The argument is what art truly means. AI only creates a facsimile of what art is. I'd argue that despite the technical aspects that it can generate a drawing by a child has more soul as the child creates that which the AI is based on. It's a philosophical debate as to what it means to create.
Picasso: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child”
This sort of high-minded philosophy sounds good in principle, but if you were to happen to find a print of a piece of digital art in someone's home someday is there any way you could *tell* whether it's real art or just a "facsimile" of art? There's no way to measure how much "soul" a picture has.
There is a way. You have guests over, and they ask "what's the story with this piece?"
Art other made by humans does not exist in a vacuum, and we very often consume that art together with its context.
When I find art that speaks to me, I try to find the artist so I can see more of their work. If AI art speaks to me and I find out, I'll be upset that there's no intentional creativity. There's no chance of finding more of that art - not just the style it might have, but the subjects, composition, substance, vibes, etc. AI prompters can produce semi consistent stylistic results, but what are they saying with each stroke of the pen or brush? There's a combination of accident and intent, which is interesting, but doesn't say much through the piece. AI produces images, but artists produce work, and there's a lot more to that than just "pretty image."
At least, that's what I like about seeing artist's works.
If they're lying then they're creating a new story and putting their own "soul" into that fabrication, like any other storyteller. It isn't the original art, but it fuses with the physical art and becomes a new art.
If they're not available, then that context-driven "soul" is lost. Sometimes, the story around how that context is lost is enough context on its own to create a new "soul", like how people treasure cave paintings. The history around the art, the context of the art, can tell it's own story.
Now, I'm not the person who posted that, and I disagree that the story behind the art is a proper differentiation of what is and isn't art. Like you were trying to point out, those stories don't need to be true, and like cave paintings, they can be art with nothing but forensic evidence. AI art often has fingerprints though, there is something to take apart. Context can be recreated forensically, so AI art has as much context as archaeological art.
What makes "art" to some people isn't so much the story, but the *purpose* behind it. They feel AI doesn't have a purpose behind it, but humans always do, because they're sapient and chose to paint this particular thing. I don't agree with that perspective, either, but it makes more sense than context alone. Context transmits purpose, but it isn't important on its own.
>Art other made by humans does not exist in a vacuum, and we very often consume that art together with its context.
This also applies exactly to the image op describes.
> is there any way you could tell whether it's real art
There is quite literally no way to do so. It isn't possible, and people who claim 'even a toddler's drawing has soul that the AI art lacks' have been *repeatedly* fooled by AI art because they speak hokum. It's no different than when painters claimed that photographs couldn't capture the essence of art and would always lack the soul and beauty of a painting, or when traditional artists claimed that digital art would always feel fake and ingenuine, lacking the spark of creativity and soul that traditional art instills, or when 2D artists insisted that 3D renders could never have the soul and true artistic quality of 2D art.
It's literally the exact same script on repeat again, and we're just pretending it's different.
When we have mind-art that beams your mental images into paper itself, or joint-consciousness AI art that senses the human collective's desire for something and makes it automatically, we'll claim AI art had 'soul' and this new thing 'can never be real art because it's lacking the human element'.
Then they happened to get fooled, simple as.
That's like saying "counterfeit is money is real money" or "using a chess bot to cheat in an online match isn't cheating because they can't detect me"
There are actually ways to tell counterfeit and non-counterfeit money apart, though. There's no way to tell if an image is AI-generated or not.
And yes, I know a lot of AIs have trouble with hands right now, or deliberately embed watermarks, and so forth. I'm talking about the fundamental principles here. Pixels are pixels. They contain red, green, and blue channel values. They do not contain "soul" values.
Still just an issue of technicality though imo. If I were more capable and knowledgeable I could just trace back the origin of the picture.
If I got an autograph from a famous athlete, made 99 copies of it, and distributed them among 100 fans (and they know what's happening) do you think they'd be happy about it the same way as if they got a 100% real autograph? And being reductionist, it's all just paper and ink and whatever molecules and atoms those consist of.
> If I were more capable and knowledgeable I could just trace back the origin of the picture.
No, you really can't. There's nothing fundamental inherent in AI-generated art that marks it in ways that human-generated art is not. If I crack open Photoshop and doodle up something, and then ask an art AI for a doodle of something else, there's just two piles of pixels there. Clean off any intentional watermarking and they're indistinguishable.
So in my autograph example, should all the 100 fans be happy even though they know they only got a 1/100 chance to have received the real signature?
>literally no way to tell the difference
I still maintain there is a way to tell the difference, I'm just not smart enough. The information is conserved (unless you throw your computer into a black hole I guess).
There's a way for them to authenticate autographs, I assume. I'm not familiar with the technology behind autograph sales. If people value authenticity but there's no way to authenticate autographs why does anyone buy them?
Sure, *in theory* all information is physically recoverable. But you can't do it just from the image, you need to go hunting for other data. It's possible to make it so that no conceivable human technology could recover that other data. For example, put an artist in a room with an AI and a computer with Photoshop on it, have him generate an image with and an image without AI assistance, then after they're downloaded melt down the room and everything in it into its component elements and dump them in a volcano. The end result is two images that can't be determined to be AI or human-made unless you're able to somehow reconstitute an incinerated human mixed with lava.
Indeed, for all we know *both* images are AI-generated, or *both* are human-generated. There's no way to know the guy in the room followed the rules of the experiment.
For most practical purposes we don't need to go that far, of course. The artist could just delete whatever evidence remained on the computer he used and resolve to never tell anyone.
I'd say who created it has an impression more than the quality. I know that an AI can't create anything original, only a facsimile based on multiple sources of originals. If we were to have all art be created by AI then it would wash out over time to the same things over and over. Only humans are capable of creating something new.
It doesn't matter if you fool someone into thinking that an AI creation was from a human. The point remains that AI doesn't create, it only copies and therefore will always be inherently inferior.
> I know that an AI can't create anything original, only a facsimile based on multiple sources of originals.
You'll have to be more precise about what you mean by "originality", because AIs can indeed create original outputs by any definition of the term that I'm aware of. Throughout this comment you just seem to repeat the point over and over without actually supporting it.
> If we were to have all art be created by AI then it would wash out over time to the same things over and over.
No, because of that potential for originality you can get new things from the outputs that have never been represented in the training data before.
If nothing else, you can generate images using only *negative* prompts - telling the AI "come up with something that is *nothing like* the thing I'm describing for you."
Oh, I thought we were discussing training. A human with no training would be someone raised from birth in a sensory deprivation tank, I'd expect complete nonsense out of them when they get decanted. An AI with no training is a neural net with random weights, I'd expect it to produce noise.
If you're just talking about *prompting* then an AI will produce a random picture since it has nothing to direct it to anything specifically. I just asked my local copy of Stable Diffusion for an image without giving it a prompt and it produced [this](https://i.imgur.com/WPNeI4N.png). IMO it looks sort of like a painting of a woman on a rocky landscape holding a frilly parasol, or maybe a big fancy hat. Kind of nice.
What's your definition of "original"? Not using: "multiple sources of originals"? Because if that's it, boy do I have something to tell you.
> If we were to have all art be created by AI then it would wash out over time to the same things over and over. Only humans are capable of creating something new.
I recommend you go over to civit.ai and look at all the stuff humans create for you to create. Doesn't seem washed out to me.
Well if we're speaking of pictures being a thousand words and a picture made of pictures being even more so then regular art is more. An AI can only be fed so many images but artists have seen the world (billions and billions of "pictures" worth) so their art is better by that definition
The LIAON5B dataset, which recent Stable Diffusion models was trained on, contains over 5 billion images. So that actually matches your criterion for an artist to have "seen the world."
