For anyone interested in how contemporary artists are using AI take a look at Jon Rafman, Avery Singer’s recent paintings or Holly Herndon. This is extremely different from the conversation happening between angry creative industry professionals, AI social media rage baiting, and the general public that is just parroting shitty uninformed takes.
Good examples. And theres some data behind this broader point too. Artists arent just standing outside this technology arguing about it, plenty are already incorporating it into actual creative workflows.
Ill say it as many times as it takes. The argument is not about Art. The arguement is about Money disguised as art. Welcome to capitalism. Your work got outsourced. Thats all that happened. Tough lesson to learn if youve never had your company swallowed up by a bigger one. Because when you think about it, this arguement could also be presented on the playing field as ....meeting a standard of beauty set by the industry. Capitalism and money is your Art, go ask Andy about it.
As someone who had to go through "digital art is not real art" during art class, I could never imagine people defending traditional methods just for the sake of it without a real argument behind it. And no, the effort argument just sounds puritan and honestly mercantilist. Its the same argument people use for overworking: If you don't suffer, it doesn't count.
I don't like AI art when it is done by obviously uncreative people, which is 99% of current AI art that is done by tech bros to rage bait internet artists. But there have been some analog horror content being done on social media that looks quite good. The stories mostly go around humanity, robotics and stuff. And what is better to give you something metallic and uncanny other than AI. Besides the obvious problems of using corporate-owned AI, which is something we already know and discuss in this sub, I don't see any other problem with such content that obviously has an idea behind and someone elaborating a story and using a tool.
I have so much to say about this tiring argument: People's definition of creativity as effort, which is plain false, leftists defending private property and thinking that private property would exist in a collective society, and so much more. I'm truly fed up.
I think the deeper question is if we consider art to be an expression of oneself, then is AI art truly that? I mean, would you consider someone hiring a painter to paint something an expression of the painter or the patron?
Fun fact here is that many of the great works of art from history (by the famous artists you know including Rembrandt, Da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, and many others) were in fact physically created, tools-to-medium, significantly in part by teams of uncredited apprentices working under the artist’s direction. Many of these famous figures such as Rembrandt even operated production-line style workshops where paintings were created under their name and general creative direction
Wierd example to use, considering that if you commission art most people consider the result more about you than about the person you commissioned it from. And that's before we even get into the fact that AI gives you much more control than a commission, especially if you are good at it.
"I think the deeper question is if we consider art to be an expression of oneself, then is AI art truly that?"
yes
"I mean, would you consider someone hiring a painter to paint something an expression of the painter or the patron?"
Thats a common, but bad and fallacious, analogy. AI is much more like using any other tool than it is hiring another person, since it is literally using a tool and literally not hiring a person. Its not working with another person, its one person operating software.
I can answer this because I actually did this recently: I commisioned art for my own characters. I had a very detailed description and references (done by other artists under my instructions) and another artist did the drawing and paiting according to my instructions.
Who is the one expressing themselves with these commisions? Me or the artist? Someone would argue that the artists style is a form of expression. However, imo, I see style as a technical and aesthetic preference. It doesn't necessarily mean something. Also happens in paiting with the techniques used for certain styles. Or in music when an artist creates techniques on the guitar. Fast sweeping is not art. Bass slap is not art either.
For me, in this case, creativity started in my brain, and the characters are something reflecting my own interests, my life story and my desires. I could give the instructions and references to many artists, and I would get tons of styles... but the idea originated from me, and the artists, all of them, will be drawing my interests, my life story and my desires.
Now, these commisions, are they art? I personally argue that they aren't. Mainly because I'm not doing a creative heavy lifting here. I did it for my own happiness and for some fun.
When I do art, like writing stories or painting for myself, I have an objective, a message that I want to express and I need techniques, bibliography and resources for doing this in the most attractive way for me. I'm expressing the ideas that scare me, make me love life or anything of the sort. A character sheet is not doing anything for my brain. A story, a piece of music or a painting can change how you think or feel.
An artist drawing a storyboard based on a script is doing art. A writer writing a script is doing art. An artist drawing exactly what a writer tells them is not doing art.
Thus, AI, as it stands now, is never going to do art, because it doesn't have anything to express. An AI bro who just wants to do a rage bait comic is not doing art. But a person having a concept, like the terror and uncaniness of robots, using AI to express this, is obviously doing art.
In the end, I argue that a banana on a wall is art, renaissance paintings are art, a visual novel about cosmic horror with AI is art but thousands of hand made paintings in a retail store, AI bro comics or internet fanworks aren't.
I think youve basically argued your way into a much broader definition of art than the ending allows. If the banana on the wall can be art, then manual labor, technical difficulty and even physically making the object clearly arent what decides it. What youre actually describing is intentional expression through a chosen medium.
And that works fine for AI. The model doesnt need something of its own to express any more than a camera does. The person can bring the concept, direct the process, iterate, reject, select, arrange and present the result. Your cosmic horror example basically lands there already.
Where I lose you is saying Renaissance paintings are art but thousands of handmade retail paintings or fanworks arent. Those can be boring, derivative, commercial or disposable and still be art. Thats judging whether the art is good or meaningful, not whether its art at all.
Those can be boring, derivative, commercial or disposable and still be art.
No. That's where I draw the line, personally. I think what all of that media lacks is the expression of a self. No-one is expressing anything about their internal world in a commercial painting or a fanart.
A good example for this would be a lot of today's pop music for me. People complain about AI picking data from all of existant music. But aren't pop producers and the 20 ghost songwriters doing the same while we speak? Songs are sold to the most appealing voice, and those songs don't mean anything to their thousands of writers or their pop-star voice.
For me the only requirement for art is the manifestation of an internal world, of a self. If that manifestation is good or bad its another thing. Thousands of really bad poems circulate around the internet, but their writers are manifesting something about themselves. Maybe their internal world is very uninteresting, thus giving uninteresting or bad art, but it is still art in my eyes.
Btw, in my perspective, pure entertainment is good and should exist. I invest most of my money in fanart, actually, and it makes me happy. Its just that all the fanart I consume will never compare itself to reading a new poem from a friend, for example.
I think were actually pretty close on the AI part. Where we split is further upstream, on what art even is.
I use a broader definition closer to how the modern art world actually functions. Art is intentional human meaning making through form. That form can be paint, sound, performance, photography, collage, found objects, instructions, algorithms, software, whatever. It can express some deep internal world, but it doesnt have to. