Yea, the AI is a tool used by humans to make art. Like other artistic tools, you can use it in a low effort way to make stuff (like the abstract and ultra random modern art). Similarly, people can use it in a much more directed and creative way, such as by using ControlNet to determine the content of the art manually, then have the AI follow whatever style directed.
There are many ways to use AI art in a more involved way than just prompting and hoping for the best. Still, like the other artistic tools that have been invented, people want to gatekeep and call it not art. Don’t listen to them, art is art regardless of how you perceive it. You may not think it as worthwhile, but it is still created only for aesthetic value and is thus art
- It’s not art
- Modern art made by people who actually have marketable skills isn’t low effort
Literally there’s modern art that’s just random splotches of paint thrown on a canvas. Both me and a toddler could create that with our skills. Regardless, those random splotches on a canvas are considered art because of the purpose they serve, not its quality
Rule #1 of contemporary (not modern) art: any time someone says it’s just splashes of paint on a canvas, it’s almost never just splashes of paint on a canvas. Even something that looks ‘simple’ like Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, And Blue III by Barnett Newman, often has an artistic process that goes into it that is so detailed that attempts at restoration that do not reflect how intricate the process is can ruin them.
Also if it’s so easy to make paintings that toddlers could make and get them into museums and sell for big bucks, you should do it. Seriously, if it’s so easy why aren’t you doing it?
Art, like everything else, is worth what someone will pay for it.
A chimpanzee can sell his art for thousands and get it in a gallery. It is that easy – if people want it for some reason.
So if it’s easy, why haven’t you done it?
Because I feel ashamed enough when I see “artists” put it out there. I’m not planning on being ashamed of myself.
So you could make millions but it’s just beneath you?
My toddler doesn’t have any dirty money that need cleaning, so it’s very unlikely her random splashes will sell for millions.
“Expensive abstract paintings are just money laundering” is intellectually lazy and conspiratorial. The entire art world and the IRS aren’t working together to let some people get away with money laundering, but only as long as they use art to do it.
A lot of contemporary art is not for mass consumption the way that high fashion is not for street wear. Everything does not have to have mass appeal, and that doesn’t make it unimportant or simple to do. I guarantee if you go to an art museum’s daily tour they will be able to tell you a lot about how these ‘simple’ paintings were made that shows how they weren’t simple at all, and what movement they are in response to/part of that adds much more significance to them.
If you’re going to nitpick about whether they’re really worth $x million, what makes any painting worth more than the canvas it’s on and the paint that makes it up? History? Mass appeal? Appeal to other artists? Appeal to rich people? Artistic self expression? Effort/length of time to make it? Originality?
It’s not art
I’m old enough to remember three similar statements that are equally untrue:
- Photography isn’t art
- Photoshop isn’t art
- Video Games aren’t art
Eventually, we changed our opinions. The same will happen for generative images. They are art.
As an artist who grew up when those exact same arguments were happening, I’ve always found it odd people went with the “AI is bad because it’s not art” argument. Instead of focusing on something like real people losing their jobs because of it. Which is such more legitimate reasons to hate how AI art is currently being used vs “b-but all you did was type prompts! You didn’t spend years learning like a REAL artist!” as if early photography/digital art wasn’t given the exact same criticism of “The tech does everything for you”
Instead of focusing on something like real people losing their jobs because of it.
Ironically, it was the rise of one of those job-killing changes that made it possible for me to get in to a job in art in the first place. I think the same thing will be true for generative images. Some people who relied on the high bar for entry to protect their jobs will lose them, and some people who couldn’t get access to those jobs will suddenly find themselves able to enter artistic fields.
It’s new, but not original. With the recent influx of AI content that doesn’t seem to be slowing down, I’d say we should make a new designation of GC - generated content.
What people make is not original as well, you’re always inspired by something.
Inspiration isn’t the same. It’s more like if I found a bunch of pictures I liked, then traced my favorite parts from each one onto a single piece of paper to make one image made up of lots of small copied pieces of other people’s work.
That’s not how AI works. For example, just a while ago I was generating one image for fun (which I don’t claim is art, by the way), it’s this:
The prompt was quite simple, “anthropomorphic bean standing in a field of beans”.
This is not created from a bunch of pictures, this is created from the AI understanding what a bean is, what anthropomorphic means, what a field is and so on. Try to find me any one image this is created from if you claim it’s just slapping together parts of images. This is an original image (which presumably was never done before, at least I don’t think anyone would create something like that very often), I can’t find any that looks enough like the one I created to claim it was copied from that. I looked for visually similar images using Google, Bing and Yandex.