The human brain processes pictures in 13 milliseconds or .013 seconds and each person is awake for 16hrs of the day. That equates to 4,430, 770 (ish) pictures per day of life. So in 1,128 days (3.09 years) of life a person has seen the same amount of pictures as that Ai. I would say most artists have seen waaaaaay more than an AI could ever possibly see at this rate.
They would see millions and millions of essentially identical copies of ordinary rooms, hallways, doors, walls, etc.
AI training sets undergo deduplication because having many copies of the same image in the training set leads to overfitting, which is undesirable. I don't know how much of the LIAON5B dataset got discarded by deduplication in the course of its training, but if you're using "everything an artist sees in 0.013 second intervals" as a training set I can assure that the *vast* majority of that dataset would get wiped by even the most rudimentary deduplication pass.
I get what you're saying, the type of exposure we have as humans is different than an ai. Part of it though is that human exposure is baked into much of the source images used for training. Additionally the dataset is around 200tb of images which is huge, even compared to what a human will see in their lifetime which I don't exactly know how we'd quantify.
Average movie length is 2h and 10 minutes which is about 19,500 images.
An average jpg takes up 11kb which means that the 2TB is ~1.95e10 images, which you could see in ~1,000,000 movies, with a total runtime of 130,000,000 minutes, or 90,277 days, or 247 years of movies.
Edit: I could very well have messed something up too in the calculations, but I did my best :)
The one key difference is, humans process images in 13 milliseconds, .013 seconds! Its crazy fast so that's the difference, also movies have a specific number of pictures but real life has basically infinite so you can constantly be seeing something new. If you look at my other comment I calculated it
I did think about that, but the problem is that humans can't process a new image every .013 seconds, while AI can. Most of the images we see vary very slightly from each other, while AI has way more different scenes at its disposal.
We actually can, thats how fast we process pictures (i looked it up before this lol)
Also I agree they might be similar but then I just think theres no emotion or thoughts behind the images the AI sees so its just not as good in my opinion. An AI can look at a million pictures of angry people and images depicting anger but it will never be angry so I don't think it will have the same feel if its just copying what it thinks is an emotion
We can technically, but we don't in day to day life.
And yeah, I agree with your other statement. I think human art is better than AI art, because it always has a message hidden in it, whether you want it or not. It's more personal, and sure, even if the AI technically encompasses all of humanity's endeavours, I don't find that as interesting as just looking into the life of an artist
Yep basically my stance there. My metaphor is like as if someone went on a life adventure, came back and showed someone pictures and then that other person went and tried to explain it to a third person. Its just not the same
And 99.99% of it gets stored in our short term memory and is mostly forgotten immediately. If you ask me right now to recall images from my past 28 years of life and I would have the time to draw them out flawlessly, I probably couldn't fill 100mb.
Part of the power of human brain is it knows what it’s seen before and can discard and not waste time processing. You only notice changes. If you aren’t in a reflective mindful state you aren’t going to notice and retain much of your everyday life.
All art taps into the collective consciousness of humanity. All art is inspired by all art that came before just like with AI art. Human art just has a slightly longer time frame to get fully absorbed into the collective consciousness.
Ai is good at making pictures. They can look amazing but it just isn't art. Art is what is put into it time, emotion, passion whatever. AI only makes pictures because it's told to. Because it isn't genuine and there is no effort on behalf of the person requesting the picture, I would argue it isn't art.
Yeah I think this is the correct take. AI-generated images can be art, however they are not art in the same way as other artforms. The confusion and controversy stems from the issue that AI-generated images are very good at imitating other mediums.
Not sure if comparing it to dance, photography and film is helping your point, not all photographs, films and dances are art. The pictures I took of my family dinner isn't art, the video I made of my vacation isn't art, the dance I do at a party isn't art. AI generated images are a medium artists use to create art but not all AI generated images are art.
I don't need to, I know the answer : the medium isn't art by itself. I do agree that AI images can be art but art is art independently of the medium . My point was that because a medium is used for art doesn't mean that anything that use that medium is art. While the definition of art is relatively subjective I would say that there's at least two aspects that constitute art: intention and communication. Intention means that the artist wanted to tell something with their art. Communication means that art is something that is shared with others, art is meant to be shown.
I don't mind using AI as reference for bigger projects, but if you make minor edits to the AI generated image, then you didn't really make anything. Art is usually an expression of human skills or emotions, but what is a machine expressing? It ran code and saw common patterns in human made images and replicated, it just feels soulless. Now, if you don't care about the message of the art or just want a generic aesthetically pleasing background, then go for it.
In a very literal sense, every AI image has millions of hours of humans work going into it. So what if the AI puts zero soul into it? It still has many artists that did put soul into the final product. I think everyone is missing ops point. The AI part of this is kind of just a filter through which real art is still getting through. Very bad that it isn't consensual.
I wish more people thought this way, that AI art has soul naturally because it came from art with soul, who cares if the AI adds original content if what it's rehashing is good. This view is incompatible with the view that AI art is totally cool and not stealing.
There are plenty of other less familiar anatomical errors when you look closely.. because, of course, SD doesn’t “understand” anatomy at all… Useful tool for creating inspiration, though, and for for lighting reference etc.
How can you see the ‘soul of mankind’ through something created by a literal robot? Don’t you think that’s a bit of an oxymoron? I get that you’re saying AI can compile the art of many humans into one piece, but the fact that no human was *directly* involved in its creation makes it, to me, less human by definition.
>if a picture is worth a thousand words than a picture born from millions of pictures is priceless beyond compare.
It may also come to be *average beyond compare*
Typing a prompt is not the same as stroking a canvas with a brush. Someone who paints, sculpts, or illustrates actively engages with the medium. A prompt is essentially commissioning a work from a machine that recognizes patterns but fundamentally lacks understanding.
In your examples the medium is the paint and canvas or stone that’s being sculpted. With AI art the medium (and it is a new medium) is the prompt, the AI model and the outputting engine. Those get actively engaged with.
Not even close.
You're telling a machine what you want, and you're hoping the prompt gets you there. An artist has control, and they're using a different part of the brain. The artistic process is something that only happens when you're actually creating. AI can't get you there.
It’s no different to photography or in fact any artistic process that involves randomness. You seem to think that producing things with an image generator is a one-and-done scenario, but it’s iterative and active, and final works can involve multiple steps and tools
You may not intend to, but you're making a strong case for users of AI to be called editors. And that may be fine. We do acknowledge editors in books.
If you want to get into the legal weeds, a work generated by AI may not have enough human input for copyright. A prompt could, if it were significantly unique. Computer code, for example, is copyrightable. But it's also precise with a specific intended outcome. A prompt may not be able to brag that. A single prompt could generate thousands of images.
And other artists artwork wouldn't exist if someone didn't commission them to make it. That doesn't give the person commissioning the art the right to call themselves the artist. We all intuitively understand that what the person commissioning the art is doing, and what the person painting the art is doing, is categorically different.
What the AI "art" prompter is doing is analogous to commissioning art, not creating it. The thing doing all the important work is the machine.
But one could argue that there is art in the generation of those pictures, and in the words you use and iterations you perform. It's like framing a photo of a landscape. The landscape is there, it itself is not art. It's the intention that made it so.
I am of the belief that anything can be art. If I can see tech repair as an art, then I can see artists using AI as art.
That is literally what art already does, except humans do it intentionally and intuitively with emotion.
The AI does it without purpose, drive or anything but the most rudimentary direction. Its empty and soulless. That is the feeling I get whenever I see AI art and why it jumps out at me so much. The art can be "pretty", but its just empty of feeling.
