By making a complex skill accessible to everyone you always reintroduce natural hierarchies of unequal competence back into a stultified domain. It makes all the right people very nervous because they depend on the unfair gatekeeping to stay ahead otherwise. The people that are against AIs because it will take away their jobs are essentially admitting that they are no better than a highly scalable and glorified autocorrect- perhaps it’s time that they stop acting like one.
No, it's more that they understand that the executives who hire artists tend to be shallow intellectual lightweights who are easily impressed by shiny new tech and tend to prefer free or cheap labor to actually paying experts to do what they're good at. They're the ones who will resort to AI and actively make the artistic landscape worse.
You confuse art and drawing. An artist can have a patron or work on commission, but the moment you're "hired" you're just a glorified wall painter. So yeah, AI pretty much gets the wall painters out of work, but it can't even touch art :)
So illustrators aren't artists? Animators? Comic book artists and mangaka? Production designers? Why on earth would I want them out of the picture? They're producing some of the most interesting work!
It depends on why do they work their job. If they fulfill their artistic vision, they are artists. If they fulfill someone else's vision that was given to them as a task they're craftsmen.
All I'm really seeing is an attempt to adopt the posture of a pretentious high-society artíste working for pure love of the art, and turning it against those people who have the gall to think they should be able to do what they love for an actual living.
It's not like most animators, comic artists, or illustrators are working exclusively from their own vision. Often it's more of a collaborative process. Hideaki Anno wasn't doing his own thing when he animated the God Warrior scene in Nausicaä, but he was doing what he was good at. All of the artists on Sandman, from Sam Keith to Jill Thompson, were there on a work-for-hire basis, working from Neil Gaiman's scripts, but ask Neil if they can be replaced by AI. And try telling Norman Rockwell, Yoshitaka Amano, Michael Whelan, or Drew Struzan that they're just house painters. Or any of the artists and designers involved with Lord of the Rings or Star Wars or Spider-Verse.
For that matter, ask CGI artists how they feel about their studios going bankrupt after contributing to successful movies. All because the people in charge treat them as disposable and interchangeable, and would love for a cheaper alternative to come along, no matter how crappy it is.
Real art is powerful on its own, whether you are able to immediately monetize it or not. Real artists create art for its own sake and not so that they could sell it. If you can’t capture the artistic landscape by the merit of your art then you are just a less effective version of the tasteless executives you are complaining about.
This is what people usually say when they ask an artist to work for exposure. It's a way to tell artists they should be glad they're not being compensated for their hard work, when that would be absolutely unacceptable in any other profession. I'm more on the Harlan Ellison side of things. Real artists do create art for its own sake. They also expect to get paid for it. https://youtu.be/PuLr9HG2ASs?si=e7rMJvNC-J2eNFYM
I don’t know who that is and I don’t particularly care tbh
You can expect to get paid all you want. You can also negotiate better pay. What you shouldn’t do, is try to stop other artists from using advanced tools because it would take away your competitive advantage. If the AI art is terrible, then it doesn’t give people the advantage, and if it is good then it is actually just producing art at that point. I don’t see how you can justify being against using AI either way.
How have I not made that clear? Because it specifically appeals to the type of people who don't think art has value, and therefore can't see the difference between terrible AI art and serviceable human art, and don't even think human artists deserve payment.
I mean, here you are in this very thread saying artists shouldn't worry about money. Like it *benefits* them? Did you at least watch the video? Is Ellison's argument sound?
I say that artists shouldn’t worry about money as someone who constantly produces real art because I basically can’t help myself. I have been offered money for some of it too and I refused because it was too personal and meaningful to sell. I think that the definition of art has become too diluted and the expectation that every mildly creative person should be able to just grind at the skills and get paid to produce mediocre drivel on a consistent basis is extremely entitled and stupid. The technical term would be “Luddites”, I suppose.
People that think that real art has no value can only exist until they come crashing against the reality somewhere. People like you, who think that any random “artist” should be able to live off of their art when what they do is easily replaceable, are the exact people that give the big bad executives the idea that *all* art is artificially replicable and so basically worthless. None of it strikes me as a good reason to stop people from using whatever tools are readily available to them.
It's somewhat like teachers. The internet made teaching yourself free.
That doesn't make teachers any less valuable. It made them more valuable. The price of a real tutor is fairly high if they have the right mindset and seek the people that can actually pay for their wares. Most people though, simply don't ask for what they're worth.
That's their problem
The fact that we have a bunch of government paid 'teachers' soaking up pensions and bankrupting the system doesn't make the internet less valuable, it makes it more valuable.
Why does this not hold true with ai and the artist?
Look, I've been the theatre guy that did the work "for the exposure." You do it once or twice, and then after that, you demand pay. And you demand pay in line with the work. It's hard to do, and you have to buck up your courage, but you do it or you walk on down the road to the next gig.
But the real is evoking. There's a depth to an oil painting that can't be gathered from a print. The light hits it differently. Someone that knows art, knows the difference, and that it can't be faked. There's a bit of your soul that goes into every piece.
"You know who really hates AI? People who used to make a lot of money drawing furry porn or Dungeons and Dragons character sheets for wealthy but aesthetically moronic software engineers."
I'm laughing so hard at this while listening to your first AI track. It all makes sense.
lol @ suggesting a journalism background and 115-120 IQ
I actually don't mind people whining about it since it only popularizes it more. And sure, there are some valid points to be made against AI art, but those typically all can be said about non-AI work which you made the great point about with his watermarks lol. It ultimately comes down to effort. With the AI thumbnails I've used, I'll make revision upon revision to get closest to what I want the piece to convey, usually at least 10x the amount of time I'd take putting a watermark, and with way more of my own creative input.
I’d largely just object to calling it “art,” but that is a philosophical distinction that will never be settled. Yes, your AI image is a more aesthetically pleasing thumbnail than someone else’s janky “graphic design is my passion” one. As far as the utilitarian purpose of having an image that will draw more eyeballs to your link on Notes or Twitter or whatever, it does the job more effectively than a lot of other things you could do for free.
I think a lot of the moral objection comes from the idea that legacy media with the resources available should be tossing some money down from on high to some illustrators, because those kinds of gigs are what can keep a young starving artist financially afloat while they develop their skills. If all “entry-level” artistic gigs are replaced by AI, then careers in the arts become even more pay-walled to “kids with rich parents only.” Obviously though, a lot of independent creators are not going to pay an artist either way—it’s either AI or something even more amateurish and janky.
But there’s no clear point at which an independent writer has an amount of money where they become morally obligated to “redistribute” some of that income to an illustrator. Or even considering legacy media, at what point does a failing Newspaper or Magazine get to lay off illustrators to save the jobs of their writers?
Such is life in the arts. Infinite people who wish they “didn’t have to work” and never got good enough at art to realize that art IS work. Finite money going to artists.
Yea but the starving artist should be able to leverage AI in a much more creative and exponentially more effective way than anyone else. The argument that large corps. will be able to in-house backroom things has validity, but with the power of AI, the common man will be able to do exactly the same thing with much more creative vigor. It's really in our favor for big companies to get lazy and start using a ton of AI because then people will appreciate small artists more.
I can understand why someone would say my AI-generated thumbnails and the AI-generated melodies of my songs aren't really art. I would mostly agree with them.
But if someone says my *lyrics* aren't art I would be extremely offended. They are obviously art to the extent any poem is art, and I think this should be uncontroversial. It also seems obvious that adding an AI-generated melody to a poem doesn't make it any less art. And I would say exactly the same thing about the prose of my essays.
I also think that the curation and prompt engineering that goes into the production of AI content is obviously an intellectually and creatively demanding task that should be celebrated and valued. I understand why an actual composer would not want me to call myself an artist for creating a purely instrumental song using Suno, and I would agree with their assessment. But if I use the tool to create something beautiful I am demonstrating precisely the same type of talent that producers like Scooter Braun and P Diddy and Harvey Weinstein (these are just the first examples that come to mind, obv they're all scumbags lol) have been regularly celebrated for. Every successful artist knows that the producer is an essential role (esp in large complex multimedia productions where good taste across domains and a good head for marketing are vital), so they should likewise value the skills that make someone a good artistic prompt engineer / AI content curator.
Anyway I guess on some level I don't feel super bad for people who are losing their jobs fulfilling someone else's vision. To me these people aren't actual artists so much as craftsmen. It's an industrial and capitalistic process, not really an artistic one. Art is about being possessed by a demonic urge to bring into existence something transcendent from another realm. If you aren't channeling that kind of crazed inspiration you aren't a real artist IMO.
Instead of getting asspained that they can no longer make decent money drawing dickgirl comics and D&D character sheets for neckbeards, artists should be thrilled that they now have the resources to bring their vision into the world much more inexpensively. You don't need years of classes and niche proprietary software that costs like $4k anymore.
But artists are mostly snobs and it feels like they want to gatekeep away people who never had to starve. And when they see a well-off STEM guy with no technical skills but a lot of cool ideas using AI to actualize his vision, they don't simply celebrate the creation of good art, they get ABSOLUTELY FUCKING FURIOUS. That guy is supposed to be their patron, not a competitor in the same status hierarchy! I get it, it probably feels unfair, but if you use the same AI tools you will STILL have a huge advantage by dint of more experience and more sophisticated tastes. There is zero need to be so exclusionary and snobby.
Anyway sorry for getting so emotional, I just feel strongly about this because AI has been the way I have been able to self actualize as a creative person after spending eight years watching my soul rot using Microsoft Excel all day. But the hipster aesthetes who I see as fundamentally my people and who I would have expected to welcome me with open arms are often unreflectively gatekeepy and it's hard not to resent that.
My reply to this was turning into an essay, so maybe I'll publish it one of these days (or maybe it will languish in my Google Docs forever). My main point though, is that AI art right now is mediocre, and so there is plenty of space for artists to flourish at the top of the field. The problem is how to get there, and a lot of mediocre "craft, not art" gigwork helps young artists avoid slinging lattes so that they can dedicate more time to honing their craft. The disappearance of these opportunities will likely squeeze more kids from middle class backgrounds out of arts career trajectories, and take us back to more of an old-money aristocracy way of doing things where only rich kids get to be artists.
One of the additional status wrinkles here is that in the truly elite gallery art world, as opposed to commercial illustration and subcultures, craft has already been devalued in favor of concept and charisma. Sometimes an MFA is about learning to cloak your bad taste and lack of talent in layers of irony and jargon so that you can pass it off as 2deep4u. I'm sure there's already a "white cube" gallery in NYC or Berlin where some trust fund dickwads who can barely prompt engineer are projecting low-effort DALL-E generations on the walls and saying it's a statement about Deleuze and late capitalism. (Don't get me wrong, there's an enormous amount of GOOD gallery art being made, but the stuff that moves me typically involves some element of traditional craft, and the artists who make it are rarely famous.)
I laughed at loud at the line about artists mad that they can no longer make a quick buck doing furry/D&D commissions for rich engineers, and at Anna Cole's comment that Magic card illustrators have been hardest hit. Cheesy fantasy art is easy for the AI to make because it's already so formulaic.
Any regulars here have a take on how to monetize prompt engineering skills as a side gig?
Yeah learn to code (lol). Single shot manual prompt engineering is too low barrier to monetize (see shitty sites selling "God" prompts for money). You need to chain several prompts together, tie it to a UX/API and write software to orchestrate all of these together to actually create something of value.
Essentially, good ol' fashion software engineering.
"the same AI tools you will STILL have a huge advantage by dint of more experience and more sophisticated tastes"
But that experience and more sophisticated taste is *exactly* what tells artists that AI art is trash. They know rules of anatomy, perspective, composition, and color theory--and how to break them--and can spot the flaws in a picture in a heartbeat. This is stuff they *don't* need done for them. If they need help with poses, there are reference photos online, plus poseable 3D figures. If they need help with perspective, both CSP and Krita have good tools for that. If they need to learn to draw, there are books and online tutorials and affordable, even free, programs to help with that. AI doesn't need to enter the picture at all.
Not to mention that the actual work of creating something--actually putting the brush to canvas, pen to paper, finger to piano key--is itself exactly part of what makes creativity worthwhile. There's plenty of scientific research on the therapeutic aspects of art and writing and music. And I just don't see how AI works the same cognitive muscles, as it were.
Alex, I don't think that anyone is arguing that the AI generated thumbnails are the same thing that you're referencing. At the most - for those using them in posts, they're a tool. A tool to get their thoughts and ideas across. I would consider it more of a tool than art. Art at all only in that it is something made by humans, conveying a truth, that I think is beautiful (I reject the images I don't think are actually good).
Now, it's a lower form of art, possibly even than pencils sketches. But I literally don't even have the time for pencil sketches for my posts. Or finding pictures and editing them. Let alone Oil Paintings, which I would consider the highest form of the canvas arts.
But, I would argue, that even in the highest form, AI generated art can aid artists. It can put an idea into a visible thing, so that the artist can see something before him, before he wastes time sketching, then putting oils to canvas. This really is a powerful tool.
It's not something traditional artists need to be afraid of.
Who considers sketching a waste of time? I love sketching. This isn't taking away the tedious parts of drawing, it's taking away the actual fun, creative part.
Who said it was a waste of time? I'm saying that it can make it so that there are less sketches where an artist begins, tries to get his thoughts on paper, and fails. He uses the ai prompts to get a foundation, then goes from there.
At no point did I say sketching is a waste of time, just that he's able to stream line the process, and cut back on failures during the process, to achieve more of the high quality, beautiful final products. That's the argument I'm making in that one particular point you're referencing.
You said "Before he wastes time sketching." That's not saying sketching is a waste of time?
And sketching is not failing. It's experimenting--testing ideas, practicing particular skills, trying to eliminate flaws. Not to mention that sketches can often be aesthetically pleasing in their own right, which is why some art books include sketches along with the finished product. That's the kind of mindset I'm trying to resist: trying to solve problems that *aren't even problems.*
"Most of these people just seem like gatekeeping snobs who don’t actually value art as a philosophical ideal, and are just selfishly agitating against something that threatens their ability to passively coast without intelligently adapting to changes in the market. Genuinely talented artists have always been able to adapt, and there’s no reason they should stop now. Operating under dynamism and constraints makes art better."
I use a lot of AI in my work for the art, music and some writing. I'm not worried about AI "stealing" my writing jobs. AI can only get you about 80% to expert level. If you're angry about AI it's because you're not good at what you do. Sorry. You're gonna have to get over that someday because the genie's out of the bottle.
This post features AI art and music. I could've used it to write the lyrics to the music but I did it myself because I'm better than AI.
Warren Buffet 100% OWNS Taylor Swift in new album!🔥🎤
LOL Nailed it. My business partner was amazed that I incorporated the use of AI into half of "Out of Lockstep", to which I responded, "Oh, I LOVE AI! I feel like an experimental painter looking at the first camera and realizing that now that there's a machine to do rich people's portraits, I can do something more original." He pointed out that a lot of Magic Card illustrators absolutely hate AI, but that was never really my area of concentration, so I can't really relate and don't know what to tell those artists. My business partner says that I need to be writing more about why I love AI art and don't feel threatened by it, and we should be playing it up when we market this installation lol.
I’m the first to admit I was anti-AI art when it first came out. My stance shifted late last year when I realized a) how it worked and b) how to use it. I’ve used it to generate images for a few of my posts and short stories. The quality of AI-generated art has gotten better.
Someday I want to use an AI music program
to see what it comes up with and then play and sing along to what the computer has generated. I think that would be interesting. Like lay down a cool guitar solo over some AI-generated rhythm track, stuff like that.
Lots of possibilities. And true artists will never be out of a job, even with this stuff readily available and easy to use.
Hawthorne's more-familiar form of Photobashing is something he too-easily excuses for art just because he took more efforts at it. One can painstakingly put individual data into every single cell on an Excel spreadsheet over hours, or one can just write a formula and have that process done faithfully and automatically within seconds. The former is not more "productive" just because it ate up more of your time - likewise Photobashing in itself is not more "artistic" just because it takes longer than using AI Art.
Nevertheless, there are important worries to AI Art, as with any form of "prosthetic" technology.
What we do as human beings shapes our bodies, minds, and spirits. When a technology replaces the struggle we once had to endure to accomplish the same or similar end, we lose that struggle - and consequently all the skills and changes that struggle would gift us - from our society. There are consequences to the use of technologies, some more than others. Whether those consequences are acceptable or not is a matter of investigation and opinion.
Contrary to the name, Large Language Models like ChatGPT (LLM's) and "AI Art" are not artificial intelligences but clever mechanisms for taking the average of various concepts and presenting them to the user. The messages and images that follow from these tools are based on aggregations of all the data fed into them and how those data are logically processed. In short, they are merely the average zeitgeist of the data fed to them.
The danger in this is that AI is fed human-created prompts in order to inform themselves, but the use of these tools will discourage the struggle that artists engage in to create their art in the first place. What point is there to struggle with thousands of hours of practice when it can be replicated and exceeded at the stroke of a key? Why learn a skill when a technological prosthetic can accomplish the same to an ever greater degree?
But AI Art, unlike prior tools, presents an interesting dilemma: In order for it to function, it requires vast amounts of human creative input to reference. However, the use of this tool discourages much of the human creative input that it would use to inform itself. Likewise it cannot use its own products, as this causes a decaying cycle of quality for various reasons. As a result, the use of this tool will cause a rift in the kinds of artwork generation going forward, and in the worst-case scenario would cause a cultural stagnation in several decades as entire generations decide to give up the struggle for artistic excellence in favor of the prosthetic likewise doomed to stagnation for lack of fresh human inputs.
There are all kinds of examples of this, from the simple to the complex. The switch from rough benches to backed chairs causes a notable increase in the amount of weak backs and spine problems due to the changes in the ways people began to sit day after day. They just didn't have to sit properly to ease themselves in the backed chairs like what they had to by the backless benches, and as a result of not struggling to hold themselves up their muscles naturally weakened.
Programming in the early days of computing required fundamental developments of metadata drivers themselves to the point that many people knew how to build working metadata structures by necessity. If you were the system admin, you either built the languages to control it or had to, by necessity, know how to build it directly. Now many programmers know only how to use higher-level editing programs that ease the programming issue to make it accessible to far more users, but have resulted in a vanishingly small number of people who actually could understand or manipulate those systems our computerized society has come to depend on. Most people don't have to know the suffering of programing an operating system, so they don't. And, subsequently, cannot.
In this case, in the recent past Bismarck would have either had to source around for pre-made thumbnails himself, or learn a few Photobashing or digital art skills to produce his own, or hired a living artist to produce the thumbnails he did. That or not have access to art at all. Obviously the AI Art tool gave its own option to him, cheaper and faster and more direct than the previous options, but it at the same time alleviates/robs Bismarck and the would-be hired artists of the efforts that would produce the art that, ironically enough, is what is fed into these machines to make them highly useful.
My point is not that AI Art is "theft" - that is very reminiscent of the shallow Libertarian's babble about taxation. My main point is that the use of the very tool itself, and more importantly society in general, will suffer from a discouragement of the creation of artists beyond this point if there are not serious, specific modifications made to these tools that will preserve the generation of human artists going forward.
I believe there are at least two major changes that need to be made regarding them: First, these models (language, art, auditory, etc) must only use those human works which are, by their mode of expression, permitted for model study. There are tools already being developed right now, notably Glaze and Nightshade, that apply difficult-to-perceive changes to photos that will either prevent or actively harm these aggregator tools that try to use them. Artists will either have to protect their works themselves this way, and/or copyright laws need to change to account for this kind of repurposing of existing works.
The second change is that any such artworks that are created by these tools must be marked in a reliable, open-sourced way in their metadata that they are AI generated and, if so, what references they used. This is vital for the training of future models (they break down using other AI inputs), but also vital for identifying what artworks were utilized for the generation of the image. This would make the identification of AI products easy without compromising personal identification, and would even open the door to the rightful possibility of artists who offer reference material to them to profit from the commercial use of those pieces - thus protecting a major incentive to artists to continue struggling in their craft.
The scenario where a company defers to AI Art to create a number of its assets is currently just open season. However with these simple changes to copyright law, each of their images generated would have a reference to what media it referred to when generating it. If their model utilized 10,000 images to create their image, they would require copyright permission to use those 10,000 images - which either would be from public domain OR from artists who agreed to it and who could profit from 1/10,000 of the part of the normal royalty payment that would normally go for those who agreed to such terms. Every time a new image was commercialized using their work as a reference, they'd receive those little shavings of royalty proportional to how much their work was referenced. And if the people didn't commercialize the work at all, or used a database that only has pieces in it from the public domain or otherwise are permitted for free use, then people could tinker away with them to their heart's content.
Suffice it to say, "AI" tools are going to be used going forward and developed to be ever-more useful. This is going to open up many new possibilities while effectively destroying others. In order to preserve human art as a common enterprise, a necessary thing not just for economic and tool reasons but for the kinds of spirits artistry develops among our people, we need to make precise and important changes to the regulations regarding this form of data referencing and aggregation.
I personally admire the artist who, through struggle and passion and discipline, can create beautiful artworks - and I would in fact argue that art is necessarily requiring a human input in several key ways to be considered art and not just "product". But the tools are here, they are useful to many, and many will use them to achieve the goals they set out to do. So long as you appreciate that this technology is in large part a prosthetic to the development of satisfying and unique lifetime skills and that you deprive yourself of the struggle that would enrich yourself otherwise, then have at it while the having is good.
I think that AI is an amazing tool for the power of creation. It lowers the bar of entry so that a lot of people can be able to play in the sand box, make a mess, and get dirty. It takes the keys away from the gate keepers on so many levels, that we can start making beautiful new art again.
Anyone can use it to boost their skills, or just start out. A beginning artist can use it to get a picture that he has in his head, then draw it in real life. I know that was always my largest hurdle - and I was a theatre set designer/painter, who has done drawing and painting for years before I converted to Catholicism and changed careers! If I had this tool, I would have been able to really been able to use it to render some of my thoughts -as a baseline- just to get a specific part, idea down, as a jumping off point.
Or do what I do now, which is using it to artistically have a through line on my substack. These whiners want me to try and find something that is impossible - I have used red headed barbarians at the end of every post, doing something related to the post, rendered in Rembrandt's style. It's fun, it's beautiful, thought provoking, and symbolic. I'm a one income father of 5 children. I don't have time for editing random pics to look like junk; but I do have time to put in prompts to make an edifying picture!
And that, right there, is what AI is for. Making it so that busy people, in an overworked, underpaid world, can do beautiful things. Can show each other what life is worth living for, and why we should fight this messed up system so that we don't have to be so stressed, play the team sport politics, and hate each other all the time.
If they hate it so much, learn to be a real artist. Because that's what AI is going to do - It's going to make Real, Huge paintings where you can see the brush strokes and are beautiful very expensive and desirable again. It's going to make live performances very expensive again. Because it's going to democratize everything, so the Rich will virtue signal to each other about their wealth with the Real very, VERY hard.
The reality is that the optimization of creative processes leads to mass adoption and that mass adoption converges on homogenization. That's the argument for why ai - or any process of artistic optimization driven by mass adoption - is shit. All of the AI images you use, for instance, are flat with respect to their relative attributes.
In terms I expect you'll readily get: AI art is the ultimate "creation by committee". In the same way that a lateralized democratic or economic power structure converges on a flattened monocultural landscape, The optimization of creative processes which lends itself to the democratization of the same processes, likewise converges upon homogenized outputs of those processes. The incalculable aesthetic idiosyncrasies llms are trained on are consolidated, weighted and averaged - all in reaction to trends of mass adoption - and thereby converge on idiosyncratic dilution, resulting in a convergence on relatively non-dynamical artistic output.
There is always a large element of randomness because the pie is infinitely too big to average everything. And when you average a lot of elements from very diverse sources that frequently sounds like something entirely original.
The mind is not some kind of mystical entity and it's pretty trivial to replicate the biomechanics of human creativity by randomly synthesizing things already established to be good.
You still need ample human curation at this juncture, but a well-conceived and properly curated song generated via Suno is better than 97% of what you'll find on Soundcloud.
Whether or not you think that song is "better" is irrelevant. What's been studied and proven is that that song not only contain less dynamics within itself, but will be less dynamical relative to the general musical landscape with regard to both melodic structure, chordal variation, and sonic dynamics.
In the near term AI art could be considered "dynamic" in its relation to non-ai art - but within the domain of AI generated art, the outputs will necessarilyconverge on homogeneity.
I suppose I should add that those who tend to think that products which converge on dynamical homogeneity are "better" tend to be pretty bad at art. In fact, that's the differentiator between real artists and pretenders. You mentioned that the right has an art problem. But if the right applied its same fondness for social and political hierarchy to technical/artistic hierarchy, it might not have that problem.
A.I. has its perfect, happy place in a society that justifies itself on relative moral grounds, yes that would be this one. There is no point to debating A.I. art because its already here. The debate is rather stupid, because no debate will ever change anything, period.
There are significant questions behind institutionalizing rip offs, but nobody ever let them get in their way.
There are significant questions behind technology, deep questions, but nobody is interested in them.
Talking about A.I. art is like farting in the wind and wondering where the stink went.
I disagreed with you at the beginning, but by the end of the article I changed my mind. If you create it, there is something unique and human about it regardless of the tools used in the process. I guess art is kinda like countries, some can stand alone and are more real than others, but if they got a flag and in some way defend themselves, they are still a country.
I expanded my thoughts, and included a philosophical take on this subject on my own stack. I thought I'd share it here so that anyone still reading could swing by.
Shit take. I tell you this as someone with unhinged, extreme high openness, generative AI is completely lacking in vision, and what comes out at best looks like it belongs on DeviantART. Because it relies on a mean of all concepts, it is fundamentally based on an effeminate, vibes-based epistemology that is formally incapable of creating anything exceptional or purposeful. Hawthorne's thumbnails show a real vision, a commitment to a cohesive aesthetic; whereas AI thumbnails are all interchangable with each other and just reek with the stench of AI-ness. My critique isn't about some notion of labor rights for artists; it's that the AI is inherently derivative dogshit
By making a complex skill accessible to everyone you always reintroduce natural hierarchies of unequal competence back into a stultified domain. It makes all the right people very nervous because they depend on the unfair gatekeeping to stay ahead otherwise. The people that are against AIs because it will take away their jobs are essentially admitting that they are no better than a highly scalable and glorified autocorrect- perhaps it’s time that they stop acting like one.
