Why I'm Skeptical of AI "Art"

Yeah, pretty much. Ai images are just noise, devoid of meaning and content. And "take the money and run" is a transformative piece of work for the 21st century in much the same way as that toilet installation that most people don't get the context of.

It is shocking to me just how small of a distance the solidarity of artists reaches when it comes to being replaced by AI. No matter how much something is "grunt work", it puts food on someone's table. I've seen artists welcome people being replaced by technology when it comes to animators, people working on movie VFX, performing musicians, translators, some types of writers, and just generally wishing it on customer service jobs and factory work. But with artists there is always some pseudophilosophical definition of art that makes your jobs special and uniquely tragic when they are replaced. How are you expecting to build a movement around this?

Is gen AI not just a tool like anything else?

I'm sure realism artists went through this exact same conversation when photography first started emerging as a new style of art. Or when people first started to trace the outlines of objects they wanted to draw

The amount of labor has 0 bearing on the value or legitimacy of art. The only thing labor provides is that with more labor, you can accomplish more than with less labor

An AI model is not a human but the very barebones of all it's inputs is the culmination of human art. There was a human deciding how to use the gen AI tool to make the art, what adjustments and edits to make to the piece, which ones to discard and which ones to use, etc.

AI art is taking a bunch of human made art and using that as a base to produce something else but is that not how all human made art is? Progressive steps built on top of knowledge and awareness of previously existing human art

As long as people are honest a piece of art was created using gen AI and explicitly label them as such, I fail to see how it's different than Photoshop, Illustrator, Photography, etc.

I feel the issue is everybody is trying to compare gen AI art to current forms of art when it should really be considered in its own categorization

While I agree with all the legitimate and well thought out arguments against AI art, my main reason for opposing it is as follows:

It's ugly, gross, disgusting, and creepy.

That's all I need to say.

My own take is that I have seen nothing which makes palatable the massive energy and resource costs of "AI". I think the question of whether it can be used to make "good art" or not is besides the point.

I agree completely. I don't want to use the term "soul" to describe art, because that apparently brings out the inner redditor in quite a few people around here, but AI art lacks intent. It isn't a person making something, having an idea in their head and trying to push out out onto a piece of paper or a canvas, it's someone typing words in and then getting "close enough" picture. There's no deeper meaning, no ability to analyse the decisions made in the creative process, it's just wholly surface level, there's nothing we can understand about the artist or ourselves from looking at AI art. It does nothing except superficially look like the thing it was supposed to look like. Art and media analysis absolutely needs to be actually fucking taught to people, I fucking hate how little people care about art.

Your post reminds me a bit of a recent Trashfuture podcast episode where the hosts were talking about the AI Willy-Wonka fiasco in Scotland or wherever that was, and a point they made was that the only endearing or worthwhile thing about it was the humor and "soul" of real humans trying to work with ridiculous AI garbage.

I mostly just hate AI "art" because most of what I've seen has been godawful, and its proponents are usually off-putting douches. A more abstract and long-term concern I have is a sort of self-sabotage of human artistic ability, where we take art out of the hands of humans and what we actually make ourselves and make it all just prompts for the AI to crap out. Humans can make art themselves with enough practice, even people who are "untalented" get appreciably better with enough practice, I've literally seen it. I don't want people to have this attitude where they rule themselves out and act like there's no point in learning because they can just lean on some AI model.

Before we start, let's just get the basics out of the way - yes, stealing

it's not stealing, and it's not intelligence. we can't have a conversation about this or even think about it properly if we're using capitalist ideas about ownership and advertising copy definitions of terms. obviously the corporations are in the wrong, but it's apparently pretty easy to spin up your own model on a GPU that a lot of people own so there's more here to unpack than the surface level luddist anticapitalism.

I'll just say i see a lot of idealism in here and doing something with a computer doesn't make it different from doing it by manually- like if i shredded a bunch of prints and then made an unrelated mosaic with the pieces where you could still identify part of mona lisa's eye.

https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf

Probably my favourite art theory essay, Walter Benjamin's 1935 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. He looks at what was lost from art as increasingly complex levels of industrialism allowed for it to become an interchangeable commodity instead of something with cultic significance to a group. Art in the Age of Algorithmic Reproduction hasn't reversed that at all, only intensifying the things that profane the sacred.

