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I hate that it’s built on theft. The idea of AI art is fine, but so much of it is just art theft. “Picture of A in the style of artist B.” That kind of shit really makes me hate AI art.
I don’t hate it, in fact I use it a lot for my D&D game nights - not being an artist myself.
I think it substracts from everything but itself. That is on its own, its pretty cool. But it’s gross when it’s used as part of a bigger project.
I don’t hate AI art. I hate AI art being passed off as “traditional” art.
As an artist I’m conflicted. I like new technology and methods and mediums, but it’s entirely unethical to make models on unconsenting artists with no compensation or recognition.
I don’t hate the “art.” The AI can’t do much about it.
What I strongly dislike is people who manage to draft literally 40 words or less and think they “created” something.
You didn’t. You a mathematical model to do something for you. You therw 175 tokens into a whirlpool and got am 87% what you wanted image out. If you even had an idea of what you wanted before hand.
low effort crap is low effort crap no matter how it’s made, that said, there is plenty of high quality, high effort AI art out there that has a lot of prompt engineering put into it; it is merely drowned out in a sea of sludge. It’s just about as easy for someone to put in zero effort and churn out AI sludge as it is for them to scribble in MSPaint, the difference being scribbling in MSPaint usually has some level of charm to it for its simplicity. That doesn’t mean the guy who spends a lot of time tweaking their prompt to get it exactly right isn’t an artist, it means they create art with different tools. Whether you use a rattlecan and stencils, or pencils and paper, or paint and canvas, or a wacom tablet and stylus, or type in carefully crafted prompts, art is art is art is art. But if you don’t spend the time required to get good at it, your art will be shit.
Also, watching the artist crowd melt down again saying “that’s not real art!” is absolutely hilarious. Those who weren’t around at the time may not remember, but when digital art was starting to become a thing, there were plenty of people who firmly attested that if it was digital, it wasn’t “real” art. Watching the same set of creatives having the same meltdown ~30 years later, “REEEEE YOU CAN’T JUST USE TECHNOLOGY TO MAKE THE PROCESS EASIER”, is extremely funny.
As an artist who had her art stolen for usage in AI, I hate AI generated images for several reasons. I’ve personally had my art stolen to be used in a prompt without my permission, and said art got mangled so much that it looked terrible. AI image generators scrape the internet for art so they can amalgamate these pieces of art together to correspond to a prompt, and this art is taken without the permission of the artists. In some AI generated images, the mangled remnants of artists’ signatures are still visible. Beyond art theft, it’s instant gratification with zero effort. A huge part of why I appreciate art is because someone made it, someone spent potentially hours to create this beautiful picture! When I look at my old art, I can instantly get a feel for what vibes I had going through my mind at the time, like I could almost take a peek into my past self’s brain, and this applies to other artist’s work too!
Prompting an AI image generator, in my eyes, is like prompting an artist to draw something for you, except that artist turns out to be someone who traces bits of other people’s art without their permission, or copy and pastes it. Sometimes AI generated images aren’t immediately recognizable, so me and a lot of other artists have tried to make it a trend to post progress pictures and other receipts along with our art.
Yes, as it conveys nothing more than the prompt it was given. Art is a means of communication, but when all it does is chop up pictures it’s seen to match a prompt there just isn’t anything to analyze.
It may look pretty in the moment, but lacks all substance and will be forgotten as quickly as it was generated.
Just playing devil’s advocate here. Let me lay out some counter points … (it’ll take me an edit or two to format this right, btw.)
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Instructing a machine to assemble bits in a specific way takes creativity. My prompt to AI is that creativity and without it, you can’t even get much of a copy of anything. Even though AI is generally assembling stolen bits, the end result (ignoring copyright law) can be original.
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Music has been mostly “figured out” and many songs we have heard over your lifetime use many of the same exact chord progressions. I-V-vi-IV being one of the most common and used in the following songs:
Journey – “Don’t Stop Believing”
James Blunt – “You’re Beautiful”
Black Eyed Peas – “Where Is the Love”
Alphaville – “Forever Young”
Jason Mraz – “I’m Yours”
Train – “Hey Soul Sister”
The Calling – “Wherever You Will Go”
Elton John – “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” (from The Lion King)
- Musicians may use patterns or progressions from other songs. Painters may use the same colors and brushes designed by other artists. In both cases, techniques that have been known for thousands of years are being used in self-expression.
I assert that given the correct instructions, you can still give someone plenty to analyze, via prompt, that has enough detail to extract a deeper meaning:
FWIW, I am extremely fed up with this AI hype now. “AI” is just a tool, and that is it. I could go on for hours about this mess, but I am trying to make a valid point: Regardless of how you interpret copyright, art is just self-expression.
There are endless examples I could give about technique re-use when it comes to creating art with machines. From my perspective, a particular brush stroke might be the same as using a specific bit at a particular depth of cut on a CNC. The art theft for AI training is one aspect, for sure. The biggest issue I see is that many people don’t understand how to create original art and the AI just spits out a copy of something it was trained on and something the user already saw.
