11 Comments

Hilarious! As an artist (in the cartoon genre) of 60 years, I gotta say that debate (Is it Art?) stems from the same pond inhabited by frogs and Nazis both. The image stuck in your head of evil pieces-of-shit frogs climbing out of the internet and infecting the world is just what is happening. IMO, since it is people who generate art, no matter how, what, or why, ya gotta just say, it's art. Even if a "non-artist" made it, AI-generated art IS generated by people, one way or another. There ya go, question answered.

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I couldn't agree more! Plus AI "art" is hurting real live artists. The new Adobe terms and conditions are maddening. They are telling their users that Adobe owns everything they create with their software🤬 And can do with it anything they see fit. I use ibisPaint X on my tablet and I love it. My art remains mine. I hate AI with a passion because it's being used in Israel's genocide, Lavender is terrifying, sex workers are being harmed by it. Revenge porn just got massively easier to create and pedophiles are using it too. Not to mention the massive amounts of energy it uses. Oh, can't forget about what law enforcement can and will be using it for. None of its good😕

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Maybe not “art” here —or maybe is! At least it’s “fun”. In fact, thus reminds me of some old Mad Magazine stuff from 20-30 years ago.

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AI is a tool, and the stuff it spits out is mostly in tune with the effort expended, especially when it's being literal and generating the kind of vacuous nonsense that literal large-language models excel at.

That said, I very much like this cat image (link below) that Midjourney generated for me when fed both an unrelated Maud Lewis seaside and a loosely-related prompt (in part, "family of exotic cats"). Not genuine art in the classic sense, and absolutely loosely founded on a renowned artist's style, but better than I'm capable of without AI. Accomplished artists do need to appreciate that just because my 59 year-old ass never spent decades studying and practicing technique (I'm an autistic engineering prof with *extremely* limited drawing ability), I am reasonably literate at prompts, and I do have a vivid visual imagination that is apparently best expressed using AI. Plus, I tweaked prompts and ultimately selected this cat from hundreds of images, so judging it as purely artificial past the prompt further robs me of agency.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ga8df9u8e7z9u62v1juqj/cat-on-a-hill.JPG?rlkey=c660b2hkdelfv6clfrhwn393b&raw=1

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i very much agree that human to human communication of some kind is part of the definition of art. i understand that for some people the prompt might seem to fit that description, about as much as when a wealthy person hires a writer or other artist to create something based on the rich arsehole's "vision."

i think also that almost all generative AI imagery has a "look" based on being trained mostly on commercial art and illustration, for which compositions are often meant to accommodate related text and techniques are used to engage viewers which aim to communicate a human desire for purchase and consumption.

so far as i know, evaluation of generative results to tune the generative models, the humans in the loop for training, doesn't particularly try to find art-positive people, or folx with awareness and use of visual and artistic concepts and critical tools.

basically AI has been trained on the polished turds of commercial art, as evaluated by people who might not be familiar with much beyond that themselves, and with no more awareness of even DESIGN than advertising and videos provide.

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I understand that it's handy for non-artists, but it has a slick, garish look that makes my eyes uncomfortable.

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Handsome Chad probably thinks he's above emotion.

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Duchamp is the person I would bring back from the dead to have dinner with. I was waiting for you to mention him and you didn't disappoint ;)

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I understand that it's handy for non-artists, but it has a slick, garish look that makes my eyes uncomfortable.

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You should program your own AI, then you can be an AI artist. Everybody else submitting prompts is just viewing a piece of somebody else’s art.

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Way back when Photoshop was new and I was a hobbyist programmer working on graphics applications, I conversed briefly with John Knoll, a co-creator of Photoshop (we messaged on the precursor to America Online, I believe). There are an enormous number of genuine artists who routinely use Photoshop (and similar packages), and I’d wager virtually none of them are programmers with even my tenuous degree of connection to an actual creator. Why would AI be any different, if using Photoshop doesn’t eliminate credentials as an artist?

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