this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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Made printing imitations of art easier. Sure, those imitations can be used as part of a larger work, but the point still stands.
people said the same thing about photography. And that was before digital photography, back when some level of knowledge of photochemistry was required, and you needed a dark room to develop in, etc. People said that it was just an imitation of painting. That turned out to not be quite the case and photography developed into its own art form, and painting became less focused on realism and documenting reality since that became the domain of photography. What photography really accomplished was reducing the amount of time and technical ability required to produce art. Same with AI stuff even if it's reactionary junk a lot of the time, that says more about who's writing the prompt and who's curating the database that the model is trained on. I imagine sculptors were also upset when 3D modeling and 3D printing showed up.
I go with Marx on this and stress that the problem isn't the means of production but who controls it. Even in the context of AI generated art, the labor is reduced to the amount of time needed to think up and write a prompt (the labor of thinking of and writing a prompt is very small) but you can then take the output and manually refine it using traditional methods if you're capable, or refine/iterate the prompt etc. So there is some creativity going into it. And then of course AI models usually have a database of art that has already been created to draw statistical data from when generating new art. The process of curating/maintaining/labelling that database requires a huge amount of labor, as does the process of writing and maintaining the model itself. Technology is what Marx called constant capital. Constant capital is just dead labor. i.e. labor that was already performed in the past. When you generate AI art it's not that there's no labor going into it, it's just that the labor was performed in the past by countless people. Same as when you use a hammer you bought from a store. You still exercise labor power to use the hammer, it's just that the labor of making the hammer was performed in the past for you by different people.
It's also not only prompt writing but also image-to-image. So you can take a crudely drawn input image and have the AI refine it. So that still requires creativity on your part, as well.
I've generated a lot of images with these tools, but they're not art.
The problem with image generation is that, unlike a camera which replaces the choices that a painter would make while painting a scene with the choices a photographer makes while shooting it, image generation robs an artist of the ability to make choices while constructing their work and doesn't replace them with anything substantial.
Now you might be tempted to say that engineering the prompt lets you make choices while generating images. It does so only in the most surface-level way possible, alienating the "artist" from 99% of what goes into creating an image. All of the choices that a painter would make while the paint is hitting the canvas are instead made by the algorithm, and they are made specifically to copy the choices artists in the past have made, not to come up with anything novel or unique. Then the person who wrote the prompt views the output and decides if it's "close enough" to what they had in mind or not, without exercising artistic control over the process at any point save for the very beginning and end of it.
That is not to say that you can't take a generated image and start making art with it, but every pixel that was generated that you don't change is a choice that the bot made that you didn't, a tiny bit of alienation from your own work that you have invited into the artistic process, and frankly that cheapens it.
the bot made zero choices. It consulted your prompt (a choice you made) and then it consulted a database full of pre-existing human-made art that has been curated and labelled and statistically sorted. Also at some point some random noise is introduced so it doesn't generate the same thing twice. Bots do not make choices. These are statistical models. It's helpful not to mystify them or attribute agency to them.
Also I don't get the point of gatekeeping art according to technical ability, which just comes down to how much free time you have to practice, your level of educational attainment, how much disposable income you have to pay for said education, and your physical ability. If a person with no arms decides to generate a painting with AI from a carefully written prompt they came up with, and someone says "that's not real art because you didn't use your hands"... what is the point of that? If an idea comes to mind, you should be free to make it however you want.
~~I never said the bot made choices. I said it removed choices from the artist.~~ Whoops thanks for replying in good faith though.
Edit: The important thing is that the choices from the artist are getting taken away.
Also I never said you need technical ability to make art, I'm working from the unstated assumption that it is the choices we make when we create art that makes it... art. A person who is bad a doodling who nevertheless makes a drawing has made art - that same person putting a couple words into a generator prompt has not.
Last thing: don't fucking come at me with an argument about gatekeeping based on class and wealth when the only reason this fucking toy exists for you to play with in the first place is untold billions of hours of stolen labor from poor countries.
you said
Now that you have clarified what you really meant, that is helpful, but I hope you can see why I was confused by your original wording (bolded above). Also I don't think it removes choices from the artist since the artist is still free to discard whatever the AI makes and re-generate it or use a more traditional method. The freedom to reject the output if you don't like it is a choice along with the choice to make the prompt.
That's fair. I'm sorry for misunderstanding you in that regard. I just find this subject interesting. I'm not coming at this from a place of anger or trying to annoy people.
Your correct and I wouldn't dream of disagreeing with this.
Nevertheless I think it's more of a tool than a toy. The problem is that the tools are made by the workers and owned by the capitalists. We should be reacting to that economic arrangement and not the tools themselves.
This is a really good argument I think for excluding most AI content from "art". You put into words that disappointing, unamused feeling you get after the novelty wears off when you learn an image is AI. Like it's illegitimate but you can't explain why because historically art has always been pushing boundaries and making people question art itself. Maybe in the future, people saying this will be considered luddites who can't appreciate "painting with words" or whatever.
Fair point; my bad
I was just thinking about the original reaction painters had to photography and extending that to other fields which was lazy on my part.
Nah you didn't sound like an ass, no worries
glad to hear
I already said it can be a viable tool and addition to an artist's work; my point is that on its own, using LLM output directly with no further interaction is like taking random photographs, I mean completely random photographs no framing or lighting considerations or anything of the sort, just flashing the bulb a bunch of times with no further decisions made (yeah yeah that itself could be an intentional art project if we go down that rabbit hole I know I know).
The pic you provided had enough artist input in its parameters to be like an artfully-taken photograph.
No arguments from me there.