No, it's more that they understand that the executives who hire artists tend to be shallow intellectual lightweights who are easily impressed by shiny new tech and tend to prefer free or cheap labor to actually paying experts to do what they're good at. They're the ones who will resort to AI and actively make the artistic landscape worse.
You confuse art and drawing. An artist can have a patron or work on commission, but the moment you're "hired" you're just a glorified wall painter. So yeah, AI pretty much gets the wall painters out of work, but it can't even touch art :)
So illustrators aren't artists? Animators? Comic book artists and mangaka? Production designers? Why on earth would I want them out of the picture? They're producing some of the most interesting work!
It depends on why do they work their job. If they fulfill their artistic vision, they are artists. If they fulfill someone else's vision that was given to them as a task they're craftsmen.
All I'm really seeing is an attempt to adopt the posture of a pretentious high-society artíste working for pure love of the art, and turning it against those people who have the gall to think they should be able to do what they love for an actual living.
It's not like most animators, comic artists, or illustrators are working exclusively from their own vision. Often it's more of a collaborative process. Hideaki Anno wasn't doing his own thing when he animated the God Warrior scene in Nausicaä, but he was doing what he was good at. All of the artists on Sandman, from Sam Keith to Jill Thompson, were there on a work-for-hire basis, working from Neil Gaiman's scripts, but ask Neil if they can be replaced by AI. And try telling Norman Rockwell, Yoshitaka Amano, Michael Whelan, or Drew Struzan that they're just house painters. Or any of the artists and designers involved with Lord of the Rings or Star Wars or Spider-Verse.
For that matter, ask CGI artists how they feel about their studios going bankrupt after contributing to successful movies. All because the people in charge treat them as disposable and interchangeable, and would love for a cheaper alternative to come along, no matter how crappy it is.
Real art is powerful on its own, whether you are able to immediately monetize it or not. Real artists create art for its own sake and not so that they could sell it. If you can’t capture the artistic landscape by the merit of your art then you are just a less effective version of the tasteless executives you are complaining about.
This is what people usually say when they ask an artist to work for exposure. It's a way to tell artists they should be glad they're not being compensated for their hard work, when that would be absolutely unacceptable in any other profession. I'm more on the Harlan Ellison side of things. Real artists do create art for its own sake. They also expect to get paid for it. https://youtu.be/PuLr9HG2ASs?si=e7rMJvNC-J2eNFYM
I don’t know who that is and I don’t particularly care tbh
You can expect to get paid all you want. You can also negotiate better pay. What you shouldn’t do, is try to stop other artists from using advanced tools because it would take away your competitive advantage. If the AI art is terrible, then it doesn’t give people the advantage, and if it is good then it is actually just producing art at that point. I don’t see how you can justify being against using AI either way.
How have I not made that clear? Because it specifically appeals to the type of people who don't think art has value, and therefore can't see the difference between terrible AI art and serviceable human art, and don't even think human artists deserve payment.
I mean, here you are in this very thread saying artists shouldn't worry about money. Like it *benefits* them? Did you at least watch the video? Is Ellison's argument sound?
I say that artists shouldn’t worry about money as someone who constantly produces real art because I basically can’t help myself. I have been offered money for some of it too and I refused because it was too personal and meaningful to sell. I think that the definition of art has become too diluted and the expectation that every mildly creative person should be able to just grind at the skills and get paid to produce mediocre drivel on a consistent basis is extremely entitled and stupid. The technical term would be “Luddites”, I suppose.
People that think that real art has no value can only exist until they come crashing against the reality somewhere. People like you, who think that any random “artist” should be able to live off of their art when what they do is easily replaceable, are the exact people that give the big bad executives the idea that *all* art is artificially replicable and so basically worthless. None of it strikes me as a good reason to stop people from using whatever tools are readily available to them.
It's somewhat like teachers. The internet made teaching yourself free.
That doesn't make teachers any less valuable. It made them more valuable. The price of a real tutor is fairly high if they have the right mindset and seek the people that can actually pay for their wares. Most people though, simply don't ask for what they're worth.
That's their problem
The fact that we have a bunch of government paid 'teachers' soaking up pensions and bankrupting the system doesn't make the internet less valuable, it makes it more valuable.
Why does this not hold true with ai and the artist?
I agree with Sai.
Look, I've been the theatre guy that did the work "for the exposure." You do it once or twice, and then after that, you demand pay. And you demand pay in line with the work. It's hard to do, and you have to buck up your courage, but you do it or you walk on down the road to the next gig.
But the real is evoking. There's a depth to an oil painting that can't be gathered from a print. The light hits it differently. Someone that knows art, knows the difference, and that it can't be faked. There's a bit of your soul that goes into every piece.
I must say that no AI can ever come close to "We want to geh shee forrr free" in comedic value
"You know who really hates AI? People who used to make a lot of money drawing furry porn or Dungeons and Dragons character sheets for wealthy but aesthetically moronic software engineers."
I'm laughing so hard at this while listening to your first AI track. It all makes sense.
lol @ suggesting a journalism background and 115-120 IQ
I actually don't mind people whining about it since it only popularizes it more. And sure, there are some valid points to be made against AI art, but those typically all can be said about non-AI work which you made the great point about with his watermarks lol. It ultimately comes down to effort. With the AI thumbnails I've used, I'll make revision upon revision to get closest to what I want the piece to convey, usually at least 10x the amount of time I'd take putting a watermark, and with way more of my own creative input.
I’d largely just object to calling it “art,” but that is a philosophical distinction that will never be settled. Yes, your AI image is a more aesthetically pleasing thumbnail than someone else’s janky “graphic design is my passion” one. As far as the utilitarian purpose of having an image that will draw more eyeballs to your link on Notes or Twitter or whatever, it does the job more effectively than a lot of other things you could do for free.
I think a lot of the moral objection comes from the idea that legacy media with the resources available should be tossing some money down from on high to some illustrators, because those kinds of gigs are what can keep a young starving artist financially afloat while they develop their skills. If all “entry-level” artistic gigs are replaced by AI, then careers in the arts become even more pay-walled to “kids with rich parents only.” Obviously though, a lot of independent creators are not going to pay an artist either way—it’s either AI or something even more amateurish and janky.
But there’s no clear point at which an independent writer has an amount of money where they become morally obligated to “redistribute” some of that income to an illustrator. Or even considering legacy media, at what point does a failing Newspaper or Magazine get to lay off illustrators to save the jobs of their writers?
Such is life in the arts. Infinite people who wish they “didn’t have to work” and never got good enough at art to realize that art IS work. Finite money going to artists.
