I was on stable diffusion art and one of my comments got removed for saying the OP didn’t “make” the AI generated art. But he didn’t make shit the AI made it, he typed in a description and hit enter. I think we need a new word for when someone shared art an AI made, like they generated it or something. It feels insulting to actual artists to say you made art with AI
That’s interesting cuz I took their point as “you can put the exact same prompt into the stable diffusion and not get the same image each time, thus good luck trying to recreate the picture.” Which seemed to me to suggest the opposite point: That intentionality has a diminished role in creating ai images, so it serves even less of a role as art. You wouldn’t say someone sitting in front of a slot machine “intended” to get a cherry, bell, and bar on a specific pull, after all.
But… you are though. Images would not exist without the photographer choosing to make them. Not to mention that many forms of photography (albiet older forms) have very real physical elements to them like dodge, burn, and film development. Even without those elements though, those images would not exist without the effort, intention, and presence of the photographer. The photographer also makes the conscious decision about what photos not to take, because they don’t align to their message. Intention is at every step of the process and that invites us to explore the meaning of their work.
Contrast that with AI art. The only intention you have is your prompt and choice of model. I would argue the fact that ai prompters need to “get close to” what they want their piece to say, rather than making the piece say what they want it to say, shows how starved for meaning the products are.
I don’t disagree with what you’re saying. But I will say that skill is not what makes art art. Skill can make you a better artist, but someone without skills can make art.
My understanding is that if you have the exact same model, prompt, and everything else, if you use the same seed, you will get the exact same image output. That and that they called it a counter point, I took it to mean they were talking about the skill in the layers of different tools folks will use to get what they are hoping for. Because, a little to your further point, there are folks that get very into it and have like 30 different fine tuned loras or whatever to finesse every finer point of the image.
At the risk of getting a little philosophically wanky about it, I guess I would argue the same for AI images. Like what exists is a nebulous connections of weights and nodes trained off stolen art that only connect in certain ways because of a given seed and prompt. Does a hypothetical random image of a muppets version of Kermit the frog as Darth Vader ‘exist’ without the high, half baked, prompt from someone using a free trial of midjourney?
I completely agree, and I think my point more was that with photography, you don’t “make” the landscape or architecture you’re capturing, but you make the image in the end.
I will say, I respect photography more, and so much of what AI generates is soulless slop. I think that ultimately my push back is on the folks that argue that it can’t be art. And just as there is intentionality in choosing what photos you don’t take for photography, there is non-zero intentionality in generating 30 loose candidates, 50 fine tuned candidates, and 3 final images with stable diffusion.
Sorry if this comment is scattered, I’ve restarted my reply like three times trying to sort out what I even think lol.
I’m not really jumping in on this discussion, but I did want to add one thing:
I can believe two things at once.
AI generated media can’t be art … because the whole purpose of a generative AI machine is to alleviate the burden of decision making. The fewer places you let something decide for you, the more “art” you can imbue into your project. Art is a communicative effort.
Artists can use AI generated media … but the points of interest, the meaning, would not (necessarily) be the decisions the machine made.
An example above, I forget if it was you or someone else, shows a pen sketch of a scene then filled in by the generator, and I think the artist there can be given credit for the perspective, the framing of the subject, the mech-suit, the sci-fi aesthetic; but I wouldn’t credit them with the tally marks on her left shoulder, or the shape details of her eyes, or the various light-up displays that dot the walls.
There’s also something to be said for choosing as opposed to creating outright, but I think we’re losing ourselves in myopic details at this point.
The bottom line is that, aside of any ethics issues, I’m not that upset about AI media that’s honest about what it is. I watch youtube channels that depend on AI for their performance art. But, AI proponents love selling this technology as a replacement for people, which is a sentiment I find… disgusting. Inhuman.
And, I find it really sad the way a person who spent the better part of their life perfecting a style and technique can be essentially shoved out of their own niche by the 10,000 style-copy images a generator can make in an afternoon. This isn’t like photography, where painters and camera-snappers can coexist in separate styles of image production: AI generators can replace both.
Sorry, I thought all that was going to be just two paragraphs.