Art was never separate from the person and the culture that created it. It was its soul. Now our lives are flooded with soulless creations night and day--the product of lazy minds and an amalgamation of stolen already-bland cultural works.
I would argue that modern art has none. Further, I would argue that art is what speaks to people.
That means that an AI generated image which makes people laugh has more soul than whatever the top selling modern artists was in 1995. By my estimation, that makes a lolcat a better piece of art than most modern art.
That is something that I actually think is true. Of course there are great artists who can show us much, much more than what is inside a lolcat. Its just that I haven't seen one of those in a while.
Artists are concerned for their jobs; That I get. Trying to defend art by claiming magical things like it doesn't have any soul is just cope. And frankly, the more I see of that, the less I care about artists and their real problems.
The soul is whatever story the buyer puts into it. A few years ago, people attributed soul to NFTs, but I think in the long run, humans will
ultimately be able to generate more pervasive stories. There are thousands of artists in towns continuing to generate them.
This is such a lazy "gotcha" argument, and a prevalent one at that. Some people seem to think that anyone who is upset about the massive deluge of garbage AI has enabled was somehow perfectly happy with the previous status quo. "Things were already bad so who cares if we make them worse?" is a sentiment that seems does have some wider acceptance in the software world, but not everyone feels this way.
No it is not lazy. But if you devoured the marvel slop or gray's anathomy in which production no human intelligence was utilized, what difference does it make if the slop is AI made?
If you filled your day with brainrot slop - does it matter the origin. Does it matter if Instagram thirst traps are so with surgery and filters or if the whole meat puppet stuff is skipped
I discuss it a lot with my wife who happens to be a painter.
For years we have perceived my work (swe) as a safe harbor. With AI boom, tides have changed and now I perceive her work as a much, much more future-proof activity
I must admit the prevalence of AI generated images has challenged me to be more attentive to detail, I even started looking for small artists I can commission for stuff on my walls, been going to expos a little more... I'm happy if this gives artists a small lifeline away from the more mercantile aspects that AI is conquering.
There's one thing worse than "designed by AI" and it's "designed by committee".
I wish more buildings were designed by AI. There's so much depressing architecture.
If the AI is tasked with "Build a building as cheap as possible with as much floor area as is legally permissible", then it too will make dull buildings.
What you really need is more people willing to pay a premium to live/work in a unique or famous building like the empire state building, and then more such buildings will be built.
That is a good point. However, from time to time we do spend very large sums on certain buildings and what we get for it isn't proportionally more beautiful; in fact it often looks worse.
Hopefully with AI we will make things like stonework and indoor plasterwork, hell, even indoor statues, that much cheaper, and we can start creating beautiful places to live.
A lot of us saw this one coming a while ago. Many, many artists of all kinds have already put up "AI-free" (or similar) badges on their work. I think it will be more significant in the fine arts world, however local art fairs could be affected as well.
I say the more the merrier, but artists who use AI in their workflows are going to be pressed about it - with negative connotations - for a while. Transparency is the best solution in my opinion.
People trying to use AI in their creative process but not as their creative process might be the biggest losers for a while. Right now there are a lot of negative gut reactions to having any AI associated with art at all
The software part is quickly being solved but I honestly believe the more creative aspects will still see large demand. LLMs have a certain stink to their UI, being creative is a hard skill, which AI has yet to master.
For so-called "AI" to have creativity, we'd first have to work out what that even means for ourselves right? What is creativity in the first place? I'm unconvinced it's just turning up the "temperature" or fiddling with some pertubing parameters.
EDIT: And AI is also pretty terrible at being consistent too, you have to work quite hard to get a level of "consistency" that you're happy with.
For 3 years now, I've gotten into arguments with both AI bros and artists about this. The main point of art is its cultural space (its creator, the zeitgeist etc.).
A human premium, and an elevation of human made art was always inevitable. Most "AI art" token spend is TPS reports, explainer slides, education etc. Maybe there is a chance some forms of AI art becomes its own new medium (like theater vs "the talkies") but it was never going to be a replacement.
