper aggressive push for math and sciences and as has been made blatantly obvious for decades and especially in the past couple of years is regardless of the presence of machines making things or not people do not value art.artists much less understand half of how it works

all that's to say i disagree with your points. i acknowledge them but from my own personal perspectives there's no chance in me seeing eye to eye with you

[Lensing]

Music careers and every other job in the music industry has become a special interest thing, jobs completely disappeared or are down
to under 1% of what they have been only 40 years ago. This is not a "nah" thing, this is a fact

[VibrantFox]

i believe the issue of focus here is putting any level of faith in a corporation or industry to be a reliable source or place of trust for the individual so my stance is still nah but i no longer wish to discuss or debate the topic with you

have a good day/night or whichever time tho ️

[Lensing]

Just believe someone who works in the music industry and is old

[VibrantFox]

a singular perspective does not mean its the only perspective but if you insist on your own mindset i will not try to change it

again tho not looking for further discussion but u have a day

[TheLemmaLlama]

Meanwhile there's always this hyper aggressive push for math and sciences

Oh yeah, totally; it's kind of weird but I've always been kind of bothered by people trying to rationalize pure math as useful (I know, 'oh no people think the thing I do is useful, poor me /s' :'D), but I actually feel like it diminishes the 'purity' of my reasons for pursuing it somehow, like I'm only in it because it's useful and will therefore make me money.

Maybe that's why I'm actually kind of proud to be an artist because art isn't seen as 'useful' and have a bit of a knee-jerk response to people saying it's useful (even though I actually do believe it's more useful than pure math in the sense that at least art is somewhat reliable at reaching others and making them think and feel, while a paper on pure math gets read by like a dozen other people 99.99% of the time and maybe makes a breakthrough and revolutionize society the other 0.01% of the time). It's like whenever someone says 'oh no you see the thing you're doing is actually useful because X, Y and Z' I have the instinctive urge to go 'Nope, I'm useless! Useless and proud!'

But really it's kind of dumb to be proud of being useless when I think about it. I should probably work on being more understanding of people who actually like their work being valued and dislike it being devalued like sane people :'D

[Lensing]

It´s not my perspective or my opinion. It´s just fact and numbers.
Everyone who worked in the music industry in the last 40 years would burst out in laughter about
a discussion like that or cry

[VibrantFox]

changing the way we thing takes time but i absolutely get what you mean

i think i get so defensive of the value of art because not just in cases like these but as ive grown ive had to watch it happen firsthand as classes with any kind of creative focus got pushed out and replaced by other academic courses so it was only a matter of time before art or drawing classes, photography, graphic design and others were pushed out and more computer classes and academics were brought into a lot of my old schools. I think what made it harder too was seeing those kids who wanted to take those art classes now feeling isolated and without a place to go to, to study or explore this thing they're interested in and i guess it became a drive to get people to see things like that and its effects over time. o'course it apparently hasnt done much coz if peopel cared i think maybe we wouldn't be where we are now (which i suppose is less a focus on the topic but more a personal frustration of mine but still )

[NellieVP318]

creative focus got pushed out and replaced by other academic courses so it was only a matter of time before art or drawing classes, photography, graphic design and others were pushed out and more computer classes and academics were brought into a lot of my old schools.

As someone who are more of a creative person than Math and Science person, this hits me. Not everyone can be a STEM person ( no offense to people who are in the STEMs.). But I really wish that STEMs and arts can merge a little. However, this AI thing ain't it. In my opinion, there should be room for both of them and try to interact with both fields. I believe this would be more productive and helpful for students who aren't one or the other.

I don't know if AI will bridge non-creatives and creatives, but it's not on a good start right now.

[VibrantFox]

This was exactly the kind of growing pains that i faced while i was in school because even when art was my passion and i was struggling to grow, rather than having folks insist on more learning tools for art i was instead pushed towards learning to code or putting more focus in science since i did well there but art was my passion and remains so

I do believe both can coexist though and I think shared education in both is a better starting point than AI. Allowing folks to learn basic art history or art appreciation in the same way we took music appreciation classes for example. Plus those were fun because I'd already had a love for and value for music since its something my family connected through but I got to see music history being taught and learned instruments in the classroom which was a nice perspective (especially from my teacher in highschool). There's ways that we as people can go about things its just spreading and sharing those ideas in a constructive manner

[irresponsiblepics]

Photography is a thing that gets mentioned in comparison.
It used to be a viable and succesful career doing event photography.
Film photography is another.
Instant film another.
These were killed off and diminished with the advent of digital and tech moving on into hand held devices.
Eventually when things settled there is a small communities keeping film/instant photography going. Event photography is still a thing to this day although not on the level it used to be.
There will always be somebody somewhere who will appreciate it. So your assessment is viable.
It's good that there is an increasing pushback with AI imaging.