That leads me to believe, that it’s indeed the same process as a human would do - take an inspiration (from real world or different paintings) and create something new.
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No. It’s like microwaving a TV dinner and saying you cooked.
There are levels to everything. People have a very shallow understanding of how these tools work.
Some ai art is low effort.
Some ai art is extremely involved.It can often take longer to get what you want out of it than it would’ve to have just drawn it. I’ve spent 8 or 9 hours fiddling with inputs and settings for a piece and it still didn’t come out as good as it would have if I had commissioned an artist.
I’ve been using it to get “close” then using it as a reference when commissioning things
Yes. I also think that’s how it is. If you want to generate something meaningful, something that contributes something deep, it is quite a lot of effort. You need to do the prompt engineering, generate a few hundred images. Skim through them and find the most promising ones, then edit them. Maybe combine more than one or put it back into the AI to get the right amount of limbs and fingers. And the lighting, background etc right.
You can just do one-shot, generate anything and upload it to the internet. But it wouldn’t be of the same value. But it works like this for anything. I can take a photo of something. Somebody else can have their photos printed on a magazine or do an exhibition. It’s a difference in skills and effort. Taking artistic photographs probably also takes some time and effort. You can ask the same question with that. Are photographs art? It depends. For other meanings of ‘OC’: Sure. The generated output is unique and you created it.
The way you put original content in quotes is weird.
OC as an acronym typically just means something that someone made. In this sense, yeah, if you make something with AI then it’s "your OC’.
Original content used as the words generally means something slightly different and it’s more debatable.
Having used AI art tools there is more creativity involved than people think. When you’re just generating them, sure, there’s less creativity than traditional digital art, of course, but it is not a wholly uncreative process. Take in-painting, you can selectively generate in just some portions of the image. Or sketch and then generate based off of that.
All that said though I don’t think “creativity” is necessary for something to be considered OC. It just needs to have been made by them.
Would you call fan art of well known characters OC? I would.
No. Large Language Models only regurgitate what they’ve been fed.
As do most humans most of the time.
As someone who has been trying to get my vision for a piece to fruition using AI for months…I absolutely think AI is OC. The argument that it references existing work cracks me up because all of art history is derivatives of what has come before. I do think there is “low effort” pieces, but you get that in other mediums as well such as photography. Also…need I mention Duchamp and the urinal?
It depends. Did they really train a model and try a long time until something great came out? Yeah, definitely.
Did they take a real image as a basis and just let one or two iterations of a filter run over it? Nope.
The latter is how most people get those super realistic pictures without having a supercomputer or waiting a long time. They are basically faking.
Sure. It’s art just like many digital tool assisted products came before it. Is it always difficult art to make ? No but who cares. It’s OC as long as the source of this AI art is the person posting.
Unfathomably based
Absolutely not
AI art is not OC. It cannot be.
Why would human art be then?
Because humans can have new ideas.
Those are not new ideas. Those are based on persons experiences up to that point. There is nothing magical in human brain that we cannot eventually implement in AI.
Those ‘new’ ideas can be inputted as a prompt into an AI image generator. Would the output of that satisfy your criteria for OC?
No. Every parameter in the LLM, not just the prompt, is or was a new human idea at some point.
And would you say that an idea formed from the combination of multiple old human ideas is not original? If the influence of an existing idea disqualifies it from being original then very little could be considered original. If something additional to existing ideas is needed for originality then that what is that thing which is beyond the capability of an AI?
Personally, I would argue that any new combination of existing ideas is inherently original (i.e. a fresh perspective.)
Talking specifically about image generators (rather than LLMs) which are trained on billions of images - some of which would be widely considered as artwork (old ideas?) and others documentary photographs.
How new is a new idea, if it must be formulated in an existing language?
Language is itself invented by humans.
Not by me though, or you. Can’t have new ideas 😞
“Humans can have new ideas” isn’t “humans only have new ideas”.
How so? What is it that makes art OC that cannot be applied to AI created art? I think it would take an extremely narrow definition which would also exclude a significant amount of human created art.
“Original Content”.
Is it content? Yes.
Is it original? That depends on the context. What do you ask about, in what context? Where is it placed? Which AI? How was it trained? How does it replicate?
If someone generates an image, it is original in that narrow context - between them and the AI.