Just 3 years of pointless hand-wringing, headlines and breathless interviews for nothing.
"Aaron Sorkin says he will never use AI".
Yes. No one asked him to! But alas, clickbait rules all.
I’ve started to see (and react negatively) to a kind of “Claude design”. Apps, slides, images share the same aesthetic, and even after aggressive prompting it reverts to a the mean.
I even create these things. But that aesthetic has started to imply a kind of throwaway, low value thing
What will be interesting is if models can create more diverse styles than the neutral Claude default we see everywhere
Similar trajectory to "human premium" for human-authored text (when we started using synthetic AI-generated text in pre-training, around 2023 for maybe llama-3?). AI text is OK (kind of like a low nutrient content food) but labs still pay a premium for high quality domain-specific data silos. As far as the consumer, pattern-breaking media will always have a place, slop videos follow a similar distribution and so there's naturally pushback against seeing the same thing, over and over even if it's not inherently crap (just as in AI-authored text).
While there is a lot of slop, it is possible to create art with AI that does not look like slop and is as creative as a human creation. That's really the main cool thing about AI is you can create things you otherwise couldn't, and the better you are the higher the ceiling for the ai art is. It is a bit of a struggle though, as in prompting and finding the right references is difficult to get good results
The issue isn’t the quality or the visual result. It’s not just slop because it looks bad. It’s the friction of someone going through each detail, making a choice. It’s the artist taking time to figure out how they want to convey what they’re feeling and thinking.
The reduction of this friction culminates in the reduction of the piece’s essence.
That's fair but there is a lot of creativity in prompting and finding the right image because on the way to those images there is a lot of experimentation and I came up with the ideas for the images not the AI.
Feels like approximately 80-90% of AI generated art, writing, games, tools, etc come under that category now. Very few people seem willing to come out and say "yeah, I got Claude/ChatGPT/Codex/Gemini to make this".
Or if they do, they'll try and downplay by saying they used AI for some elements, but not most of them.
I can imagine that being a reaction to the negativity and backlash from a substantial (or very active) part of the audience, to anything built with AI. I don't imagine that shame for using AI for something, or fear of disclosing it, is self-imposed.
Ideally, how you create something and what tools you use should be nobody's business, and all it matters would be if they like it or not. But inherent value / merit is a thing, and concern for the provenance of what you buy is also a valid position for the public to take. It's gonna be a while before the balance settles on either AI = bad or AI = who cares.
On my site, we started asking artists to disclose their use of AI starting ~2 years ago. Turns out roughly 1 in 3 lied.
So, I developed an AI detector. It's working pretty well for that. But it's a schlep having to keep up with all the new models. We're processing ~60,000 songs a day at this point, kinda crazy!
Another area where prices have increased due to AI because a bunch of soulless chronically online people can feel better about themselves.
Mind you, human-painted artwork is a niche beyond expensive art. Not everyone buys the equivalent of Monet paintings. I've been eyeing a painting by a local painter just to realize the prices jumped from $500 to something like $3000 on average. Sucks.
I'm not sure what you're saying. Is the claim that the artist raised the cost of his work 6x because he's getting less work, because people are using AI instead? Maybe I'm in a bubble, but that doesn't seem credible. I'm trying to imagine the person that was thinking that they would hire a local artist to paint them a painting and then discovered AI and instead asked Gemini to do it. Those just seem like two completely separate use cases.
How are the prices a problem? If a person is just looking for a picture not a particular artist or philosophical theories, AI is cheaper. If a person wants to commission an artist, that was always a semi luxury even for cheapest of cheap rate online artists.
In fact if your old price was already 500 dollars then its already a useless luxury. People think a lot before paying 500 even for actual tools, anyone who has 500 to spend on a non-essential luxury is already doing something most people don't have any need to.
We should just admit that human created art is dead. Just like hand coded code. Same thing. AI will soon beat any human in quantity and quality. Just accept it. It is over for humans.