Yea but the starving artist should be able to leverage AI in a much more creative and exponentially more effective way than anyone else. The argument that large corps. will be able to in-house backroom things has validity, but with the power of AI, the common man will be able to do exactly the same thing with much more creative vigor. It's really in our favor for big companies to get lazy and start using a ton of AI because then people will appreciate small artists more.
I can understand why someone would say my AI-generated thumbnails and the AI-generated melodies of my songs aren't really art. I would mostly agree with them.
But if someone says my *lyrics* aren't art I would be extremely offended. They are obviously art to the extent any poem is art, and I think this should be uncontroversial. It also seems obvious that adding an AI-generated melody to a poem doesn't make it any less art. And I would say exactly the same thing about the prose of my essays.
I also think that the curation and prompt engineering that goes into the production of AI content is obviously an intellectually and creatively demanding task that should be celebrated and valued. I understand why an actual composer would not want me to call myself an artist for creating a purely instrumental song using Suno, and I would agree with their assessment. But if I use the tool to create something beautiful I am demonstrating precisely the same type of talent that producers like Scooter Braun and P Diddy and Harvey Weinstein (these are just the first examples that come to mind, obv they're all scumbags lol) have been regularly celebrated for. Every successful artist knows that the producer is an essential role (esp in large complex multimedia productions where good taste across domains and a good head for marketing are vital), so they should likewise value the skills that make someone a good artistic prompt engineer / AI content curator.
Anyway I guess on some level I don't feel super bad for people who are losing their jobs fulfilling someone else's vision. To me these people aren't actual artists so much as craftsmen. It's an industrial and capitalistic process, not really an artistic one. Art is about being possessed by a demonic urge to bring into existence something transcendent from another realm. If you aren't channeling that kind of crazed inspiration you aren't a real artist IMO.
Instead of getting asspained that they can no longer make decent money drawing dickgirl comics and D&D character sheets for neckbeards, artists should be thrilled that they now have the resources to bring their vision into the world much more inexpensively. You don't need years of classes and niche proprietary software that costs like $4k anymore.
But artists are mostly snobs and it feels like they want to gatekeep away people who never had to starve. And when they see a well-off STEM guy with no technical skills but a lot of cool ideas using AI to actualize his vision, they don't simply celebrate the creation of good art, they get ABSOLUTELY FUCKING FURIOUS. That guy is supposed to be their patron, not a competitor in the same status hierarchy! I get it, it probably feels unfair, but if you use the same AI tools you will STILL have a huge advantage by dint of more experience and more sophisticated tastes. There is zero need to be so exclusionary and snobby.
Anyway sorry for getting so emotional, I just feel strongly about this because AI has been the way I have been able to self actualize as a creative person after spending eight years watching my soul rot using Microsoft Excel all day. But the hipster aesthetes who I see as fundamentally my people and who I would have expected to welcome me with open arms are often unreflectively gatekeepy and it's hard not to resent that.
My reply to this was turning into an essay, so maybe I'll publish it one of these days (or maybe it will languish in my Google Docs forever). My main point though, is that AI art right now is mediocre, and so there is plenty of space for artists to flourish at the top of the field. The problem is how to get there, and a lot of mediocre "craft, not art" gigwork helps young artists avoid slinging lattes so that they can dedicate more time to honing their craft. The disappearance of these opportunities will likely squeeze more kids from middle class backgrounds out of arts career trajectories, and take us back to more of an old-money aristocracy way of doing things where only rich kids get to be artists.
One of the additional status wrinkles here is that in the truly elite gallery art world, as opposed to commercial illustration and subcultures, craft has already been devalued in favor of concept and charisma. Sometimes an MFA is about learning to cloak your bad taste and lack of talent in layers of irony and jargon so that you can pass it off as 2deep4u. I'm sure there's already a "white cube" gallery in NYC or Berlin where some trust fund dickwads who can barely prompt engineer are projecting low-effort DALL-E generations on the walls and saying it's a statement about Deleuze and late capitalism. (Don't get me wrong, there's an enormous amount of GOOD gallery art being made, but the stuff that moves me typically involves some element of traditional craft, and the artists who make it are rarely famous.)
I laughed at loud at the line about artists mad that they can no longer make a quick buck doing furry/D&D commissions for rich engineers, and at Anna Cole's comment that Magic card illustrators have been hardest hit. Cheesy fantasy art is easy for the AI to make because it's already so formulaic.
Any regulars here have a take on how to monetize prompt engineering skills as a side gig?
Yeah learn to code (lol). Single shot manual prompt engineering is too low barrier to monetize (see shitty sites selling "God" prompts for money). You need to chain several prompts together, tie it to a UX/API and write software to orchestrate all of these together to actually create something of value.
Essentially, good ol' fashion software engineering.
"the same AI tools you will STILL have a huge advantage by dint of more experience and more sophisticated tastes"
But that experience and more sophisticated taste is *exactly* what tells artists that AI art is trash. They know rules of anatomy, perspective, composition, and color theory--and how to break them--and can spot the flaws in a picture in a heartbeat. This is stuff they *don't* need done for them. If they need help with poses, there are reference photos online, plus poseable 3D figures. If they need help with perspective, both CSP and Krita have good tools for that. If they need to learn to draw, there are books and online tutorials and affordable, even free, programs to help with that. AI doesn't need to enter the picture at all.
Not to mention that the actual work of creating something--actually putting the brush to canvas, pen to paper, finger to piano key--is itself exactly part of what makes creativity worthwhile. There's plenty of scientific research on the therapeutic aspects of art and writing and music. And I just don't see how AI works the same cognitive muscles, as it were.
Alex, I don't think that anyone is arguing that the AI generated thumbnails are the same thing that you're referencing. At the most - for those using them in posts, they're a tool. A tool to get their thoughts and ideas across. I would consider it more of a tool than art. Art at all only in that it is something made by humans, conveying a truth, that I think is beautiful (I reject the images I don't think are actually good).
Now, it's a lower form of art, possibly even than pencils sketches. But I literally don't even have the time for pencil sketches for my posts. Or finding pictures and editing them. Let alone Oil Paintings, which I would consider the highest form of the canvas arts.
But, I would argue, that even in the highest form, AI generated art can aid artists. It can put an idea into a visible thing, so that the artist can see something before him, before he wastes time sketching, then putting oils to canvas. This really is a powerful tool.
It's not something traditional artists need to be afraid of.
Who considers sketching a waste of time? I love sketching. This isn't taking away the tedious parts of drawing, it's taking away the actual fun, creative part.
Who said it was a waste of time? I'm saying that it can make it so that there are less sketches where an artist begins, tries to get his thoughts on paper, and fails. He uses the ai prompts to get a foundation, then goes from there.
