Pretty challenged in terms of even having a definition of art. Mommy like your refrigerator drawings? Seriously though, so many complaining about what they truly don't understand. Ask a #glitch artist, warning, reading ahead to grasp what I am saying!
You’re closer to correct for prompt-only models like Grok and Dall-E, but the style reference mixing, parameter tuning, personalization feature, moodboards, editor, remixing, etc. puts me 100% in the “it’s absolutely art” camp.
Midjourney is like an entirely new medium. Or at least it makes style itself into its own unique and novel kind of medium that’s just not practically achievable/replicable in any other way.
Don’t let bad/lazy AI art close your mind on this issue. There’s tons of great stuff out there!
Check out Midjourney magazine for a good collection of curated examples of AI art done well. They profile artists and styles and explain their process. It sounds really a lot like how any other artist would describe what they do.
$4/mo for a high quality booklet. Could do 1 mo and cancel.
I think this matters because when people make broad, sweeping, imprecise criticisms like your original post, when really they mean something much more narrow and nuanced, a lot of people and their work gets caught in the crossfire unfairly and unnecessarily. It’s bad for discourse.
I see tons of really poorly considered anti-AI sentiment on this platform specifically, and this doesn’t really contribute anything productive, but it does at least inadvertently perpetuate those bad criticisms. I mistook your OP for one of those.
imo, lazy prompts are less equivalent to doodles and more equivalent to google searches in my eyes. I dont think typing "drawing of a pumpkin" in google is art, even if search engine is combining all the results into one image. Not everyone has to agree but I think it's an understandable separation
That’s a good metaphor, but I don’t think these tools are comparable enough to search engines to make it work. The new image of a pumpkin will be genuinely novel and will only have come to exist through the action of a human intending to create it. I think the intention is the more salient part.
On the one end you have natural beauty, like a waterfall, which isn’t art because it wasn’t created by a human with intention. On the other end you have something like a Rothko or a photograph, which is art almost entirely due to human intention.
I've done traditional art most of my life, and more recently dabbled in AI image generation. And, I agree. You can go into an image generator with a specific vision, but figuring out how to articulate it so a computer can understand it is a very different experience from actually making art.
Sounds to me like using AI to make art is an artform itself.
I can’t hand carve wood because I’m no good with chisels and knives, but I can program a CNC to do pretty much exactly what I want for relief carvings.
I've also done a lot of 3D CAD work, and I consider that to be a lot different from AI prompting. Whether you're making brush strokes or programming tool paths, you're going through a mental process of figuring out how your vision will be constructed.
With AI prompting, you're largely hands off with the construction elements, and leaving it up to the interpretation of a system you can never fully understand. The biggest challenge is dealing with the machine misinterpreting or ignoring instructions.
art is expression and expression is made through decision. you do not make the decisions with generative ai, thus there is no expression, thus it is not art. it is antithetical to human creativity, and just a bad toy by the rich to not pay skilled and passionatr artists they steal from
Damn I didn't know Mr Beat was a part of the radical, leftist, woke mob, hating AI art. You can't just have based opinions on art like that man. Leave some woke for the rest of us teach.
Sounds to me like using AI to make art is an artform itself.
I can’t hand carve wood because I’m no good with chisels and knives, but I can program a CNC to do pretty much exactly what I want for relief carvings.
do you think poetry is art? The reason I ask is because I have heard the argument that the artistic process of using AI image generation comes from writing the prompt.
Poetry is a linguistic art, an expression of ideas through a choice of words to incite mental imagery and feelings not only through the words themselves but the rhythm and flow of how said words look and sound. None of that is expressed in an AI prompt or in the image generated by the AI.
UHMM ACSHULLY AI Artwork is harder to do than any "Real" art, do you know how hard it is to get the perfect prompt to get Robert E Lee and Ulysees S. Grant to kiss?
When I was very young, I remember being introduced to a toy piano with three buttons. I carefully pressed the buttons and believed I was playing "This Old Man," and was crushed when it was revealed that the order did not matter, it ALWAYS played "This Old Man".
If all one did was enter in a prompt, I agree. I experimented with AI by writing song lyrics and a structure and seeing what came out, then modified the song by adding in different musical sections, just to test out the technology, and I liked the results but wouldn't do it again.
It was fun and interesting using a new tool as a songwriter, and again, I did a lot of modifications to the song in terms of arrangement. It was like having a co-writer, and again, I like the song but would not do it again due to ethical considerations.
Not quite sure I agree - there are modern artists who quite literally throw paint at a canvass and call it art. Is your point that art requires personal effort or originality, or both? Neither?
Only if you also grant that AI art which is highly iterated on and refined by a person in order to achieve a specific artistic vision through mastery of their AI tools is also art.
I don’t think there’s a reasonable way to have it just one way and not the other.
Comments
You’re closer to correct for prompt-only models like Grok and Dall-E, but the style reference mixing, parameter tuning, personalization feature, moodboards, editor, remixing, etc. puts me 100% in the “it’s absolutely art” camp.
Don’t let bad/lazy AI art close your mind on this issue. There’s tons of great stuff out there!
$4/mo for a high quality booklet. Could do 1 mo and cancel.
Lazy, basic prompts are still art to the same extent lazy, basic doodles/scribbles are.
If you want to deny both of those, fair enough, otherwise I can’t see a way to reasonably separate the two.
Mostly, we just shouldn’t gatekeep the definition.
What about ethical considerations in sourcing training data and intellectual property?
How about the practical/social/political issues of AI displacing human artists?
I can’t hand carve wood because I’m no good with chisels and knives, but I can program a CNC to do pretty much exactly what I want for relief carvings.
The tool used doesn’t mean it is/isn’t art.
A theremin is incredibly difficult to play, but with a skilled performer, the music is still art.
The ideas don’t come from the AI.
I can’t hand carve wood because I’m no good with chisels and knives, but I can program a CNC to do pretty much exactly what I want for relief carvings.
The tool used doesn’t mean it is/isn’t art.
I disagree. AI is just a tool
It's a tool that takes a training set and a text prompt as input, and produces an image as output.
The AI developer, the author of the prompt, and the various artists who originated the training set all do their part
When I was very young, I remember being introduced to a toy piano with three buttons. I carefully pressed the buttons and believed I was playing "This Old Man," and was crushed when it was revealed that the order did not matter, it ALWAYS played "This Old Man".
I don’t think there’s a reasonable way to have it just one way and not the other.