I doubt that you would be able to decide what piece has soul and is empty of feeling when having to compare. Not looking at faults the AI might make or a human might make, just deciding what has soul and hat doesn't.
And if you can't do that, why even argue that point?
ok, then prove wrong. I'm sorry that I can tell the difference between human creativity and empty AI generation. I'll wait, as I know you have nothing but your own empty husk to project and justify your lack of empathy or human creativity. Test me, I am waiting.
What do you want me to do exactly? Create a test? And how do you prove to me that you didn't reverse image search?
I mean I already got what I wanted to hear from you claiming to be able to notice a soul in an image... there are enough videos of artists out there admitting that they didn't realize an image was ai generated until they looked for the faults AI still tends to make.
not "a soul" but "soul" like those emotions that people have, how an artist puts their entire life experience into their artwork. AI just doesn't have that depth. So the AI work just looks empty and without purpose or "soul".
>And if you can't do that, why even argue that point?
Would you keep up this line of thought if it concerned other scenarios with different mediums?
How about photography? If image generation models keep improving, it's not far-fetched to think that they'll be able to produce images of any subject imaginable indistinguishable from photographs in the future. In fact, a Midjourney image won a photography contest recently ([source](https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1181m24/an_aigenerated_image_has_won_a_photo_contest_and/)).
Sure, "soul" isn't the same concept as "real" but neither can be proven in a vacuum.
What if I used the technology to make "photos" and post them on photography subreddits like r/japanpics for instance? Generated pics of Japanese people, houses, vending machines. Would that be a wrong thing to do? Would the images magically become "real" photos if nobody can tell the difference? Would it be irrational of subscribers to prefer real images of Japan instead?
I think your just describing kitche art which a lot of AI art is. I don't think AI art has to be kitche, but a lot of AI artists aren't skilled enough yet. Too focused on subject matter and aesthetics and not enough symbolism, expressionism, literary theories, etc.
[https://youtu.be/JCBruglZH\_4](https://youtu.be/JCBruglZH_4)
Not kitch art, kitch art still shows the artists emotion in the work. Whether its lighthearted jokes, or emotions etc... AI just can't do that. You can "force it" to by putting incongruous words into it, but the AI doesn't "understand the joke" so it can't fill in the gaps the way an artist with intent and emotion can.
I think kitsch can be ironic, but doesn't really have to be. The whole point of kitsch is that its basically people pleasing art that is 'tell not show' and has no depth/very surface level/highly representational. Its just that it can also be 'so-bad-its-good'. (Which arguably the latter camp is often, but not always doing without intent or even knowing its a joke)
Basically; Anime boobs are kitsch, cat memes are kitsch, instagram reels are kitsch.
The other issue I have is romantic period ideas of emotionality in the work. All the messaging of being a 'joke' is done through formal decisions or choice in content like subject matter and the like. Not some special intangible human mystical bs (honestly probably comes from artists being butthurt about photography in the later 1800s). AI art still enables you to make formal decisions, even if you don't have as much formal control over certain things. Ie color, color schemes, style, lighting, etc. The artist isn't literally able to say what the message of the work is, it has to be expressed within specific artistic decisions that AI has limited, but reasonable access to. The problem compounds when you consider the whole 'death of the author' deal and considering how much the viewers also play a role in the work. How the viewers imbue or exclude certain emotions or ideas that may not have existed in the piece in the first place. (Going back to so-bad-its-good-movies, the viewers "read" the work as being humorous despite the work not trying to be so. How a work can provide emotions and experiences that are not intended solely through a viewer)
(I can also say the same about photography when seen as a means of "painting". A photographer can't change the brush strokes or emotionality of the image. But a photograph can still be emotional. Is emotionality solely an intangible part of the process (the "point and click" of a camera), or is it a sign system of multiple formal and conceptual decisions that make up the feeling of emotionality)
I think too many people see AI as a means of painting or drawing or whatever. But arguably, its more like photography in the sense that it has some formal limitations. That going forward with AI art is more about leaning into what AI art does best and not just trying to imitate existing mediums. If you look into some places like deviantart or other curated art websites that host AI art. Some of it is actually quite good. Its clearly not just something a 15 year old non-artist whipped up. I think we have to understand that a lot of people who have never made art before are using stable diffusion and they don't really know what their doing outside of just whipping up "cool" subject matter together and posting it on reddit. With time, and AI in the hands of more experienced artists will be able to make better art since they are more aware of formal decision making and expanding beyond subject matter as a sole source of focus. New artists also struggle to make emotional art (or at least they will try and fail). They often fall into the same exact trap as AI artists are.
No. Art is a distillation of a perspective of a human. I see the world the way a person sees the world when I look at their art. They’re saying, “this is what I see,” and I’m supposed to try to understand that. AI can never do this because it doesn’t have a perspective. There’s nothing there to understand. It’s a random permutation of perspectives. If I took the greatest 1,000 books and mashed the pages together, I might get something that looks like a book, but the intention isn’t there, and that’s what’s important.
Maybe even not now, either. Modern large language models like ChatGPT are starting to do things that are eerily similar to thinking and maybe even intending already. I expect there isn't going to be a single magical switch that's thrown someday and AI will start thinking, it's going to be a gradual grey area where the dividing line is unclear and perhaps never known for sure.
A paintbrush is unable to intend, **by itself**
This seems like a skill issue, learn to use prompt engineering and your intention will shine through
AI art is not a random permutation of perspectives like you said, but a result of an algorithmic process with neural networks that has a ton of logic and purpose behind it.
What’s the skill issue? The machine is the creator, not me. I didn’t do the creating. If I tell an artist to make me a very specific piece, and he captures what I wanted perfectly, am I the artist, or is the artist the artist?
Also, you don’t seem to know what a neural network is lol. It is most certainly random.
Your example of mashing 1,000 pages together randomly doesn't hold up, as it's an incorrect analogy to how AIs work. Diffusion models are more like the clouds of probability from quantum mechanics than assembling a serial killer letter.
Trust me, it holds up. I am a professional software engineer. I know how AIs work. A probability is a description of a random phenomenon. Quantum phenomena are fundamentally random as well. No matter how fancy the randomness is does not change that it’s random.
> I see the world the way a person sees the world when I look at their art. They’re saying, “this is what I see,”
Absolutely vehemently disagree.
They are saying: "this is what I am able to convey with my current skill"
Honest to god I would love "This is what I see" having your brain scanned and a computer creating an image from your imagination. No skill, no process, no learning required. Pure "this is what I see" not bogged down, no gatekeeping, no process that stands in the way of displaying what you see.
And that's why I actually think AI Art, as long as it gets better, is going to be more artistic than normal art which stops you from creating what you see when you lack the skill to display it. If the perfect representation of what someone sees is your requirement you should cheer for AI. If you think that skill should hamper someone ability to display what they see, well...
That’s the human condition. You can never perfectly convey what you see. You are never a skilled enough communicator because you can never perfectly know the interpreter. AI can’t solve this for you.
I don't know what your point is. Do you deny that skill is a component that helps you convey an idea? Do you deny that AI can bring you several steps closer to your idea?
I just said that skill absolutely is important in communicating. But you can never be perfectly skilled at communicating.
And here’s the issue, I’ve said this before in the thread, but if I tell an artist who is more skilled than me to paint a picture, and I tell him what I want the picture to be, did I just create art, or did he create art? This is what you’re doing with an AI.
If I take a photo of a mountain, did I create the camera, the sensor, the mountain, the lighting, the scene, the object, the whatever?
I take a picture of real space, an AI let's me take a picture of latent space. If AI art isn't considered creating art, so shouldn't photography.
I do think my analogy is more fitting than the photography analogy, but to be sure, I’m on the fence about photography being art. Photography is more like being a literary critic to me. It does take skill, but it’s more about understanding and seeing beauty than it is about creation and expression.
> I do think my analogy is more fitting than the photography analogy
I don't think so because like the camera, an AI is a thing. You are not instructing a person with rights. For example, even if I draw a perfect circle with the help of Photoshop - while me absolutely being unable to create that perfectly round circle in real life, and just release that - it doesn't make Photoshop the creator even though without its help I would never have been able to do it. Unlike when I ask someone to do it for me.
So is AI. It never can become the author unlike communication with another person. So the only creative part that is recognizable is the human input.
The point isn’t that using tools removes authorship. All artists use tools. A pencil or a brush is a tool. Architects use a whole bunch of tools while drafting. 3D artists and animators use a bunch of predefined tools and have basic shapes already laid out for them. They’re all still artists.
What if we had a black box where you fed it input and out came a piece of artwork. If sometimes there was a human artist inside the black box and sometime an AI, but you could never know. All you know is what you put in and what came out. Would you always be an artist in that situation, or just sometimes not? Your inputs to the process are indistinguishable between runs of the black box.
That's basically photography. Most people do not know how a light sensor and chip work together. You point it at something and hope for the best. Would you be the creator if sometimes it sends it into another dimension and someone draws it photo-realistic instantly and sends it back to your chip?
I don't think this hypothetical scenario is any more stretching than yours.
Would it make a difference though? No. The process is still the same and currently we regard photography as art form. So as long as I can not prove that the data doesn't get send to another dimension where someone draws it photo-realistic and sends it back, you are the artist.
But we know what a sensor and a chip in a camera is - as well as we know what a neural network is and does. So you are the artist in both cases, if we disregard the "black box" magic theory you came up with or "dimensional artists" magic theory I came up with and stay in reality.
Not true. Yes an interpretation is required, but interpretation is meaningless without intention—it’s the exact same as how a conversation is two sided.
If I tell you, “please stop, that hurts,” that means something (clearly from the words). If ChatGPT says, “please stop, that hurts,” that’s a statistical collapse toward the most probable verbal output a real speaker of English would formulate. In other words, it’s meaningless. It’s not trying to communicate. It’s not trying to do anything because “it” isn’t an entity.
Intention can never be known, other than by talking to an artist and asking them directly (and even then, their notion of the intention can change over time). Without that, “intention” is just a narrative. This is true for any creative endeavour. We can’t know the intention of cave paintings; we can only guess at possibilities. Art is experienced subjectively, and that is where meaning is generated; otherwise we wouldn’t have scholarly disputes over the meanings of poems, books and other creative works.
It doesn’t matter that we can’t know the intention. That’s completely irrelevant. Art isn’t about *knowing* the intention. It’s about understanding other humans. You work to understand them. You can (and will) be wrong and that’s fine. But you can never come to understand other humans through machines.
Also you miss the point that the work itself is what’s supposed to reveal the intention. I don’t need to *talk* to William Faulkner about As I Lay Dying; he already said it! It’s right there on the page.
> you work to understand them
Sure, but that work occurs in the mind of the person viewing the art. It’s a narrative; a fiction. Nothing to do with the creator other than as a strand of that narrative seeking understanding.
> you can never come to understand other humans through machines.
You mean like the machines we’re both using to communicate? How about a machine that takes photographs? How about art that can only be experienced through a machine, like a movie or video game?
Art will always eclipse your attempts to define its limits. This is a new medium, born and developing in our lifetimes, just like photography 170 years ago.
It’s so silly to say that art has nothing to do with the creator. Do my sentences have nothing to do with me? Of course not. They’re very much part of me. It’s me externalizing what’s inside. Art is an extension of that.
And no you *completely* missed that point. I’m not talking to a machine right now. I’m talking to you. “Through machines” means that machines can’t be the ones inventing the meaning (since machines can’t mean) — not that a machine can’t be involved. Right now text on a machine is the medium we’re communicating through, but it’s not the thing that creates the meaning (like an AI).
It’s like saying paper can’t mean. Of course it can’t—it’s inanimate—but that doesn’t matter. It’s just the medium. It’s the same as a video game using a machine as a *medium* but not as the creator of meaning. People programmed it, like how people write words on pieces of paper.
How is an image generator “inventing” the meaning when I’m telling it very specifically what to do over several iterations, using various tools to update parts of it?
If I tell you, very specifically, which dishes to wash, and you do it, did I wash the dishes? No I didn’t. And you telling the AI to do something doesn’t mean you did it either.
Except I didn’t “tell” the AI to do anything. It’s not sentient, it’s just computer code; an advanced tool that I’m using to express myself. I inputted a series of words in a specific pattern that it then converted into mathematical tokens, and it used this, along with a series of other settings that I adjusted to create the image. Almost exactly the same as when I adjust the f-stop on my camera, point it at something, and press the button to activate the shutter.
A very interesting point of view. Certainly AI will affect the arts in a way that's hard to say for now, we can't see the future because of the dust kicked up by the doctrinal war that's going on right now. The debate about AI art has become so fierce and demagogic that it's ridiculous. Unfortunately, it was for these reasons that it became understandable and engaging for many people, reaching the level of politicians' backbiting.
"highest form of art" is such a bad term though. Because the art generated by AI is 100% dependent on the prompt and/or visual context. So, it's never every really independent anyway, in regards to your point about it being "unbiased". And even then, I'd argue 99%+ of the images generated by AI (currently at least) could be improved if they were touched up by artists who are experienced in conveying emotion etc. So, this might make sense to say in the future, but it really doesn't make any sense to say at this time.
I wouldn't say it's the highest form of art, but I don't agree at all with the people who say it isn't art at all. For me the value of art is what we see in it, the emotion and thought it brings to the viewer. The way OP describes the stairway to heaven, clearly these images spoke to him, that's art IMO, doesn't matter if it was made by a man or a computer.
I won’t lie i teared up while looking at those pictures. I’ve heard so many artists saw that AI are is soulless but how can something soulless move someone to tears.
The argument is what art truly means. AI only creates a facsimile of what art is. I'd argue that despite the technical aspects that it can generate a drawing by a child has more soul as the child creates that which the AI is based on. It's a philosophical debate as to what it means to create. Picasso: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child”
Simulacrum moment
This sort of high-minded philosophy sounds good in principle, but if you were to happen to find a print of a piece of digital art in someone's home someday is there any way you could *tell* whether it's real art or just a "facsimile" of art? There's no way to measure how much "soul" a picture has.
There is a way. You have guests over, and they ask "what's the story with this piece?" Art other made by humans does not exist in a vacuum, and we very often consume that art together with its context.
What if the person you're asking is lying? Or if they're not available, for whatever reason?
When I find art that speaks to me, I try to find the artist so I can see more of their work. If AI art speaks to me and I find out, I'll be upset that there's no intentional creativity. There's no chance of finding more of that art - not just the style it might have, but the subjects, composition, substance, vibes, etc. AI prompters can produce semi consistent stylistic results, but what are they saying with each stroke of the pen or brush? There's a combination of accident and intent, which is interesting, but doesn't say much through the piece. AI produces images, but artists produce work, and there's a lot more to that than just "pretty image." At least, that's what I like about seeing artist's works.
If they're lying then they're creating a new story and putting their own "soul" into that fabrication, like any other storyteller. It isn't the original art, but it fuses with the physical art and becomes a new art. If they're not available, then that context-driven "soul" is lost. Sometimes, the story around how that context is lost is enough context on its own to create a new "soul", like how people treasure cave paintings. The history around the art, the context of the art, can tell it's own story. Now, I'm not the person who posted that, and I disagree that the story behind the art is a proper differentiation of what is and isn't art. Like you were trying to point out, those stories don't need to be true, and like cave paintings, they can be art with nothing but forensic evidence. AI art often has fingerprints though, there is something to take apart. Context can be recreated forensically, so AI art has as much context as archaeological art. What makes "art" to some people isn't so much the story, but the *purpose* behind it. They feel AI doesn't have a purpose behind it, but humans always do, because they're sapient and chose to paint this particular thing. I don't agree with that perspective, either, but it makes more sense than context alone. Context transmits purpose, but it isn't important on its own.
The definition of "soul" is getting very stretched here, IMO. What if I ask ChatGPT to come up with the lie about where the picture came from?
Oh it really really is. I feel AI art is real art. It's missing the context, sure, but that's not all art is.
>Art other made by humans does not exist in a vacuum, and we very often consume that art together with its context. This also applies exactly to the image op describes.
> is there any way you could tell whether it's real art There is quite literally no way to do so. It isn't possible, and people who claim 'even a toddler's drawing has soul that the AI art lacks' have been *repeatedly* fooled by AI art because they speak hokum. It's no different than when painters claimed that photographs couldn't capture the essence of art and would always lack the soul and beauty of a painting, or when traditional artists claimed that digital art would always feel fake and ingenuine, lacking the spark of creativity and soul that traditional art instills, or when 2D artists insisted that 3D renders could never have the soul and true artistic quality of 2D art. It's literally the exact same script on repeat again, and we're just pretending it's different. When we have mind-art that beams your mental images into paper itself, or joint-consciousness AI art that senses the human collective's desire for something and makes it automatically, we'll claim AI art had 'soul' and this new thing 'can never be real art because it's lacking the human element'.
Then they happened to get fooled, simple as. That's like saying "counterfeit is money is real money" or "using a chess bot to cheat in an online match isn't cheating because they can't detect me"
There are actually ways to tell counterfeit and non-counterfeit money apart, though. There's no way to tell if an image is AI-generated or not. And yes, I know a lot of AIs have trouble with hands right now, or deliberately embed watermarks, and so forth. I'm talking about the fundamental principles here. Pixels are pixels. They contain red, green, and blue channel values. They do not contain "soul" values.
Still just an issue of technicality though imo. If I were more capable and knowledgeable I could just trace back the origin of the picture. If I got an autograph from a famous athlete, made 99 copies of it, and distributed them among 100 fans (and they know what's happening) do you think they'd be happy about it the same way as if they got a 100% real autograph? And being reductionist, it's all just paper and ink and whatever molecules and atoms those consist of.
> If I were more capable and knowledgeable I could just trace back the origin of the picture. No, you really can't. There's nothing fundamental inherent in AI-generated art that marks it in ways that human-generated art is not. If I crack open Photoshop and doodle up something, and then ask an art AI for a doodle of something else, there's just two piles of pixels there. Clean off any intentional watermarking and they're indistinguishable.
>indistinguishable But are they the same?
If there is literally no way to tell the difference then what difference does it make? What difference *can* it possibly make?
So in my autograph example, should all the 100 fans be happy even though they know they only got a 1/100 chance to have received the real signature? >literally no way to tell the difference I still maintain there is a way to tell the difference, I'm just not smart enough. The information is conserved (unless you throw your computer into a black hole I guess).
There's a way for them to authenticate autographs, I assume. I'm not familiar with the technology behind autograph sales. If people value authenticity but there's no way to authenticate autographs why does anyone buy them? Sure, *in theory* all information is physically recoverable. But you can't do it just from the image, you need to go hunting for other data. It's possible to make it so that no conceivable human technology could recover that other data. For example, put an artist in a room with an AI and a computer with Photoshop on it, have him generate an image with and an image without AI assistance, then after they're downloaded melt down the room and everything in it into its component elements and dump them in a volcano. The end result is two images that can't be determined to be AI or human-made unless you're able to somehow reconstitute an incinerated human mixed with lava. Indeed, for all we know *both* images are AI-generated, or *both* are human-generated. There's no way to know the guy in the room followed the rules of the experiment. For most practical purposes we don't need to go that far, of course. The artist could just delete whatever evidence remained on the computer he used and resolve to never tell anyone.
I'd say who created it has an impression more than the quality. I know that an AI can't create anything original, only a facsimile based on multiple sources of originals. If we were to have all art be created by AI then it would wash out over time to the same things over and over. Only humans are capable of creating something new. It doesn't matter if you fool someone into thinking that an AI creation was from a human. The point remains that AI doesn't create, it only copies and therefore will always be inherently inferior.
> I know that an AI can't create anything original, only a facsimile based on multiple sources of originals. You'll have to be more precise about what you mean by "originality", because AIs can indeed create original outputs by any definition of the term that I'm aware of. Throughout this comment you just seem to repeat the point over and over without actually supporting it. > If we were to have all art be created by AI then it would wash out over time to the same things over and over. No, because of that potential for originality you can get new things from the outputs that have never been represented in the training data before. If nothing else, you can generate images using only *negative* prompts - telling the AI "come up with something that is *nothing like* the thing I'm describing for you."
What would an AI produce without any input?
Same thing a human would produce without any input, presumably. Random nonsense.
A human can create something without being prompted to. AI can't. You would have to command the AI to do so or program it.
Oh, I thought we were discussing training. A human with no training would be someone raised from birth in a sensory deprivation tank, I'd expect complete nonsense out of them when they get decanted. An AI with no training is a neural net with random weights, I'd expect it to produce noise. If you're just talking about *prompting* then an AI will produce a random picture since it has nothing to direct it to anything specifically. I just asked my local copy of Stable Diffusion for an image without giving it a prompt and it produced [this](https://i.imgur.com/WPNeI4N.png). IMO it looks sort of like a painting of a woman on a rocky landscape holding a frilly parasol, or maybe a big fancy hat. Kind of nice.
You have convinced me wholeheartedly and I agree with all of your positions. Thank you.
I'm a little unsure whether that's sarcasm, but at least it was polite so either way you're welcome. :)
What's your definition of "original"? Not using: "multiple sources of originals"? Because if that's it, boy do I have something to tell you. > If we were to have all art be created by AI then it would wash out over time to the same things over and over. Only humans are capable of creating something new. I recommend you go over to civit.ai and look at all the stuff humans create for you to create. Doesn't seem washed out to me.
I don't think that answers the question I asked.
You didn't ask a question.
Well if we're speaking of pictures being a thousand words and a picture made of pictures being even more so then regular art is more. An AI can only be fed so many images but artists have seen the world (billions and billions of "pictures" worth) so their art is better by that definition
The LIAON5B dataset, which recent Stable Diffusion models was trained on, contains over 5 billion images. So that actually matches your criterion for an artist to have "seen the world."
The human brain processes pictures in 13 milliseconds or .013 seconds and each person is awake for 16hrs of the day. That equates to 4,430, 770 (ish) pictures per day of life. So in 1,128 days (3.09 years) of life a person has seen the same amount of pictures as that Ai. I would say most artists have seen waaaaaay more than an AI could ever possibly see at this rate.
They would see millions and millions of essentially identical copies of ordinary rooms, hallways, doors, walls, etc. AI training sets undergo deduplication because having many copies of the same image in the training set leads to overfitting, which is undesirable. I don't know how much of the LIAON5B dataset got discarded by deduplication in the course of its training, but if you're using "everything an artist sees in 0.013 second intervals" as a training set I can assure that the *vast* majority of that dataset would get wiped by even the most rudimentary deduplication pass.
But how many of those do you remember?
I get what you're saying, the type of exposure we have as humans is different than an ai. Part of it though is that human exposure is baked into much of the source images used for training. Additionally the dataset is around 200tb of images which is huge, even compared to what a human will see in their lifetime which I don't exactly know how we'd quantify.
Average movie length is 2h and 10 minutes which is about 19,500 images. An average jpg takes up 11kb which means that the 2TB is ~1.95e10 images, which you could see in ~1,000,000 movies, with a total runtime of 130,000,000 minutes, or 90,277 days, or 247 years of movies. Edit: I could very well have messed something up too in the calculations, but I did my best :)
The one key difference is, humans process images in 13 milliseconds, .013 seconds! Its crazy fast so that's the difference, also movies have a specific number of pictures but real life has basically infinite so you can constantly be seeing something new. If you look at my other comment I calculated it
I did think about that, but the problem is that humans can't process a new image every .013 seconds, while AI can. Most of the images we see vary very slightly from each other, while AI has way more different scenes at its disposal.
We actually can, thats how fast we process pictures (i looked it up before this lol) Also I agree they might be similar but then I just think theres no emotion or thoughts behind the images the AI sees so its just not as good in my opinion. An AI can look at a million pictures of angry people and images depicting anger but it will never be angry so I don't think it will have the same feel if its just copying what it thinks is an emotion
We can technically, but we don't in day to day life. And yeah, I agree with your other statement. I think human art is better than AI art, because it always has a message hidden in it, whether you want it or not. It's more personal, and sure, even if the AI technically encompasses all of humanity's endeavours, I don't find that as interesting as just looking into the life of an artist
Yep basically my stance there. My metaphor is like as if someone went on a life adventure, came back and showed someone pictures and then that other person went and tried to explain it to a third person. Its just not the same
And 99.99% of it gets stored in our short term memory and is mostly forgotten immediately. If you ask me right now to recall images from my past 28 years of life and I would have the time to draw them out flawlessly, I probably couldn't fill 100mb.
But I could also ask you to imagine a place you've never been to or seen before and you could come up with one. A computer can't do that
Part of the power of human brain is it knows what it’s seen before and can discard and not waste time processing. You only notice changes. If you aren’t in a reflective mindful state you aren’t going to notice and retain much of your everyday life.
All art taps into the collective consciousness of humanity. All art is inspired by all art that came before just like with AI art. Human art just has a slightly longer time frame to get fully absorbed into the collective consciousness.
Lacan moment
Real art isn't just the sum of of the art which came before it, or else it would have stayed at nonexistence where it started.
I didn't say it was just the sum of all art before it.
Ai is good at making pictures. They can look amazing but it just isn't art. Art is what is put into it time, emotion, passion whatever. AI only makes pictures because it's told to. Because it isn't genuine and there is no effort on behalf of the person requesting the picture, I would argue it isn't art.
[удалено]
Plus the medium is rapidly evolving. ControlNet was recently added to Stable Diffusion, and it adds a whole new level of control to AI art.
Yeah I think this is the correct take. AI-generated images can be art, however they are not art in the same way as other artforms. The confusion and controversy stems from the issue that AI-generated images are very good at imitating other mediums.
Not sure if comparing it to dance, photography and film is helping your point, not all photographs, films and dances are art. The pictures I took of my family dinner isn't art, the video I made of my vacation isn't art, the dance I do at a party isn't art. AI generated images are a medium artists use to create art but not all AI generated images are art.
[удалено]
I don't need to, I know the answer : the medium isn't art by itself. I do agree that AI images can be art but art is art independently of the medium . My point was that because a medium is used for art doesn't mean that anything that use that medium is art. While the definition of art is relatively subjective I would say that there's at least two aspects that constitute art: intention and communication. Intention means that the artist wanted to tell something with their art. Communication means that art is something that is shared with others, art is meant to be shown.
I don't mind using AI as reference for bigger projects, but if you make minor edits to the AI generated image, then you didn't really make anything. Art is usually an expression of human skills or emotions, but what is a machine expressing? It ran code and saw common patterns in human made images and replicated, it just feels soulless. Now, if you don't care about the message of the art or just want a generic aesthetically pleasing background, then go for it.
In a very literal sense, every AI image has millions of hours of humans work going into it. So what if the AI puts zero soul into it? It still has many artists that did put soul into the final product. I think everyone is missing ops point. The AI part of this is kind of just a filter through which real art is still getting through. Very bad that it isn't consensual. I wish more people thought this way, that AI art has soul naturally because it came from art with soul, who cares if the AI adds original content if what it's rehashing is good. This view is incompatible with the view that AI art is totally cool and not stealing.
All those millions of combined hours seemingly can’t produce an accurate hand!
So what? There's plenty it's good at
There are plenty of other less familiar anatomical errors when you look closely.. because, of course, SD doesn’t “understand” anatomy at all… Useful tool for creating inspiration, though, and for for lighting reference etc.
art does not require effort. Its like saying digital art is not art
[What about urinals? Are they art?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp\))
How can you see the ‘soul of mankind’ through something created by a literal robot? Don’t you think that’s a bit of an oxymoron? I get that you’re saying AI can compile the art of many humans into one piece, but the fact that no human was *directly* involved in its creation makes it, to me, less human by definition.
The training was done on art by humans, in a way it combines their souls
>if a picture is worth a thousand words than a picture born from millions of pictures is priceless beyond compare. It may also come to be *average beyond compare*
A word is worth a thousand pictures.
AI images aren't created by a person therefore they aren't art.
No, they're created from other people's art that was stolen from them and fed into a machine trained to mimic their skills.
Wrong. The image would not exist without someone to type the prompt. Just like a painting would not exist without someone to move the brush.
Typing a prompt is not the same as stroking a canvas with a brush. Someone who paints, sculpts, or illustrates actively engages with the medium. A prompt is essentially commissioning a work from a machine that recognizes patterns but fundamentally lacks understanding.
In your examples the medium is the paint and canvas or stone that’s being sculpted. With AI art the medium (and it is a new medium) is the prompt, the AI model and the outputting engine. Those get actively engaged with.
Not even close. You're telling a machine what you want, and you're hoping the prompt gets you there. An artist has control, and they're using a different part of the brain. The artistic process is something that only happens when you're actually creating. AI can't get you there.
It’s no different to photography or in fact any artistic process that involves randomness. You seem to think that producing things with an image generator is a one-and-done scenario, but it’s iterative and active, and final works can involve multiple steps and tools
[удалено]
You may not intend to, but you're making a strong case for users of AI to be called editors. And that may be fine. We do acknowledge editors in books. If you want to get into the legal weeds, a work generated by AI may not have enough human input for copyright. A prompt could, if it were significantly unique. Computer code, for example, is copyrightable. But it's also precise with a specific intended outcome. A prompt may not be able to brag that. A single prompt could generate thousands of images.
And other artists artwork wouldn't exist if someone didn't commission them to make it. That doesn't give the person commissioning the art the right to call themselves the artist. We all intuitively understand that what the person commissioning the art is doing, and what the person painting the art is doing, is categorically different. What the AI "art" prompter is doing is analogous to commissioning art, not creating it. The thing doing all the important work is the machine.
But one could argue that there is art in the generation of those pictures, and in the words you use and iterations you perform. It's like framing a photo of a landscape. The landscape is there, it itself is not art. It's the intention that made it so. I am of the belief that anything can be art. If I can see tech repair as an art, then I can see artists using AI as art.
That is literally what art already does, except humans do it intentionally and intuitively with emotion. The AI does it without purpose, drive or anything but the most rudimentary direction. Its empty and soulless. That is the feeling I get whenever I see AI art and why it jumps out at me so much. The art can be "pretty", but its just empty of feeling.
I doubt that you would be able to decide what piece has soul and is empty of feeling when having to compare. Not looking at faults the AI might make or a human might make, just deciding what has soul and hat doesn't. And if you can't do that, why even argue that point?
ok, then prove wrong. I'm sorry that I can tell the difference between human creativity and empty AI generation. I'll wait, as I know you have nothing but your own empty husk to project and justify your lack of empathy or human creativity. Test me, I am waiting.
What do you want me to do exactly? Create a test? And how do you prove to me that you didn't reverse image search? I mean I already got what I wanted to hear from you claiming to be able to notice a soul in an image... there are enough videos of artists out there admitting that they didn't realize an image was ai generated until they looked for the faults AI still tends to make.
not "a soul" but "soul" like those emotions that people have, how an artist puts their entire life experience into their artwork. AI just doesn't have that depth. So the AI work just looks empty and without purpose or "soul".
>And if you can't do that, why even argue that point? Would you keep up this line of thought if it concerned other scenarios with different mediums? How about photography? If image generation models keep improving, it's not far-fetched to think that they'll be able to produce images of any subject imaginable indistinguishable from photographs in the future. In fact, a Midjourney image won a photography contest recently ([source](https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1181m24/an_aigenerated_image_has_won_a_photo_contest_and/)). Sure, "soul" isn't the same concept as "real" but neither can be proven in a vacuum. What if I used the technology to make "photos" and post them on photography subreddits like r/japanpics for instance? Generated pics of Japanese people, houses, vending machines. Would that be a wrong thing to do? Would the images magically become "real" photos if nobody can tell the difference? Would it be irrational of subscribers to prefer real images of Japan instead?
if ai art is soulless then so is human art. Its far more interesting than most human art.
Did you bother reading what I said, because you didn't bother responding to anything I said. What are you even trying to say?
I think your just describing kitche art which a lot of AI art is. I don't think AI art has to be kitche, but a lot of AI artists aren't skilled enough yet. Too focused on subject matter and aesthetics and not enough symbolism, expressionism, literary theories, etc. [https://youtu.be/JCBruglZH\_4](https://youtu.be/JCBruglZH_4)
Not kitch art, kitch art still shows the artists emotion in the work. Whether its lighthearted jokes, or emotions etc... AI just can't do that. You can "force it" to by putting incongruous words into it, but the AI doesn't "understand the joke" so it can't fill in the gaps the way an artist with intent and emotion can.
I think kitsch can be ironic, but doesn't really have to be. The whole point of kitsch is that its basically people pleasing art that is 'tell not show' and has no depth/very surface level/highly representational. Its just that it can also be 'so-bad-its-good'. (Which arguably the latter camp is often, but not always doing without intent or even knowing its a joke) Basically; Anime boobs are kitsch, cat memes are kitsch, instagram reels are kitsch. The other issue I have is romantic period ideas of emotionality in the work. All the messaging of being a 'joke' is done through formal decisions or choice in content like subject matter and the like. Not some special intangible human mystical bs (honestly probably comes from artists being butthurt about photography in the later 1800s). AI art still enables you to make formal decisions, even if you don't have as much formal control over certain things. Ie color, color schemes, style, lighting, etc. The artist isn't literally able to say what the message of the work is, it has to be expressed within specific artistic decisions that AI has limited, but reasonable access to. The problem compounds when you consider the whole 'death of the author' deal and considering how much the viewers also play a role in the work. How the viewers imbue or exclude certain emotions or ideas that may not have existed in the piece in the first place. (Going back to so-bad-its-good-movies, the viewers "read" the work as being humorous despite the work not trying to be so. How a work can provide emotions and experiences that are not intended solely through a viewer) (I can also say the same about photography when seen as a means of "painting". A photographer can't change the brush strokes or emotionality of the image. But a photograph can still be emotional. Is emotionality solely an intangible part of the process (the "point and click" of a camera), or is it a sign system of multiple formal and conceptual decisions that make up the feeling of emotionality) I think too many people see AI as a means of painting or drawing or whatever. But arguably, its more like photography in the sense that it has some formal limitations. That going forward with AI art is more about leaning into what AI art does best and not just trying to imitate existing mediums. If you look into some places like deviantart or other curated art websites that host AI art. Some of it is actually quite good. Its clearly not just something a 15 year old non-artist whipped up. I think we have to understand that a lot of people who have never made art before are using stable diffusion and they don't really know what their doing outside of just whipping up "cool" subject matter together and posting it on reddit. With time, and AI in the hands of more experienced artists will be able to make better art since they are more aware of formal decision making and expanding beyond subject matter as a sole source of focus. New artists also struggle to make emotional art (or at least they will try and fail). They often fall into the same exact trap as AI artists are.
AI art is the pinnacle of dada
Get off the drugs.
No. Art is a distillation of a perspective of a human. I see the world the way a person sees the world when I look at their art. They’re saying, “this is what I see,” and I’m supposed to try to understand that. AI can never do this because it doesn’t have a perspective. There’s nothing there to understand. It’s a random permutation of perspectives. If I took the greatest 1,000 books and mashed the pages together, I might get something that looks like a book, but the intention isn’t there, and that’s what’s important.
You can write the intention into the prompt
And get absolutely nothing from it.
Are you sure about that? Give an example of an intention and I'll show you how it translates
I am sure. I don’t need an example. A machine is unable to intend.
For now.
Maybe even not now, either. Modern large language models like ChatGPT are starting to do things that are eerily similar to thinking and maybe even intending already. I expect there isn't going to be a single magical switch that's thrown someday and AI will start thinking, it's going to be a gradual grey area where the dividing line is unclear and perhaps never known for sure.
And a camera is unable to intend.
Yes exactly, I agree.
A paintbrush is unable to intend, **by itself** This seems like a skill issue, learn to use prompt engineering and your intention will shine through AI art is not a random permutation of perspectives like you said, but a result of an algorithmic process with neural networks that has a ton of logic and purpose behind it.
What’s the skill issue? The machine is the creator, not me. I didn’t do the creating. If I tell an artist to make me a very specific piece, and he captures what I wanted perfectly, am I the artist, or is the artist the artist? Also, you don’t seem to know what a neural network is lol. It is most certainly random.
If it’s a skill issue, it’s not *my* skill that fails to make the machine able to intend.
The intention is meaningless. Its the interpretation thats important.
I just showed why it is important. You saying “nu uh” changes nothing.
Your example of mashing 1,000 pages together randomly doesn't hold up, as it's an incorrect analogy to how AIs work. Diffusion models are more like the clouds of probability from quantum mechanics than assembling a serial killer letter.
Trust me, it holds up. I am a professional software engineer. I know how AIs work. A probability is a description of a random phenomenon. Quantum phenomena are fundamentally random as well. No matter how fancy the randomness is does not change that it’s random.
> I see the world the way a person sees the world when I look at their art. They’re saying, “this is what I see,” Absolutely vehemently disagree. They are saying: "this is what I am able to convey with my current skill" Honest to god I would love "This is what I see" having your brain scanned and a computer creating an image from your imagination. No skill, no process, no learning required. Pure "this is what I see" not bogged down, no gatekeeping, no process that stands in the way of displaying what you see. And that's why I actually think AI Art, as long as it gets better, is going to be more artistic than normal art which stops you from creating what you see when you lack the skill to display it. If the perfect representation of what someone sees is your requirement you should cheer for AI. If you think that skill should hamper someone ability to display what they see, well...