Is the AI producing originals, original interpretations, original replications, or only transforming other content? I don’t think you can make a general statement on that. It’s too broad, unspecific of a question.
You absolutely can make a general statement. Humans don’t make original content if you don’t think AIs do. The process is basically the same. A human learns to make art, and specific styles, and then produces something from that library of training. An AI does the same thing.
People saying an AI doesn’t create art from a human prompt don’t understand how humans work.
Large language models (what marketing departments are calling “AI”) cannot synthesize new ideas or knowledge.
Don’t know what you are talking about. GPT-4 absolutely can write new stories. What differentiates that from a new idea?
I can’t tell whether you’re saying I don’t know what I’m talking about, or you don’t know what I’m talking about.
Doesn’t matter.
When in conversation the “AI can’t have creativity/new ideas etc” argument comes up, I often get the impression it’s a protective reaction rather than a reflected conclusion.
Physician, heal thyself, then.
First off all, yes they can for all practical purposes. Or, alternately, neither can humans. So the point is academic. There is little difference between the end result from an AI and a human taken at random.
Secondly, LLMs aren’t really what people are talking about when they talk about AI art.
First off all, yes they can for all practical purposes. Or, alternately, neither can humans. So the point is academic. There is little difference between the end result from an AI and a human taken at random.
Not even the AI companies’ marketing departments go that far.
It’s an interesting thing to ponder and my opinion is that like many other things in life something being ‘OC’ is a spectrum rather than a binary thing.
If I apply a B&W filter on an image is that OC? Obviously not
But what if I make an artwork that’s formed by hundreds of smaller artworks, like this example? This definitely deserves the OC tag
AI art is also somewhere in that spectrum and even then it changes depending on how AI was used to make the art. Each person has a different line on the spectrum where things transition from non OC to OC, so the answer to this would be different for everyone.
Yeah, I do. I play with AI from time to time and people don’t realize creating the correct prompts is a skill in itself, it’s not just some magical doodad that does what you want out of the box. AI generated stuff is OC if you’re the one who made it.
So what’s your definition of art?
For example, I personally don’t think hyper realism (people spending months “painting” an exact large copy of a hi-def photo) is art, for me it’s just craftsmanship, no creativity even.
AI feels the same, it’s just a tool as the chisel or the paintbrush. What do you create when doing your prompts?
It can be art I guess, but I also think it usually is not at all.
AI is a tool like any other. You can’t say that art made with some tool is not art just because you don’t like the tool. When photography came around, there were people saying it’s not a real art because it does everything for you.
A world where banana taped on a wall is art, but something you spend many hours tailoring to your vision is not, well, that’s not a world I can agree with. How can we claim some random splashes are art just because there’s some vision behind them and at the same time claim that AI art created with some vision is not?
I generally consider “OC” to mean specifically that it’s original - you didn’t get it from someplace else, so broadly yes if you’re the one who had it generated.
But if it’s a community for art or photography generally, I don’t think AI art belongs there - the skills and talent required are just too different. I love AI art communities, I just think it’s a separate thing.
But following that logic “OC” would mean you didn’t get it from “someplace else”, but since AI is trained by looking pieces made by other people to learn, it technically did get it from someplace else.
by looking pieces made by other people to learn
Humans do it it’s inspiration.
Computers do it it’s theft.deleted by creator
Unironically yes
I don’t understand people like you. Seems to me like exactly the ones who destroyed machines few centuries ago because they would take our jobs. Turns out they didn’t. And AI will succeed as well and it won’t put as all into unemployment.
Humans also look at other peoples art to learn, they might also really like someone else’s style and want to produce works in that style themselves, does this make them AI? Humans have been copying and remixing off of each other since the beginning of time.
The fact that a lot of movie pitches are boiled down to “thing A, meets thing B” and the person listening is able to autocomplete that “prompt” well enough to decide to invest in the idea or not, is the clearest evidence of that, I personally don’t think that just because humans are slower and we aren’t able to reproduce things perfectly even though that’s what we are trying to do sometimes, means that we somehow have a monopoly on this thing called creativity or originality.
You could maybe argue that it comes down to intentionality, and that because the AI isn’t “conscious” yet, it isn’t making the decision to create the artwork on its own or making the decision to accept the art commission via the prompt on its own. Then it can’t have truely created the art the same way photoshop didn’t create the art.
But I’ve always found the argument of “it’s not actually making anything because it had to look at all these other works by these other people first” a little disingenuous because it ignores the way humans learn and experience things since the day we are born.
