Art isn’t about making something pretty, nor is it really about design, it’s about wanting to do or make something with no ulterior motive, or going beyond what you have to go make something inspiring (these are the same thing when you think about it).
Clip art, a lot of corporate design, a lot of architecture and more isn’t meant to be art, it’s meant to fulfill a purpose and maybe look pretty doing it. That’s not what art is.
Cameras largely killed off commissioned portrait because people don’t care about the process, they just want a picture of themselves, therefore the portrait wasn’t art, it was utility.
That doesn’t mean that it’s impossible for a portrait to be art, nor that photography isn’t art, just that unskilled people were suddenly able to make what they were looking for to a “good enough” standard much more conveniently.
The same can be seen for so many things, including AI being used for clip art or supplementary images in articles. In the case of AI, if all you want is any picture that help support part of an article you’re writing, you didn’t want art in the first place. If you use AI to help you make a statement, or to match a vision you have in your head, or even do things like poke around at the internals to distort the output, then that is art.
AI today is basically a mechanical school. AI students are trained to give a specific answer. This is at the heart of how all machine learning works, including generative AI. Even image generators do this.
“Here’s a million examples of what the pixelated representation of a hand looks like; now go and make a derivative copy.”
This is fine for objective facts, like physics and history. It is useless for art.
Merely drawing a hand is not art, it’s an objective truth (do typical humans have 5 or 6 fingers?). But art school is not about objective truths. Art school teaches creativity. Specifically challenging ideas and expression.
AIs can’t fundamentally challenge ideas and express themselves because they lack personal experience, personality and individuality.
Society at large has been fooled into thinking that speech (LLM) and other generative AI lead to AGI. But the reality is that these models have more in common with encyclopedias and stock image libraries than intelligence.
I’m not convinced your take is different - drawing an accurate sketch of a hand isn’t art, telling AI to generate a hand isn’t art, it requires someone creative or expressing something to be art, regardless of the medium(s), including diffusion/noise removal models being a medium.
Nobody’s going to claim illustrator or inkscape “made” your graphic design, so why claim the same for AI - doing so just shows you don’t understand the medium or what goes into finetuning models, parameters, inpainting, step control of loras, block weights, noise removal level and regional prompting and all the other things that differentiate a piece of AI-generated art from AI slop (not to say that you have to use all of these for it to be art, just that once you do it probably passes the threshold for it to be art)?
Except corporate art also has human elements behind it that change. Look at global village coffeehouse vs alegria. Having ai churn out all clip art and corporate art will make it stagnate and become even more soulless.
I love your take. And extrapolating from it a bit, a lot of what we consider ‘artists’ weren’t really making ‘art’, as you define it. They were (and mostly still are) drawing/painting, etc pictures as a means to an end. For money; and now they are mad or worried or scared (with reason) about losing their livelihood. Because a cheaper, not necessarily better but certainly with a better cost/benefit ratio, comes along.
A lot of what we consider ‘artists’ weren’t really making art
I think that’s extrapolating too far… I think the overwhelming majority made art outside of their job, with with minorities making art for their job and a minority not making any art at all. It’s hard to create commissioned works without a strong skillset which overlaps significantly with that required for art, just that if they were just taking a commission without going above and beyond, that isn’t art.
Art isn’t about making something pretty, nor is it really about design, it’s about wanting to do or make something with no ulterior motive, or going beyond what you have to go make something inspiring (these are the same thing when you think about it).
Clip art, a lot of corporate design, a lot of architecture and more isn’t meant to be art, it’s meant to fulfill a purpose and maybe look pretty doing it. That’s not what art is.
Cameras largely killed off commissioned portrait because people don’t care about the process, they just want a picture of themselves, therefore the portrait wasn’t art, it was utility.
That doesn’t mean that it’s impossible for a portrait to be art, nor that photography isn’t art, just that unskilled people were suddenly able to make what they were looking for to a “good enough” standard much more conveniently.
The same can be seen for so many things, including AI being used for clip art or supplementary images in articles. In the case of AI, if all you want is any picture that help support part of an article you’re writing, you didn’t want art in the first place. If you use AI to help you make a statement, or to match a vision you have in your head, or even do things like poke around at the internals to distort the output, then that is art.
I’ve been saying this for years
I have a different take.
AI today is basically a mechanical school. AI students are trained to give a specific answer. This is at the heart of how all machine learning works, including generative AI. Even image generators do this.
“Here’s a million examples of what the pixelated representation of a hand looks like; now go and make a derivative copy.”
This is fine for objective facts, like physics and history. It is useless for art.
Merely drawing a hand is not art, it’s an objective truth (do typical humans have 5 or 6 fingers?). But art school is not about objective truths. Art school teaches creativity. Specifically challenging ideas and expression.
AIs can’t fundamentally challenge ideas and express themselves because they lack personal experience, personality and individuality.
Society at large has been fooled into thinking that speech (LLM) and other generative AI lead to AGI. But the reality is that these models have more in common with encyclopedias and stock image libraries than intelligence.
I’m not convinced your take is different - drawing an accurate sketch of a hand isn’t art, telling AI to generate a hand isn’t art, it requires someone creative or expressing something to be art, regardless of the medium(s), including diffusion/noise removal models being a medium.
Nobody’s going to claim illustrator or inkscape “made” your graphic design, so why claim the same for AI - doing so just shows you don’t understand the medium or what goes into finetuning models, parameters, inpainting, step control of loras, block weights, noise removal level and regional prompting and all the other things that differentiate a piece of AI-generated art from AI slop (not to say that you have to use all of these for it to be art, just that once you do it probably passes the threshold for it to be art)?
Transition periods are usually hard, for some
I agree completely.
Except corporate art also has human elements behind it that change. Look at global village coffeehouse vs alegria. Having ai churn out all clip art and corporate art will make it stagnate and become even more soulless.
I love your take. And extrapolating from it a bit, a lot of what we consider ‘artists’ weren’t really making ‘art’, as you define it. They were (and mostly still are) drawing/painting, etc pictures as a means to an end. For money; and now they are mad or worried or scared (with reason) about losing their livelihood. Because a cheaper, not necessarily better but certainly with a better cost/benefit ratio, comes along.
I think that’s extrapolating too far… I think the overwhelming majority made art outside of their job, with with minorities making art for their job and a minority not making any art at all. It’s hard to create commissioned works without a strong skillset which overlaps significantly with that required for art, just that if they were just taking a commission without going above and beyond, that isn’t art.