Code has always been seen as purely utilitarian by most people, art is different.
I suspect use of AI to "realize one's artistic vision" will get increasingly more normalized, but I don't know how people will react to end-to-end AI art (which generally doesn't exist yet), things are going to be a really strange once/if human taste gets fully mapped and demystified.
I would argue that modern art has none. Further, I would argue that art is what speaks to people.
That means that an AI generated image which makes people laugh has more soul than whatever the top selling modern artists was in 1995. By my estimation, that makes a lolcat a better piece of art than most modern art.
That is something that I actually think is true. Of course there are great artists who can show us much, much more than what is inside a lolcat. Its just that I haven't seen one of those in a while.
Artists are concerned for their jobs; That I get. Trying to defend art by claiming magical things like it doesn't have any soul is just cope. And frankly, the more I see of that, the less I care about artists and their real problems.
If you filled your day with brainrot slop - does it matter the origin. Does it matter if Instagram thirst traps are so with surgery and filters or if the whole meat puppet stuff is skipped
For years we have perceived my work (swe) as a safe harbor. With AI boom, tides have changed and now I perceive her work as a much, much more future-proof activity
What you really need is more people willing to pay a premium to live/work in a unique or famous building like the empire state building, and then more such buildings will be built.
Hopefully with AI we will make things like stonework and indoor plasterwork, hell, even indoor statues, that much cheaper, and we can start creating beautiful places to live.
I say the more the merrier, but artists who use AI in their workflows are going to be pressed about it - with negative connotations - for a while. Transparency is the best solution in my opinion.
EDIT: And AI is also pretty terrible at being consistent too, you have to work quite hard to get a level of "consistency" that you're happy with.
A human premium, and an elevation of human made art was always inevitable. Most "AI art" token spend is TPS reports, explainer slides, education etc. Maybe there is a chance some forms of AI art becomes its own new medium (like theater vs "the talkies") but it was never going to be a replacement.
Just 3 years of pointless hand-wringing, headlines and breathless interviews for nothing.
"Aaron Sorkin says he will never use AI".
Yes. No one asked him to! But alas, clickbait rules all.
I even create these things. But that aesthetic has started to imply a kind of throwaway, low value thing
What will be interesting is if models can create more diverse styles than the neutral Claude default we see everywhere
Edit: here are some examples for those wondering what I mean: https://imgur.com/a/mK3Iuzq
You can sort of tell they are AI because of the composition stuff but I think they are aight.
The reduction of this friction culminates in the reduction of the piece’s essence.
Or if they do, they'll try and downplay by saying they used AI for some elements, but not most of them.
Ideally, how you create something and what tools you use should be nobody's business, and all it matters would be if they like it or not. But inherent value / merit is a thing, and concern for the provenance of what you buy is also a valid position for the public to take. It's gonna be a while before the balance settles on either AI = bad or AI = who cares.
On my site, we started asking artists to disclose their use of AI starting ~2 years ago. Turns out roughly 1 in 3 lied.
So, I developed an AI detector. It's working pretty well for that. But it's a schlep having to keep up with all the new models. We're processing ~60,000 songs a day at this point, kinda crazy!
1. How often do you encounter false positives, and does that change things?
2. Have you considered outright prohibiting/banning vs disclosure?
Just want to hear from someone running a platform how they deal with this since I imagine it's very hard to get right.
What’s your site?
Mind you, human-painted artwork is a niche beyond expensive art. Not everyone buys the equivalent of Monet paintings. I've been eyeing a painting by a local painter just to realize the prices jumped from $500 to something like $3000 on average. Sucks.
In fact if your old price was already 500 dollars then its already a useless luxury. People think a lot before paying 500 even for actual tools, anyone who has 500 to spend on a non-essential luxury is already doing something most people don't have any need to.
I suspect use of AI to "realize one's artistic vision" will get increasingly more normalized, but I don't know how people will react to end-to-end AI art (which generally doesn't exist yet), things are going to be a really strange once/if human taste gets fully mapped and demystified.