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.
There was a good interview with Tim Minchin by the BBC where he said something similar to this & used the word intent.
I suppose the intent/communication/art comes from the person writing the prompt but those few words can only convey so much information. When the choice of medium & every line etc. involves millions of micro-decisions by the artist there is so much more information encoded. Even if its copy & pasted bits of memes.
Tim Minchin has always come across as a good egg to me. It’s nice to hear he’s of the same mind, and I particularly like the optimism he’s promoting in his predictions for artistry going forward.
I’ve been practicing at being a better writer, and one of the ways I’ve been doing that is by studying the writing that I personally really like. Often I can’t explain why I click so much with a particular style of writing, but by studying and attempting to learn how to copy the styles that I like, it feels like a step towards developing my own “voice” in writing.
A common adage around art (and other skilled endeavours) is that you need to know how to follow the rules before you can break them, after all. Copying is a useful stepping stone to something more. It’s always going to be tough to learn when your ambition is greater than your skill level, but there’s a quote from Ira Glass that I’ve found quite helpful:
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take a while. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
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 been before them. 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
But you still choose the final result…for something like that, the how is really quite irrelevant, it is just the end result that matters and that still remains in the hands of humans as they’re the ones to settle on the final solution.
But that’s exactly my point; logos, icons, stock images etc. are already nothing but noise meant to just catch the eye…might as well just get it auto-generated.
That you can’t see or appreciate the intent of the artist behind those doesn’t mean it’s not there or not important. Why they were made or how they are used in the end is not important. All that matters is how they were made.
I would honestly argue that the way an artist makes art is also completely irrelevant. The art is only meaningful in the way it’s perceived, how the artist physically makes it is of very little importance. The tools and materials are just a means to an end, it’s the finished product that inspires feelings and thoughts, not the process of how it came to be.
Not really. It’s the equivalent of ordering a “build it yourself” sandwich where you specify type of bread and content, and having someone else make it. Yes you didn’t actually assemble the sandwich yourself, but who cares how that happened, you have the sandwich you wanted, it contains what you wanted, it tastes and looks like you intended.
I’m not arguing that people using AI generated images can call themselves artists, I’m arguing that AI generated can have a useful purpose replacing menial “art” work.
Oh my fucking god people…I didn’t say you could claim you made something when using AI generated images. I claimed it still makes sense for some things because they hold pretty much no artistic value when made by humans already (like icons, stock images and logos)
Your example is shit. It would be more appropriate for when you commission a piece of work from someone, where they are using their skills and choices and you’re telling them what you want and don’t want on the sandwich.
AI doesn’t make choices when creating an image. It generates an image based off of other images and you hope that it gets something that follows some aesthetic principles that it’s lifting from other images. Just because you reroll the die doesn’t mean you’re choosing shit.
That “menial” process when you’re making art is literally the best part. When you’re painting a sky for the background of something you don’t want that just filled in, that’s where you can experiment and maybe even add an element that you weren’t thinking of before when you started the piece. AI can’t do that for you.
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.
If some guy spends five hours tweaking a prompt to get the exact right combination of fifteen unforgiveable fetishes, I don’t think the computer is to blame. A human being put in time and effort to get an idea from their brain to yours. It’s their fault that you just took psychic damage.
Ok? You seem to be missing the point. As Inman points out, the “suffering” is important. Not strictly pain, but the tiring, boring minutia of creation - the tedious details that define the piece are intrinsic to what makes it what it is. A painter chooses where to put the brush, how to move it, how hard to press. A photographer chooses the angle, the shutter speed, the distance. Some are intentional choices, some a product of unconscious action, but every form of art has these infinitely small details that are what make them a form of personal expression. They’re what make it interesting, and what make it capital ‘a’ Art.
Image/text/video generators don’t have any of that. Yes, a person could spend an indefinite amount of time tweaking their prompts and workflows, but what comes out is, ultimately, not in their control. It’s not their expression, even if it was their “fault”.
A thousand iterations are tiring minutia even when it’s editing text instead of dragging a cursor around.
Elevated is a four-kilobyte PC demo from 2009. Four kilobytes is the size of an Atari 2600 cartridge. Nobody sculpted that mountain - it’s math. They tried some numbers and settled on results they liked. Camera motions reuse data from earlier in the program. The creators watched hundreds of essentially random paths, out of thousands, and picked a dozen.