[Mallory]

I played around with AI image generation a little bit (when I first heard about it, it freaked me out, so I wanted to see for myself) and I honestly don't think it can take over that many art jobs, because as it exists right now, the technology has very concrete limitations. Or rather, limitation.

It has no freaking clue what it's doing. The program is literally just averaging millions of (stolen) images to generate a derivative composite of pixels that it's algorithm tells it has high likelihood of being what the prompter wants. It has no understanding of any individual part of any of the images it generates, which means it fails at things like perspective and anatomy, and there is no real way to improve this technology in these aspects. It's also incapable on a basic, program level of maintaining continuity for the same reason, which means it can never be used for conceptual work (since every concept evaporates from the machine mind the moment it creates the image) or any sort of narrative-related art (and forget any art that has to do with precise design and/or symbolism, like words). Outside of the hands of an artist capable of working with such raw material, it has really limited value.

There's a certain number of naive tech bros that believe that if they just feed this machine enough (stolen) images, it will figure things out, but it's... it's not how artists make art. It's not about having a million things to reference, it's about understanding the spacial relationship between objects, and how light within the environment interacts with said objects. There will probably be a period of time in which a bunch of unscrupulous tech bros attempt to leverage all the money they can out of this technology, and then eventually it'll just become a part of a professional artist's workflow and idle amusement for anyone else. (Unless someone manages to create a sentient machine that CAN discern the content of its own images - but then we'll have a much more interesting issue on our hands).

To me the biggest issue with it right now is the mass copyright infringement and art theft, which has been demonstrated to be the case by numerous researchers.

ETA: Also as someone who grew up in a science family and has a science degree, I am SO SICK of how much STEM gets pushed on kids (especially when they somehow fail to teach the basic fundamentals of all of it [human curiosity, and the desire to ask questions and seek answers] DESPITE all of the pushing).

[TheLemmaLlama]

(someone yell at me if they think I'm going too far off topic XD)

classes with any kind of creative focus got pushed out and replaced by other academic courses so it was only a matter of time before art or drawing classes, photography, graphic design and others were pushed out and more computer classes and academics were brought into a lot of my old schools.

I think it's a general issue of treating kids like resources rather than people; we push them to become X because 'we need more X'* rather than letting them do what they want. It would be better for everyone if education focused on arts just as much as STEM; STEM-oriented kids would feel less like sellouts and art-oriented kids would actually have a place to belong

I don't think I'll ever understand people who study STEM and are now all like 'ha, sucks to be you art people, shoulda studied STEM like your parents told you to'. It's like they're admitting 'I'm a sellout who only got into STEM for the money and not because I'm genuinely passionate about my field; those silly passionate artists should've became sellouts like us!' I don't get why that's something they're so proud of, like, at all

(also, obligatory 'STEM and creativity (or even art) aren't diametrically opposed; STEM is actually very creative but schools butcher it by making it dry and making creative people hate it because they're pushing for results'. Though now that I think about it, I think the above 'shoulda studied STEM like your parents told you to' crowd are also to blame for this perception :'D Traitors smh XD)

---

*

ofc the accuracy of such statements is a whole 'nother can of worms. 'Need' for what purpose? What does it mean when you say we 'need' more STEM people rather than art people? That STEM people would put more money in the economy? Even if we suppose that's true, we're assuming that's even a more worthwhile goal than what art people bring to the table.

[Lensing]

Yes and in music it´s many things.
We don´t have any product to sell anymore except merchandise.
The bands are not the ones that make the money anymore.
People who talk about this don´t even have a faint idea how
many jobs were connected to the music industry and record sales
which don´t exist anymore in 2022 or are down to a few.
Independent labels and everyone who was connected with them,
distribution, mailorders, recording studios. I was working in
publishing, I´m an audio engineer and musician all my life and
in all kind of different jobs connected to music. I still work close
together with some independent labels & recording studios and
I pretty much know all about the sales and which studios survived
in which country. People who talk about the music industry really don´t
know how bad it is and how much damage the internet & the loss
of something to sell has done

[Zeedom]

Why anyone would willing help the people that stole their art, photos, medical records, other personal info and everything else they could is beyond me. You have to really hate yourself, your family, friends, class mate, co-workers, neighbours ect. to welcome the people that robbed all of you and is actively trying to strip all rights away from you so they can profit. Ai isn't here to help any artist.

[system]

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