Even if a company invested billions of dollars into the world's most revolutionary AI art generator, something that could infinitely outperform any human, I wouldn't pay $1 for its work. It's no more unique and special than any individual pattern in a kaleidoscope, but even those reflect a conscious choice to load more red beads than blue. If it makes a character that has no more value than me pressing "generate random" on an RPG character creator. If it writes a book, I'm not going to buy that book because I could just as easily make it generate my own version where I'm the special boy. I'll look down on any "artist" who uses it like I would a plagiarist and steal their work on principle.

The crap these things churn out isn't art it's pictures. Nobody is making art to decorate the top of a post on Nancy's baking blog or whatever, "AI" or otherwise.

I am sure at some point we will get an actual piece of art generated using these tools, that will be an interesting conversation indeed

The one place where I think AI has some sort of artistic value, although it might be more accurate to call it sociological value, is not in the art it generates. That’s garbage; if you need a thumbnail for your YouTube video, pay a twitter artist $40 to make it. The value is in using the database to generate collective reflections of how society/artists illustrate particular ideas, phrasings, concepts in a way that one individual artist couldn’t.

Like, my kid was watching a video showing what the AI Art program spat out when asked to make an “American image” but kept using more and more extreme/ridiculous/over the top adjectives for how American they wanted it. The individual pieces of art were crap, but the evolution of how it depicted “even more American” was fascinating. This was just a silly YouTube experiment, if someone did this sort of thing but with more serious intent than David Byrne directing traffic, it could generate some decent discussion pieces.

i think the thing about AI art is that it really lays bare how alienated we really are from the means of production, that people are so unwilling to inject any amount of human effort and would rather have something created for them by a proprietary piece of software than ever suffer the embarrassment of even trying to create something, which only further feeds back into that alienation. It's telling that one of the very first things to come out of AI art as a 'movement' is stuff like NFTs - the most low grade, mass producible 'art' possible, solely aimed at trying to extract money from other people.

I'm also reminded constantly about the late 2000s/early 2010s discourse around 'video games are art' - in that a lot of this discussion is less about wanting to take a medium and genuinely bring it to a place where you can engage with it through artistic critique, and more wanting to steal a label and the perceived 'respect' of that label as a means to justify a consumer product

It's something I've been grappiling with. I think part of the issue is reality butting up against what I think society and money and IP and art should ideally look like. AI art for a meme or personal use? Who cares. AI art for profit just to churn out garbage? Sure that's bad, but that's not the fault of the technology or the individuals, that's just an incentive of capitalism to make money and fuck the consequences. Hell, plenty of real artists make garbage they have no passion for because that's what makes money, the only difference is how quick they can churn it out vs a computer. And while I think being obsessed with your own intellectual property is lame, would you want your passion projects to be turned into slop by a machine? Would you want art that comes from your heart that you release for free to just become sludge that a robot eats to shit out content for grifters to sell? Or should I care if other people want to eat slop and pay for the privilege? If I don't care about IP laws then thems the breaks. Maybe that's something artists have always had to deal with; people not respecting their art in the way they want them to and AI really is nothing new. Or what if that AI then gets used to generate propaganda or used to spread misinformation and your art contributed to its ability to effectivelydo so? Is that even something random artists should reasonably be worried about or does that only effect relatively well off people in the first world? Should that matter or affect my opinion? Hell if I know!

I think this false start with "AI" has actually brought up a far more interesting question, one that people seem to not even have the language for and are incapable of naming it even through they can feel it now more than ever. What's the problem with AI art? That it turns human passion into slop and content and roboshit that appeals to the lowest common denominator? We've had aggressively anti-human, profit motivated art for a while now already. What else is new? This is just one more pimple on capitalism's ass.

Generative AI isn't really art - art is supposed to express something, or mean something, or do something, and Generative AI is fundamentally incapable of functioning on this wavelength.

I would like to guzzle soylent and shove the hubble space telescope into my navel for a moment to say that the images produced by generative AI are still art, but not art borne of the AI itself. Since, as mentioned, the AI has no consciousness, is not alive, and is only but a tool similar to a cement mixer.