Process music, as a genre, is all about seeing what happens. William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops are a tape falling apart as you’re listening to it. The infinitely small details are a distant consequence of the artist hitting Play.
A thousand iterations are tiring minutia even when it’s editing text instead of dragging a cursor around.
If you’re writing a story, sure. Not when you’re prodding an algorithm to “make the thing”.
As for the examples you provided, I’d categorize the first two as generative in the same vein as the current tech we’re discussing. Like the current tech, it’s impressive, but the skill exhibited in both is solely in the tech, not in artistry. The third is certainly art, though not in the way you’re suggesting. The art is not the “music” itself, but in the process of documenting the event. It’s akin to setting down a camera to record a spider weaving a web, or a plant blooming and ultimately rotting. The artist doesn’t control the subject matter, but they do control how it’s portrayed. That’s art.
Indirect control is still control.
To an extent. Like with the deteriorating tapes or my example of filming nature, the artist lacks control of the subject matter, but they still intimately control the art being created about the subject. In contrast, a prompter is has little-to-no control of any aspect of the content generation. The rng black-box of these algorithms make that impossible. They can endlessly poke and prod at it in attempts to influence it, or iterate through endless random seeds, but, ultimately, the essence of the end result is random noise, not their personal intent.
How the fuck is a description of an image in your mind less intentional control than pointing a camera at a bug?
I’m not talking about what they have imagined. That’s something else entirely. I’m talking about what they end up with, and I’m 100% confident that nobody has ever generated exactly what they imagined. It’s simply impossible. It can be similar/“good enough”, but the process is not controllable enough to produce exactly what the prompter intends. That’s my whole point.
If your definition of artistry is so uptight
Honestly, I think my definition of art is exceptionally broad. It basically asks, “Was there intent?” If yes, it’s most probably art. Hell, I’d even say other animals can meet that singular criteria. But in regards to the demos you mentioned, the creator is deliberately relinquishing control of the end product to a program/algorithm that lacks any intent or purpose. Without that, it’s not art. It’s just…product.
And to clarify, I’m not questioning the skill it takes to make those programs. The technical details are well over my head, but I know enough to appreciate the talent behind it.
Nobody has ever painted exactly what they imagined. Art is not finished; it is abandoned.
There’s so much analog-era art history you’re shitting on, I don’t know where to begin. Readymades? Decoupage? Exquisite corpse?
What in god’s name do you mean by intent if creating an entire program from scratch doesn’t fucking count? Someone conceived of a scene, invented new math tricks to achieve it, and crammed it into a minuscule space - but oh, they didn’t tweak each pixel by hand, so it’s not art. Fuck that.
I entirely reject your assertions on this subject, if you’d look at this thirty-year artistic movement, an anti-commercial collective building on and feeding into each other’s works, and scoff that it’s just… “product.” Eugh! Intolerable nonsense. Special pleading to discount effort you don’t even understand. Crayon on paper, sure, that’s real art - but inventing an impossible effect through months of effort? Nuh uh, because computers.
Nobody has ever painted exactly what they imagined. Art is not finished; it is abandoned.
That’s fair. The finished result is still in the artist’s control, though. Not so with generated content.
Readymades? Decoupage? Exquisite corpse?
All fit my previous descriptions of art.
As for the demoscene, my intent is not too diminish what those people do. You brought up examples which, if I understand the process correctly, simply don’t result in art. Although “product” was perhaps a bad word to use. It wasn’t intended to suggest it’s all commercial. Just meant as a distinction from art with intent.
And, as I said, the direct result of their efforts in the programs they create is impressive. I’m not suggesting otherwise. I’d happily consider that art if one were to suggest it. The process of setting up the mechanism, setting it in motion, and creating something? That’s a big art piece. But the generated results of those programs? Without the rest of it, the result on it’s own is just not art. It’s empty of intent.
Sounds quite similar to Nick Cave’s letter on the topic, read here by Stephen Fry. (anyone feel free to reply with a piped link, for some reason it’s never worked for me)
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.
There was a good interview with Tim Minchin by the BBC where he said something similar to this & used the word intent.
I suppose the intent/communication/art comes from the person writing the prompt but those few words can only convey so much information. When the choice of medium & every line etc. involves millions of micro-decisions by the artist there is so much more information encoded. Even if its copy & pasted bits of memes.
Is this the interview? https://files.catbox.moe/ddp6tp.mp4
Tim Minchin has always come across as a good egg to me. It’s nice to hear he’s of the same mind, and I particularly like the optimism he’s promoting in his predictions for artistry going forward.
