Are Generative AI (LLM programs) produced illustrations… art?

[Spockydog]

6 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

So what?

 

Just pointing out a fact.

You think anyone cares when Gary Lightbody is mumbling his reasons for writing Run in front of 44000 people in some stadium?

I'm sure Taylor Swift had a big ole message n her latest 247 track opus, but really, who gives a shit about her old boyfriend?

Yeah, we can scratch our chins and wonder at the artist's demons or inspirations or whatnot, but, frankly, zzzzzzzz.........

Edited April 24 by Spockydog

[Spockydog]

Yeah. I realise that Swift was a bad example. Her fans are cray cray.

 

[Jace, Extat]

Ooh, no. I'm with the Frenchman on this one. As material existence becomes more and more token the importance of human inspiration in art is even more important. To remind us that we live for more than imminent comfort.

[Rippounet]

13 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

You think anyone cares when Gary Lightbody is mumbling his reasons for writing Run in front of 44000 people in some stadium?

[...]

Yeah, we can scratch our chins and wonder at the artist's demons or inspirations or whatnot, but, frankly, zzzzzzzz.........

Aren't you a bit quick to forget where this discussion is happening?

Though I suppose that, if you're on the truly cynical side of things, you could argue that Martin killed himself as an author.

10 minutes ago, Jace, Extat said:

Ooh, no. I'm with the Frenchman on this one.

Ah, shit. It really is the end times then.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

6 hours ago, Rippounet said:

So what?

If we stop caring where our art comes from, after not caring where our objects or food come from, what's going to be left to make human life valuable?
If it's all made by a system, why should I care about anyone that has no significant influence on me? If even art were to be created by machines, then the life of strangers would become truly meaningless.
It's a small detail in the greater picture, and yet it could also be seen as a pretty big step on the road to nihilism.

Didn't think of you as traditionalist, with me ending up in the modernist camp arguing, the message is whatever you see in it.

[Luzifer's right hand]

At least you can't fall in love with something only to discover that the creator is a horrible person later. 

That's the one advantage of AI created content I see.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

4 hours ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

At least you can't fall in love with something only to discover that the creator is a horrible person later. 

That's the one advantage of AI created content I see.

Tell that to my elderly relative who has fallen in love with a bot designed to ask for money after softing them up with complements.  They refuse to give money and to believe the bot is a bot…

[A Horse Named Stranger]

22 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Tell that to my elderly relative who has fallen in love with a bot designed to ask for money after softing them up with complements.  They refuse to give money and to believe the bot is a bot…

Trump campaign/defense fundraiser?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

4 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Trump campaign/defense fundraiser?

No. It’s coming at them through a dating app.  They are convinced it is real despite all evidence to the contrary.  Can a human have real love for a bot?  Can that love be real the way people defending AI “art” claim AI output can be “art”?

Edited April 25 by Ser Scot A Ellison

[Larry of the Lawn]

16 hours ago, Spockydog said:

Scot, here's an experiment....

Q. What is art?

A. At its most basic, something you look at or listen to that pleases and/or moves you emotionally.

Agreed?

Nope. I found the recent solar eclipse to be awesome in the literal sense of the word.  My dad is pleased emotionally watching baseball.  Neither of these things are art.  

Art is more than just something that produces an emotional response.  This premise here, that the rest of your post is based on, simply isn't true. 

I'm not going to argue that art requires the creator to have an intentional message, or that it be understandable.  But I think (so this is just my opinion) that one of the differences between art and something else, is that art requires an intention to create on the part of the person doing it.

I'd argue that not all photographs are art. Not all books are either.  

The artist is in some way marking the art by taking something that is inside themself and putting it outside into the world. Art predates written language.  We've found bone flutes over 100,000 years old.  There is an element of self-expression in art that makes it what it is.

You could argue that we're all just meat robots and that anything we do is a byproduct of our programming and our experience at that specific moment of action, that there is no such thing as originality, that everything created is simply a reassembly of things that came before.

As a person and maybe a Luddite, I disagree.  

AI-created stuff isn't art.  It might be a really good facsimile thereof, but we're going to need a new word for it.  It's not the same thing when the creator is removed.  I think we might already be at a point with graphics and music where we can't necessarily discern if something is AI generated or not, where we can't actually tell if it's art or not.  

 

I can't tell the difference between a fake diamond and a diamond simply by looking at them.  It doesn't mean they're the same thing.  

 

Edited April 25 by Larry of the Lawn
Make it make sense, autocorrect

[Liffguard]

It is art, it just sucks.

The product itself is ugly, it contributes to a flattening and smoothing of our collective culture, and it increases economic precarity for working creatives.

It's bad art with negative social effects, but that doesn't make it not art.

 

PS: I also just want to push back a little on the variations of "I'm not a Luddite but..." type statements. I want to make it clear I explicitly am a Luddite.

[Larry of the Lawn]

1 hour ago, Liffguard said:

It is art, it just sucks.

The product itself is ugly, it contributes to a flattening and smoothing of our collective culture, and it increases economic precarity for working creatives.

It's bad art with negative social effects, but that doesn't make it not art.