At no point did I say sketching is a waste of time, just that he's able to stream line the process, and cut back on failures during the process, to achieve more of the high quality, beautiful final products. That's the argument I'm making in that one particular point you're referencing.
You said "Before he wastes time sketching." That's not saying sketching is a waste of time?
And sketching is not failing. It's experimenting--testing ideas, practicing particular skills, trying to eliminate flaws. Not to mention that sketches can often be aesthetically pleasing in their own right, which is why some art books include sketches along with the finished product. That's the kind of mindset I'm trying to resist: trying to solve problems that *aren't even problems.*
"Most of these people just seem like gatekeeping snobs who don’t actually value art as a philosophical ideal, and are just selfishly agitating against something that threatens their ability to passively coast without intelligently adapting to changes in the market. Genuinely talented artists have always been able to adapt, and there’s no reason they should stop now. Operating under dynamism and constraints makes art better."
Exactly. I really can't stand Luddites.
I use a lot of AI in my work for the art, music and some writing. I'm not worried about AI "stealing" my writing jobs. AI can only get you about 80% to expert level. If you're angry about AI it's because you're not good at what you do. Sorry. You're gonna have to get over that someday because the genie's out of the bottle.
This post features AI art and music. I could've used it to write the lyrics to the music but I did it myself because I'm better than AI.
Warren Buffet 100% OWNS Taylor Swift in new album!🔥🎤
https://thaliascomedy.com/p/warren-buffet-100-owns-taylor-swift
LOL Nailed it. My business partner was amazed that I incorporated the use of AI into half of "Out of Lockstep", to which I responded, "Oh, I LOVE AI! I feel like an experimental painter looking at the first camera and realizing that now that there's a machine to do rich people's portraits, I can do something more original." He pointed out that a lot of Magic Card illustrators absolutely hate AI, but that was never really my area of concentration, so I can't really relate and don't know what to tell those artists. My business partner says that I need to be writing more about why I love AI art and don't feel threatened by it, and we should be playing it up when we market this installation lol.
I’m the first to admit I was anti-AI art when it first came out. My stance shifted late last year when I realized a) how it worked and b) how to use it. I’ve used it to generate images for a few of my posts and short stories. The quality of AI-generated art has gotten better.
Someday I want to use an AI music program
to see what it comes up with and then play and sing along to what the computer has generated. I think that would be interesting. Like lay down a cool guitar solo over some AI-generated rhythm track, stuff like that.
Lots of possibilities. And true artists will never be out of a job, even with this stuff readily available and easy to use.
Hawthorne's more-familiar form of Photobashing is something he too-easily excuses for art just because he took more efforts at it. One can painstakingly put individual data into every single cell on an Excel spreadsheet over hours, or one can just write a formula and have that process done faithfully and automatically within seconds. The former is not more "productive" just because it ate up more of your time - likewise Photobashing in itself is not more "artistic" just because it takes longer than using AI Art.
Nevertheless, there are important worries to AI Art, as with any form of "prosthetic" technology.
What we do as human beings shapes our bodies, minds, and spirits. When a technology replaces the struggle we once had to endure to accomplish the same or similar end, we lose that struggle - and consequently all the skills and changes that struggle would gift us - from our society. There are consequences to the use of technologies, some more than others. Whether those consequences are acceptable or not is a matter of investigation and opinion.
Contrary to the name, Large Language Models like ChatGPT (LLM's) and "AI Art" are not artificial intelligences but clever mechanisms for taking the average of various concepts and presenting them to the user. The messages and images that follow from these tools are based on aggregations of all the data fed into them and how those data are logically processed. In short, they are merely the average zeitgeist of the data fed to them.
The danger in this is that AI is fed human-created prompts in order to inform themselves, but the use of these tools will discourage the struggle that artists engage in to create their art in the first place. What point is there to struggle with thousands of hours of practice when it can be replicated and exceeded at the stroke of a key? Why learn a skill when a technological prosthetic can accomplish the same to an ever greater degree?
But AI Art, unlike prior tools, presents an interesting dilemma: In order for it to function, it requires vast amounts of human creative input to reference. However, the use of this tool discourages much of the human creative input that it would use to inform itself. Likewise it cannot use its own products, as this causes a decaying cycle of quality for various reasons. As a result, the use of this tool will cause a rift in the kinds of artwork generation going forward, and in the worst-case scenario would cause a cultural stagnation in several decades as entire generations decide to give up the struggle for artistic excellence in favor of the prosthetic likewise doomed to stagnation for lack of fresh human inputs.
There are all kinds of examples of this, from the simple to the complex. The switch from rough benches to backed chairs causes a notable increase in the amount of weak backs and spine problems due to the changes in the ways people began to sit day after day. They just didn't have to sit properly to ease themselves in the backed chairs like what they had to by the backless benches, and as a result of not struggling to hold themselves up their muscles naturally weakened.
Programming in the early days of computing required fundamental developments of metadata drivers themselves to the point that many people knew how to build working metadata structures by necessity. If you were the system admin, you either built the languages to control it or had to, by necessity, know how to build it directly. Now many programmers know only how to use higher-level editing programs that ease the programming issue to make it accessible to far more users, but have resulted in a vanishingly small number of people who actually could understand or manipulate those systems our computerized society has come to depend on. Most people don't have to know the suffering of programing an operating system, so they don't. And, subsequently, cannot.
In this case, in the recent past Bismarck would have either had to source around for pre-made thumbnails himself, or learn a few Photobashing or digital art skills to produce his own, or hired a living artist to produce the thumbnails he did. That or not have access to art at all. Obviously the AI Art tool gave its own option to him, cheaper and faster and more direct than the previous options, but it at the same time alleviates/robs Bismarck and the would-be hired artists of the efforts that would produce the art that, ironically enough, is what is fed into these machines to make them highly useful.
My point is not that AI Art is "theft" - that is very reminiscent of the shallow Libertarian's babble about taxation. My main point is that the use of the very tool itself, and more importantly society in general, will suffer from a discouragement of the creation of artists beyond this point if there are not serious, specific modifications made to these tools that will preserve the generation of human artists going forward.
I believe there are at least two major changes that need to be made regarding them: First, these models (language, art, auditory, etc) must only use those human works which are, by their mode of expression, permitted for model study. There are tools already being developed right now, notably Glaze and Nightshade, that apply difficult-to-perceive changes to photos that will either prevent or actively harm these aggregator tools that try to use them. Artists will either have to protect their works themselves this way, and/or copyright laws need to change to account for this kind of repurposing of existing works.