However, the artwork in its training dataset was produced by humans with consciousness, and the MCdonalds drive through order input given to it for guidance was written by a human. This property leads to a convolution operation where all relevant artwork from the training dataset is mashed together, modulated by the drive thru order.

As such, the original intents of each of the works are mangled beyond recognition and stitched back together along the lines of the intent held by the orderer, so a bit of a chimera of artistic communication.

It still sucks ass though because if everyone suddenly stopped producing art and instead just generated art using these AI models, they would all eventually fail, because AI using AI-generated art from a previous iteration in the training dataset slowly destroys the subsequent iterations.

In essence, the whole industry will collapse I hope because it will end up poisoning itself to death by eating its own shit.

These AI art posts always make for interesting struggle sessions. Full disclosure: I don't understand what art is and I feel like any definition is an assertion rather than an explanation. And that's fine really, I'm not the dictionary police, but I think it's worth realizing that we're mostly talking about culture here.

Like, would it have been art if instead of blank canvases, Jens sent the museum an AI generated picture of what they were asking for?

Idk I feel like there's piece of the puzzle missing here. I think art can be found anywhere where someone wants to find it, if that makes any sense. In nature, in random odd places, the universe itself. Im just not sure if a "soul" (ignoring the fact that souls aren't real and humans are just biocomputers) is really necessary for art to be real.

It implies a level of intent that I don't think the perceiver has to be cognizant of in order to appreciate a work of art. The implication here seems that unless an artist's intent is fully understood by the audience that we can't really fully appreciate it as art.

Also while people generating prompts isn't art in itself, I feel like it kind of begins prying away at this notion of there being no human behind the creation in the first place.

I think the most straightforward example is something like the work of a collage artist. There is already this practice of grabbing many different things from different places, other art, pictures, objects, whatever, and it's the specific combination of these things which gives it this special kind of "intent".

I of course agree with all of your other points about the way AI generated art impacts society.

There are some nice people here who are definitely not defending "AI" "art" while putting it forth that it is art by the person using the algorithm. Art is a set of decisions with intent and meaning, which is obviously not possible for a stochastic algorithm. If we then question whether the decisions and intents of the person running the algorithm count for art, I think a comparison is useful.

Consider an artist making a comissioned work, and that the patron has some participation in the process. For the first example, let the patron have an active participation in the process, questioning the purpose behind this brushstroke, that note, making suggestions and even gets the suggessions made if the artist finds them well reasoned or simply feels they're right. I have no doubt this reads unrealistic, it's only meant to be an absolute edge case. In this example, the patron clearly has some part in the process and though not a partner, they've definitely contributed to the work, to the art of it. In the second example, the patron comissions a work, is presented something they have "corrections" to, and they're satisfied with the revised version. For the sake of argument, let's clarify that the requested revisions weren't artistic in nature, the portrait needed to be more flattering, the concerto needed more oomph, that sort of thing. Clearly, this opposite edge case, no doubt more likely, has no artistic contribution by the patron and thus singularly belongs to the artist.

I presented this as a spectrum and now I can't get out of it, where's the line that separates the patron making artistic contribution and not? Perhaps as with all spectra, there isn't one. If we agree that the line has to be somewhere inbetween, then the artistic contribution is in the meaning and the discussion. For our purposes, this is sufficient to refute running an algorithm as art: whatever intent the runner has loses meaning in the stochastic strokes of the algoruthm and any discussion is absent for obvious reasons. Any argument that it's a "tool" doesn't apply here; the brush, the violin, the software are all tools, yet applying them randomly until it resembles something doesn't suffice in making something art.

There may be an argument to be made that my previous assertion is incorrect and that a patron who merely has the artist redo the work still has some contribution. If there is, I can't see it. To me, this case has no more artistry than picking the right wrench or an item of food from a menu. I believe here taste is involved, but not any artistic expression, but if there's someone to make the argument earnestly I'll be sure to read it.

I agree. Artists and any of the mediums through which they bear their souls are all involved in a process that is very human. Until we can teach the computer to act precisely as our brain & body do in response to stimuli then I don’t think they can quite be deemed to be artists