Edit: After reading many of the other comments here, many people have a strange definition of “art”. Yes, art can be about communication, it can be about sending a message, it can express a style of creativity or hundreds of other things.
Art is just… art. It’s something a person sketches, composes, speaks, signs or farts. You don’t have to like it or agree with it. Hell, you don’t even need to recognize something as art for it to be art. Art is just self-expression. It’s a feeling that is converted into some kind of other medium that others might happen to see, feel or hear, smell, taste or a combination of all of those things.
As much as I hate to admit it, a banana taped to a wall is art. Someone eating said banana is also art. I think it’s fucking stupid, but who am I to not call it someone’s self-expression?
That some, most or all art is partly or wholly derivative of other art is not relevant because the process used by ‘AI’ does not resemble the artistic process. When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet (a work derived from an older play, itself derived from an older myth which itself had been through countless retellings, variations and translations), he did not do what an LLM does, which is approximately to say: ‘It’s statistically likely that the phrase “to be” will be followed by the phrase “or not to be”’. Putting together statistical likelihoods is not creativity. This alone shows that AI ‘art’ is not creative and therefore not art at all.
Additionally, instructing a machine to make things from prompts does not require creativity. Creativity is not ‘having ideas’; it’s an ongoing process. When you tell an image generator to make an image, you’re not asking it to create something, because it cannot do it. You’re saying ‘Show me the statistically likely output for this input’. Again, this statistical generator is not the same as, nor is it comparable to, the human imaginative process.
Example: My picture of the Lemming.
I knew exactly what I wanted before I even typed in the prompt: My vision was for a nervous, burned-out lemming to be sitting on a log, hunched over a laptop smoking a cigarette with bloodshot eyes surrounded in crushed beer cans.
That is not creative? Saying I have no imagination or creativity is kinda rude and giving all my credit to AI is downright insulting. Sure, I didn’t draw it and I absolutely do not have the ability to draw it. However, you cannot (reasonably) deny that the idea is mine. I’m not exactly the most creative person in the world, but damn… (The image will show up under my username over at least two instances over the span of 1-2 years? It’s mine, is my point.)
If you saw my edit, you should know exactly what I thought when you said “artistic process”.
However, my underlying point about derivative process or technique was to shoot a hole in the arguments of “cobbled together bits from wherever” and why I specifically used music as an example. Drum lines are openly copied. Not derived: blatantly copied. It’s considered a compliment in many cases, actually. Progressions and transitions are all just copies. You don’t even need AI to “statistically generate” music patterns. With every chord I choose to start a progression, there are only X number of chords that will work correctly after it.
I believe there have been some projects to generate (within reason) every chord progression possible and every kind of melody that would fit it… statistically. Almost every bit of popular music you hear is a derivative or a copy or reused or whatever, is my point. How many times have you heard the “Amen break”? More times than you actually know, unless you know your music, then you do. Much of music is just, for lack of a better term, math.
Creativity is an idea or multiple ideas. It’s anything that exceeds the sum of your existing knowledge. AI by itself isn’t “creative” and it is impossible for AI to be creative, we both agree. Again, from my perspective, AI can be used as a tool to fill in the gaps between two different ideas. It’s the assembly of different ideas or components that is important. The sum of the key bits.
In my CAD work, I use formulas and simulated physics to automatically generate connecting features or structures. Are the designs I create exempted from “art” because of that?
Putting creativity and art into a box and saying you must follow “creative process” or “artistic process” is just odd. You can think that way if you want, but it’s very limiting. The artists I study make a habit of saying “fuck the rules, fuck the process and do what makes you feel good.”
Just for lulz, I was wondering what another machine would think of my Lemming. It kinda got it, but kinda didn’t. Statistically, it figured out the parts, but you should know darn well what my intent was:
Having ideas is not creativity. Creativity is creating the thing. If a billionaire pays a painter to create their idea, the artist is still the painter, not the billionaire commissioning the art. Replace the painter with AI and the logic doesn’t change, the person putting the prompt is not an artist. It did not create the thing. The machine is not an artist either, as the human painter at least had consciousness, intention, agency, emotion,all things the machine doesn’t have and cannot source from to create the art. This is why AI images always feel soulless, dry and boring. They don’t produce any emotion on the audience because it had none to source from or communicate through the art. The prompt engineer is no artist but a commissionner to an inept soulless painter.
so there’s no thing called “thinking creatively”?
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I don’t even consider AI generated images to be art since there is no expression of skill, imagination, or feeling in them.
It reminds me to those hyper-realistic paintings that were trendy 15 years ago, they were impresive feats of skill but by the fifth in a row they became boring. AI is the same but without the skill.
There’s nothing interesting about it. It’s a waste of storage space and computational power. It makes the world worse
I like it quite a bit. Le chat mistral does a good job