No, I hadn’t seen that one, thanks!
Hah, sure thing. I suppose it’s a point he’s discussed a few times.
I’ve been practicing at being a better writer, and one of the ways I’ve been doing that is by studying the writing that I personally really like. Often I can’t explain why I click so much with a particular style of writing, but by studying and attempting to learn how to copy the styles that I like, it feels like a step towards developing my own “voice” in writing.
A common adage around art (and other skilled endeavours) is that you need to know how to follow the rules before you can break them, after all. Copying is a useful stepping stone to something more. It’s always going to be tough to learn when your ambition is greater than your skill level, but there’s a quote from Ira Glass that I’ve found quite helpful:
Agreed.
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 been before them. 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
But you still choose the final result…for something like that, the how is really quite irrelevant, it is just the end result that matters and that still remains in the hands of humans as they’re the ones to settle on the final solution.
That’s our point. The how is entirely relevant. It’s what makes art interesting and meaningful. Without the how and why, it’s just colors and noise.
But that’s exactly my point; logos, icons, stock images etc. are already nothing but noise meant to just catch the eye…might as well just get it auto-generated.
That you can’t see or appreciate the intent of the artist behind those doesn’t mean it’s not there or not important. Why they were made or how they are used in the end is not important. All that matters is how they were made.
I would honestly argue that the way an artist makes art is also completely irrelevant. The art is only meaningful in the way it’s perceived, how the artist physically makes it is of very little importance. The tools and materials are just a means to an end, it’s the finished product that inspires feelings and thoughts, not the process of how it came to be.
You’ve stated as much already. If we’re just repeating ourselves here, I’ll just copy-paste.
Right, but people who type prompts into AI art generators aren’t actually “making” anything though, are they?
That’s like saying you cooked a chicken sandwich because you ordered it off the menu.
Not really. It’s the equivalent of ordering a “build it yourself” sandwich where you specify type of bread and content, and having someone else make it. Yes you didn’t actually assemble the sandwich yourself, but who cares how that happened, you have the sandwich you wanted, it contains what you wanted, it tastes and looks like you intended.
I’m not arguing that people using AI generated images can call themselves artists, I’m arguing that AI generated can have a useful purpose replacing menial “art” work.
No, having a soulless machine make it.
Then claiming that you made it yourself even though all you did was select a few things on a menu.
Oh my fucking god people…I didn’t say you could claim you made something when using AI generated images. I claimed it still makes sense for some things because they hold pretty much no artistic value when made by humans already (like icons, stock images and logos)
Way to shit on everyone who’s job it is to make those things.
Why do you think logos and so on have no artistic value? What defines value? Because if it’s influencing people and culture, then logos definitely do.
Corporate art sucks ass but it’s still made using choices, which ai doesn’t do.
Your example is shit. It would be more appropriate for when you commission a piece of work from someone, where they are using their skills and choices and you’re telling them what you want and don’t want on the sandwich.
AI doesn’t make choices when creating an image. It generates an image based off of other images and you hope that it gets something that follows some aesthetic principles that it’s lifting from other images. Just because you reroll the die doesn’t mean you’re choosing shit.
That “menial” process when you’re making art is literally the best part. When you’re painting a sky for the background of something you don’t want that just filled in, that’s where you can experiment and maybe even add an element that you weren’t thinking of before when you started the piece. AI can’t do that for you.
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.
If some guy spends five hours tweaking a prompt to get the exact right combination of fifteen unforgiveable fetishes, I don’t think the computer is to blame. A human being put in time and effort to get an idea from their brain to yours. It’s their fault that you just took psychic damage.
Ok? You seem to be missing the point. As Inman points out, the “suffering” is important. Not strictly pain, but the tiring, boring minutia of creation - the tedious details that define the piece are intrinsic to what makes it what it is. A painter chooses where to put the brush, how to move it, how hard to press. A photographer chooses the angle, the shutter speed, the distance. Some are intentional choices, some a product of unconscious action, but every form of art has these infinitely small details that are what make them a form of personal expression. They’re what make it interesting, and what make it capital ‘a’ Art.
Image/text/video generators don’t have any of that. Yes, a person could spend an indefinite amount of time tweaking their prompts and workflows, but what comes out is, ultimately, not in their control. It’s not their expression, even if it was their “fault”.
A thousand iterations are tiring minutia even when it’s editing text instead of dragging a cursor around.