 

PS: I also just want to push back a little on the variations of "I'm not a Luddite but..." type statements. I want to make it clear I explicitly am a Luddite.

This essay should be required reading on the broad topic of the ethics of technology, automation, and how we think about reactions to it, and is rather prescient for being written 40 years ago, particularly the conclusion:

Is it ok to be a Luddite?

[Liffguard]

57 minutes ago, Larry of the Lawn said:

This essay should be required reading on the broad topic of the ethics of technology, automation, and how we think about reactions to it, and is rather prescient for being written 40 years ago, particularly the conclusion:

Is it ok to be a Luddite?

See also Blood in the Machine, Brian Merchant's latest book.

[Rippounet]

1 hour ago, Larry of the Lawn said:

This essay should be required reading on the broad topic of the ethics of technology, automation, and how we think about reactions to it, and is rather prescient for being written 40 years ago, particularly the conclusion:

Is it ok to be a Luddite?

Yes, but I'd like to unerline this passage:

Quote

The knitting machines which provoked the first Luddite disturbances had been putting people out of work for well over two centuries. Everybody saw this happening - it became part of daily life. They also saw the machines coming more and more to be the property of men who did not work, only owned and hired. It took no German philosopher, then or later, to point out what this did, had been doing, to wages and jobs. Public feeling about the machines could never have been simple unreasoning horror, but likely something more complex: the love/hate that grows up between humans and machinery - especially when it's been around for a while - not to mention serious resentment toward at least two multiplications of effect that were seen as unfair and threatening. One was the concentration of capital that each machine represented, and the other was the ability of each machine to put a certain number of humans out of work - to be ''worth'' that many human souls.

I think this points out that it's the specific combination of technology and capitalism that is so dangerous.
So it depends how you want to define "Luddism." If we're talking about the historical movement, then yes, we should all be Luddites, because neoliberalism threatens to make any technology terrifying.
But if we're using a more common sense of the word, I think it would be better to direct the rage at socio-economic structures instead of technology itself. I'd say Iain Banks had an interesting view of what AIs could provide humanity in a socialist perspective. One could argue that it's a rather paternalistic view, but I think such a view is warranted given history, and I'd rather take that than the absolutely moronic idea that "the market" will allow for the proper development and use of technology.

Another way to put it is that I'm a bit reluctant to embrace Luddism, because the early days of computer science and IT offered incredible promises for humanity, that were only betrayed once massive corporations took over and redirected the entire enterprise toward maximizing profit. We still have remnants of the potential though, like wikipedia, and as I said earlier, communication really can be said to be a good in itself, so I'd rather target our corporate overlords than the machines.

[Larry of the Lawn]

15 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Yes, but I'd like to unerline this passage:

I think this points out that it's the specific combination of technology and capitalism that is so dangerous.
So it depends how you want to define "Luddism." If we're talking about the historical movement, then yes, we should all be Luddites, because neoliberalism threatens to make any technology terrifying.
But if we're using a more common sense of the word, I think it would be better to direct the rage at socio-economic structures instead of technology itself. I'd say Iain Banks had an interesting view of what AIs could provide humanity in a socialist perspective. One could argue that it's a rather paternalistic view, but I think such a view is warranted given history, and I'd rather take that than the absolutely moronic idea that "the market" will allow for the proper development and use of technology.

Another way to put it is that I'm a bit reluctant to embrace Luddism, because the early days of computer science and IT offered incredible promises for humanity, that were only betrayed once massive corporations took over and redirected the entire enterprise toward maximizing profit. We still have remnants of the potential though, like wikipedia, and as I said earlier, communication really can be said to be a good in itself, so I'd rather target our corporate overlords than the machines.

For sure.  It was this part you quoted (and the distinction you've made above) that led me to say "maybe a Luddite" and to recommend this.  I am less concerned with technology itself than about using it responsibly to improve the world rather than to create more or new or exciting types of suffering because of profit. 

[horangi]

2 hours ago, Larry of the Lawn said:

This essay should be required reading on the broad topic of the ethics of technology, automation, and how we think about reactions to it, and is rather prescient for being written 40 years ago, particularly the conclusion:

Is it ok to be a Luddite?

Thanks for sharing, quite an interesting read especially considering it was published in 1984.

"We are all supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to go on, even though, because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less possible to fool any of the people any of the time. If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come - you heard it here first - when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge."

Man I wish the first sentence was true- not sure they anticipated that too much data would lead to the truth being more easily obscured.  We seem to be on track with AI and molecular biology, but those robotists are really letting us down.  (Just wrapping up Excession by Banks, so this whole thread was serendipitous for me)

[TheLastWolf]

I don't remember who but <pronoun> said that AI or computer generated stuff can never be art since the most fundamental quality inherently required in any creator of a work of art is horniness. Find me a decent asexual artist, let alone great.

AI no horny, no artist.

After all Freudian theory still holds broadly, the only two urges (boiling down) we have are sex and aggression, procreate and destroy.