The second change is that any such artworks that are created by these tools must be marked in a reliable, open-sourced way in their metadata that they are AI generated and, if so, what references they used. This is vital for the training of future models (they break down using other AI inputs), but also vital for identifying what artworks were utilized for the generation of the image. This would make the identification of AI products easy without compromising personal identification, and would even open the door to the rightful possibility of artists who offer reference material to them to profit from the commercial use of those pieces - thus protecting a major incentive to artists to continue struggling in their craft.
The scenario where a company defers to AI Art to create a number of its assets is currently just open season. However with these simple changes to copyright law, each of their images generated would have a reference to what media it referred to when generating it. If their model utilized 10,000 images to create their image, they would require copyright permission to use those 10,000 images - which either would be from public domain OR from artists who agreed to it and who could profit from 1/10,000 of the part of the normal royalty payment that would normally go for those who agreed to such terms. Every time a new image was commercialized using their work as a reference, they'd receive those little shavings of royalty proportional to how much their work was referenced. And if the people didn't commercialize the work at all, or used a database that only has pieces in it from the public domain or otherwise are permitted for free use, then people could tinker away with them to their heart's content.
Suffice it to say, "AI" tools are going to be used going forward and developed to be ever-more useful. This is going to open up many new possibilities while effectively destroying others. In order to preserve human art as a common enterprise, a necessary thing not just for economic and tool reasons but for the kinds of spirits artistry develops among our people, we need to make precise and important changes to the regulations regarding this form of data referencing and aggregation.
I personally admire the artist who, through struggle and passion and discipline, can create beautiful artworks - and I would in fact argue that art is necessarily requiring a human input in several key ways to be considered art and not just "product". But the tools are here, they are useful to many, and many will use them to achieve the goals they set out to do. So long as you appreciate that this technology is in large part a prosthetic to the development of satisfying and unique lifetime skills and that you deprive yourself of the struggle that would enrich yourself otherwise, then have at it while the having is good.
I think that AI is an amazing tool for the power of creation. It lowers the bar of entry so that a lot of people can be able to play in the sand box, make a mess, and get dirty. It takes the keys away from the gate keepers on so many levels, that we can start making beautiful new art again.
Anyone can use it to boost their skills, or just start out. A beginning artist can use it to get a picture that he has in his head, then draw it in real life. I know that was always my largest hurdle - and I was a theatre set designer/painter, who has done drawing and painting for years before I converted to Catholicism and changed careers! If I had this tool, I would have been able to really been able to use it to render some of my thoughts -as a baseline- just to get a specific part, idea down, as a jumping off point.
Or do what I do now, which is using it to artistically have a through line on my substack. These whiners want me to try and find something that is impossible - I have used red headed barbarians at the end of every post, doing something related to the post, rendered in Rembrandt's style. It's fun, it's beautiful, thought provoking, and symbolic. I'm a one income father of 5 children. I don't have time for editing random pics to look like junk; but I do have time to put in prompts to make an edifying picture!
And that, right there, is what AI is for. Making it so that busy people, in an overworked, underpaid world, can do beautiful things. Can show each other what life is worth living for, and why we should fight this messed up system so that we don't have to be so stressed, play the team sport politics, and hate each other all the time.
If they hate it so much, learn to be a real artist. Because that's what AI is going to do - It's going to make Real, Huge paintings where you can see the brush strokes and are beautiful very expensive and desirable again. It's going to make live performances very expensive again. Because it's going to democratize everything, so the Rich will virtue signal to each other about their wealth with the Real very, VERY hard.
The reality is that the optimization of creative processes leads to mass adoption and that mass adoption converges on homogenization. That's the argument for why ai - or any process of artistic optimization driven by mass adoption - is shit. All of the AI images you use, for instance, are flat with respect to their relative attributes.
>All of the AI images you use, for instance, are flat with respect to their relative attributes.
explain
In terms I expect you'll readily get: AI art is the ultimate "creation by committee". In the same way that a lateralized democratic or economic power structure converges on a flattened monocultural landscape, The optimization of creative processes which lends itself to the democratization of the same processes, likewise converges upon homogenized outputs of those processes. The incalculable aesthetic idiosyncrasies llms are trained on are consolidated, weighted and averaged - all in reaction to trends of mass adoption - and thereby converge on idiosyncratic dilution, resulting in a convergence on relatively non-dynamical artistic output.
no.
There is always a large element of randomness because the pie is infinitely too big to average everything. And when you average a lot of elements from very diverse sources that frequently sounds like something entirely original.
The mind is not some kind of mystical entity and it's pretty trivial to replicate the biomechanics of human creativity by randomly synthesizing things already established to be good.
You still need ample human curation at this juncture, but a well-conceived and properly curated song generated via Suno is better than 97% of what you'll find on Soundcloud.
Whether or not you think that song is "better" is irrelevant. What's been studied and proven is that that song not only contain less dynamics within itself, but will be less dynamical relative to the general musical landscape with regard to both melodic structure, chordal variation, and sonic dynamics.
In the near term AI art could be considered "dynamic" in its relation to non-ai art - but within the domain of AI generated art, the outputs will necessarilyconverge on homogeneity.
I suppose I should add that those who tend to think that products which converge on dynamical homogeneity are "better" tend to be pretty bad at art. In fact, that's the differentiator between real artists and pretenders. You mentioned that the right has an art problem. But if the right applied its same fondness for social and political hierarchy to technical/artistic hierarchy, it might not have that problem.
A.I. has its perfect, happy place in a society that justifies itself on relative moral grounds, yes that would be this one. There is no point to debating A.I. art because its already here. The debate is rather stupid, because no debate will ever change anything, period.
There are significant questions behind institutionalizing rip offs, but nobody ever let them get in their way.
There are significant questions behind technology, deep questions, but nobody is interested in them.
Talking about A.I. art is like farting in the wind and wondering where the stink went.
Do I like A.I."art"?
Who cares?
I disagreed with you at the beginning, but by the end of the article I changed my mind. If you create it, there is something unique and human about it regardless of the tools used in the process. I guess art is kinda like countries, some can stand alone and are more real than others, but if they got a flag and in some way defend themselves, they are still a country.
I expanded my thoughts, and included a philosophical take on this subject on my own stack. I thought I'd share it here so that anyone still reading could swing by.
https://uncouthbarbarian.substack.com/p/ai-art-is-as-natural-as-any-art
Shit take. I tell you this as someone with unhinged, extreme high openness, generative AI is completely lacking in vision, and what comes out at best looks like it belongs on DeviantART. Because it relies on a mean of all concepts, it is fundamentally based on an effeminate, vibes-based epistemology that is formally incapable of creating anything exceptional or purposeful. Hawthorne's thumbnails show a real vision, a commitment to a cohesive aesthetic; whereas AI thumbnails are all interchangable with each other and just reek with the stench of AI-ness. My critique isn't about some notion of labor rights for artists; it's that the AI is inherently derivative dogshit