Elevated is a four-kilobyte PC demo from 2009. Four kilobytes is the size of an Atari 2600 cartridge. Nobody sculpted that mountain - it’s math. They tried some numbers and settled on results they liked. Camera motions reuse data from earlier in the program. The creators watched hundreds of essentially random paths, out of thousands, and picked a dozen.
A Mind Is Born is a 256-byte Commodore 64 demo from 2017. The artist did not write that music or draw that imagery. “I spent a considerable amount of time tweaking the random process until I found something that was musically satisfactory.”
Process music, as a genre, is all about seeing what happens. William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops are a tape falling apart as you’re listening to it. The infinitely small details are a distant consequence of the artist hitting Play.
Indirect control is still control.
If you’re writing a story, sure. Not when you’re prodding an algorithm to “make the thing”.
As for the examples you provided, I’d categorize the first two as generative in the same vein as the current tech we’re discussing. Like the current tech, it’s impressive, but the skill exhibited in both is solely in the tech, not in artistry. The third is certainly art, though not in the way you’re suggesting. The art is not the “music” itself, but in the process of documenting the event. It’s akin to setting down a camera to record a spider weaving a web, or a plant blooming and ultimately rotting. The artist doesn’t control the subject matter, but they do control how it’s portrayed. That’s art.
To an extent. Like with the deteriorating tapes or my example of filming nature, the artist lacks control of the subject matter, but they still intimately control the art being created about the subject. In contrast, a prompter is has little-to-no control of any aspect of the content generation. The rng black-box of these algorithms make that impossible. They can endlessly poke and prod at it in attempts to influence it, or iterate through endless random seeds, but, ultimately, the essence of the end result is random noise, not their personal intent.
How the fuck is a description of an image in your mind less intentional control than pointing a camera at a bug?
If your definition of artistry is so uptight that the demoscene doesn’t count, there’s a whole army of people with funny accents ready to throw hands.
I’m not talking about what they have imagined. That’s something else entirely. I’m talking about what they end up with, and I’m 100% confident that nobody has ever generated exactly what they imagined. It’s simply impossible. It can be similar/“good enough”, but the process is not controllable enough to produce exactly what the prompter intends. That’s my whole point.
Honestly, I think my definition of art is exceptionally broad. It basically asks, “Was there intent?” If yes, it’s most probably art. Hell, I’d even say other animals can meet that singular criteria. But in regards to the demos you mentioned, the creator is deliberately relinquishing control of the end product to a program/algorithm that lacks any intent or purpose. Without that, it’s not art. It’s just…product.
And to clarify, I’m not questioning the skill it takes to make those programs. The technical details are well over my head, but I know enough to appreciate the talent behind it.
Nobody has ever painted exactly what they imagined. Art is not finished; it is abandoned.
There’s so much analog-era art history you’re shitting on, I don’t know where to begin. Readymades? Decoupage? Exquisite corpse?
What in god’s name do you mean by intent if creating an entire program from scratch doesn’t fucking count? Someone conceived of a scene, invented new math tricks to achieve it, and crammed it into a minuscule space - but oh, they didn’t tweak each pixel by hand, so it’s not art. Fuck that.
I entirely reject your assertions on this subject, if you’d look at this thirty-year artistic movement, an anti-commercial collective building on and feeding into each other’s works, and scoff that it’s just… “product.” Eugh! Intolerable nonsense. Special pleading to discount effort you don’t even understand. Crayon on paper, sure, that’s real art - but inventing an impossible effect through months of effort? Nuh uh, because computers.
That’s fair. The finished result is still in the artist’s control, though. Not so with generated content.
All fit my previous descriptions of art.
As for the demoscene, my intent is not too diminish what those people do. You brought up examples which, if I understand the process correctly, simply don’t result in art. Although “product” was perhaps a bad word to use. It wasn’t intended to suggest it’s all commercial. Just meant as a distinction from art with intent.
And, as I said, the direct result of their efforts in the programs they create is impressive. I’m not suggesting otherwise. I’d happily consider that art if one were to suggest it. The process of setting up the mechanism, setting it in motion, and creating something? That’s a big art piece. But the generated results of those programs? Without the rest of it, the result on it’s own is just not art. It’s empty of intent.
Sounds quite similar to Nick Cave’s letter on the topic, read here by Stephen Fry. (anyone feel free to reply with a piped link, for some reason it’s never worked for me)