[Knight Of Winter]

I think the underlying problem is our innate desire to be seen as unique as humans - that our feelings, creativity and "soul" are somehow special and irreplaceable; and our underlying deep discomfort when the rise of artificial intelligence manages to achieve the aforementioned in some way, shape of form. Now we have to accept that e.g. our intelligence is nothing special (AI will reach and then surpass it in the next years/decades), that our emotions are nothing special (e.g. love - people have been known to fall in love with computer programs, robots or dolls) and now we're at our final frontier: art. Surely art is innately human? Surely it requires reaching some elusive creative spark within you, surely it can't be recued to simple algorithms? Well, turns out we're in for an unpleasant surprise.

I'm reminded of a story I read in a book, about a programmer who boasted how his computer application managed to not only study and analyze all of Beethoven's (IIRC, it was Beethoven) work, but to even create new compositions in Beethoven's style. So one musician called bullshit and challenged programmer to a competition, which programmer complied to. Professional pianist would play 3 musical pieces, one composed by Beethoven, one by musician in question himself, and one by computer - and trained audience will try to guess which is which. As it turned out:

- what audience thought was Beethoven, was actually composed by the computer

- what audience thought was musician, was actually composed by Beethoven

- what audience thought was computer, was actually composed by the musician

It pertains to deep issues of our "human" identity. For time immemorial we thought of several uniquely human things which define us as special: our emotions, our intelligence, our abstract thinking, and our art - especially our art. When we found our computers can do - or at least competently feign doing - all of these, our very core as human being felt under attack, and expectedly so.  

The other issue is dichotomy of we're affected by art: as creator and as consumer. Because, to its creator, a piece of art is everything. It's materialized piece of their soul, their unique "child" which they, and only they could ever produce. Consumer, on the other hand, doesn't concern much much the process of artistic creation they're not privy to - instead they main mainly evaluate a piece of art by emotional value it had to them. I'm mentioning this because it very much affects the issue of AI art, depending on the viewpoint we approach it from.

Because, on one hand, the very thought that AI could match, or surpass, one if e.g. stories, songs or even memes I created would be hell of a lot unsettling to me. I would subconsciously seek every possible reason to devalue said AI art: I would call it unfair, I would call it derivative, I would call it a result of programming rather than any innate artistic expression.  It would endanger my identity as a creator, no matter how objectively little artistic value my creations possibly hold.

On the other hand, as a consumer, I wouldn't care nearly as much. The discovery that Gabriel Garcia Marquez was not a writer, but brilliant 100-years-ahead-of-his-time programmer whose AI wrote all of supposedly his works, would not diminish my enjoyment or evaluation of Love in the time of Cholera. I wouldn't mind listening to AI-composed music, watching AI-made painting nor visiting AI-designed building - provided that each of the generated some kind of emotional catharsis within me.

So is AI-art an art? Well, it depends of who you ask. It depends whether the person is an artist, it depends whether they care about artistic process or just the end-result, it depends on their views on humanism, and it possibly depends on whole lot of other things. Art isn't hard science, it's always been far more subjective and ambiguous - and that subjectivity and ambiguity stretch all the way to the very definition of art itself. And that's fine.

Edited April 25 by Knight Of Winter

[maarsen]

There is so much bad art out there that any addition to the volume of such art by AI will be like me hoping to raise the oceans by peeing into it. People seem to like bad art or even mediocre art. How else to explain the amount of it? Lets look at fiction books. Whenever I go to the local library I am astonished at the shelf space given to authors, who having read once I will never ever read again. Who does read that crap? If AI does manage to push out some of the drivel that passes for art in our culture then I will not complain. If all it does is add to the drivel and mediocrity, well there seems to be a ready audience for it. Even if an AI created a work of staggering brilliance, the audience is small enough that the hours of computing time used to create it will never be paid for by the limited number of people in the audience for it. The problem solves itself.

[Ran]

We've generated thousands of images with Stable Diffusion, I must admit, and only some small percentage of them were worthwhile for our purposes. We've been using them to create character images on the wiki for characters who've been around in the public literature a decade or three and never seem to attract attention from artists, or maybe there's some art out there but we haven't gotten permission to use it.

It seems relatively harmless to me -- no one's been clamoring to depict these characters, no one's losing out on a job (though, amusingly, I know one of the editors has commissioned a few pieces to replace some of the images per our policy of preferring art from actual artists , which IMO was pretty cool). We have a pro artist or two who've offered to do some pieces for free, but I find myself embarassed to take them up on it when they should, rightly, be focusing on paid work.

You can see a progression in the images from the early SD 1.5 to the latest SDXL variations. It's gotten better, some of it is quite poor, some is good in spots and bad in others (the Clarissa Dayne I like a lot as a composition, except the balustrade is just a mess that I should probably take [another] crack at fixing in Photoshop). Is any of it great? I don't think so. I do think a few came out rather well, but I'm sure a genuine artist would easily find faults in even the aesthetically most pleasing of them. But then, we have some non-AI art that, I admit, looks terrible to my eye, but there they are, and there they stay unless some artist tackles the same subject(s) better and gives us permission to use the piece.

I should probably run some of the early ones through SDXL + Controlnet, now that I think of it. Odds are something a bit nicer may come out, anyways.

Edited April 25 by Ran