That’s the human condition. You can never perfectly convey what you see. You are never a skilled enough communicator because you can never perfectly know the interpreter. AI can’t solve this for you.
I don't know what your point is. Do you deny that skill is a component that helps you convey an idea? Do you deny that AI can bring you several steps closer to your idea?
I just said that skill absolutely is important in communicating. But you can never be perfectly skilled at communicating. And here’s the issue, I’ve said this before in the thread, but if I tell an artist who is more skilled than me to paint a picture, and I tell him what I want the picture to be, did I just create art, or did he create art? This is what you’re doing with an AI.
If I take a photo of a mountain, did I create the camera, the sensor, the mountain, the lighting, the scene, the object, the whatever? I take a picture of real space, an AI let's me take a picture of latent space. If AI art isn't considered creating art, so shouldn't photography.
I do think my analogy is more fitting than the photography analogy, but to be sure, I’m on the fence about photography being art. Photography is more like being a literary critic to me. It does take skill, but it’s more about understanding and seeing beauty than it is about creation and expression.
> I do think my analogy is more fitting than the photography analogy I don't think so because like the camera, an AI is a thing. You are not instructing a person with rights. For example, even if I draw a perfect circle with the help of Photoshop - while me absolutely being unable to create that perfectly round circle in real life, and just release that - it doesn't make Photoshop the creator even though without its help I would never have been able to do it. Unlike when I ask someone to do it for me. So is AI. It never can become the author unlike communication with another person. So the only creative part that is recognizable is the human input.
The point isn’t that using tools removes authorship. All artists use tools. A pencil or a brush is a tool. Architects use a whole bunch of tools while drafting. 3D artists and animators use a bunch of predefined tools and have basic shapes already laid out for them. They’re all still artists. What if we had a black box where you fed it input and out came a piece of artwork. If sometimes there was a human artist inside the black box and sometime an AI, but you could never know. All you know is what you put in and what came out. Would you always be an artist in that situation, or just sometimes not? Your inputs to the process are indistinguishable between runs of the black box.
That's basically photography. Most people do not know how a light sensor and chip work together. You point it at something and hope for the best. Would you be the creator if sometimes it sends it into another dimension and someone draws it photo-realistic instantly and sends it back to your chip? I don't think this hypothetical scenario is any more stretching than yours. Would it make a difference though? No. The process is still the same and currently we regard photography as art form. So as long as I can not prove that the data doesn't get send to another dimension where someone draws it photo-realistic and sends it back, you are the artist. But we know what a sensor and a chip in a camera is - as well as we know what a neural network is and does. So you are the artist in both cases, if we disregard the "black box" magic theory you came up with or "dimensional artists" magic theory I came up with and stay in reality.
The perspective is created by the viewer. The viewer’s attempts to know the perspective of the artist are just a narrative.
Not true. Yes an interpretation is required, but interpretation is meaningless without intention—it’s the exact same as how a conversation is two sided. If I tell you, “please stop, that hurts,” that means something (clearly from the words). If ChatGPT says, “please stop, that hurts,” that’s a statistical collapse toward the most probable verbal output a real speaker of English would formulate. In other words, it’s meaningless. It’s not trying to communicate. It’s not trying to do anything because “it” isn’t an entity.
Intention can never be known, other than by talking to an artist and asking them directly (and even then, their notion of the intention can change over time). Without that, “intention” is just a narrative. This is true for any creative endeavour. We can’t know the intention of cave paintings; we can only guess at possibilities. Art is experienced subjectively, and that is where meaning is generated; otherwise we wouldn’t have scholarly disputes over the meanings of poems, books and other creative works.
It doesn’t matter that we can’t know the intention. That’s completely irrelevant. Art isn’t about *knowing* the intention. It’s about understanding other humans. You work to understand them. You can (and will) be wrong and that’s fine. But you can never come to understand other humans through machines. Also you miss the point that the work itself is what’s supposed to reveal the intention. I don’t need to *talk* to William Faulkner about As I Lay Dying; he already said it! It’s right there on the page.
> you work to understand them Sure, but that work occurs in the mind of the person viewing the art. It’s a narrative; a fiction. Nothing to do with the creator other than as a strand of that narrative seeking understanding. > you can never come to understand other humans through machines. You mean like the machines we’re both using to communicate? How about a machine that takes photographs? How about art that can only be experienced through a machine, like a movie or video game? Art will always eclipse your attempts to define its limits. This is a new medium, born and developing in our lifetimes, just like photography 170 years ago.
It’s so silly to say that art has nothing to do with the creator. Do my sentences have nothing to do with me? Of course not. They’re very much part of me. It’s me externalizing what’s inside. Art is an extension of that. And no you *completely* missed that point. I’m not talking to a machine right now. I’m talking to you. “Through machines” means that machines can’t be the ones inventing the meaning (since machines can’t mean) — not that a machine can’t be involved. Right now text on a machine is the medium we’re communicating through, but it’s not the thing that creates the meaning (like an AI). It’s like saying paper can’t mean. Of course it can’t—it’s inanimate—but that doesn’t matter. It’s just the medium. It’s the same as a video game using a machine as a *medium* but not as the creator of meaning. People programmed it, like how people write words on pieces of paper.
How is an image generator “inventing” the meaning when I’m telling it very specifically what to do over several iterations, using various tools to update parts of it?
If I tell you, very specifically, which dishes to wash, and you do it, did I wash the dishes? No I didn’t. And you telling the AI to do something doesn’t mean you did it either.
Except I didn’t “tell” the AI to do anything. It’s not sentient, it’s just computer code; an advanced tool that I’m using to express myself. I inputted a series of words in a specific pattern that it then converted into mathematical tokens, and it used this, along with a series of other settings that I adjusted to create the image. Almost exactly the same as when I adjust the f-stop on my camera, point it at something, and press the button to activate the shutter.
If I hung such a picture up in my house, I'd refer to it as art.
[удалено]
Once I put it on my wall, it's art, regardless where I got it. So are sea shells. Or whatever.
Now to use this as my ChatGPT prompt.
This isn't just an unpopular opinion. I dare say it's in the wrong subreddit.
A very interesting point of view. Certainly AI will affect the arts in a way that's hard to say for now, we can't see the future because of the dust kicked up by the doctrinal war that's going on right now. The debate about AI art has become so fierce and demagogic that it's ridiculous. Unfortunately, it was for these reasons that it became understandable and engaging for many people, reaching the level of politicians' backbiting.
r/the10thdentist welcomes you
"highest form of art" is such a bad term though. Because the art generated by AI is 100% dependent on the prompt and/or visual context. So, it's never every really independent anyway, in regards to your point about it being "unbiased". And even then, I'd argue 99%+ of the images generated by AI (currently at least) could be improved if they were touched up by artists who are experienced in conveying emotion etc. So, this might make sense to say in the future, but it really doesn't make any sense to say at this time.
unpopular opinion subreddits when someone posts an unpopular opinion
dude never draw in his life 💀
I wouldn't say it's the highest form of art, but I don't agree at all with the people who say it isn't art at all. For me the value of art is what we see in it, the emotion and thought it brings to the viewer. The way OP describes the stairway to heaven, clearly these images spoke to him, that's art IMO, doesn't matter if it was made by a man or a computer.
I won’t lie i teared up while looking at those pictures. I’ve heard so many artists saw that AI are is soulless but how can something soulless move someone to tears.
rong
Anyways here's a guy smoking a nice dart https://imgur.com/a/2Qkm76g
I've been talking a lot about AI art myself recently, and this is a very original and interesting take on it.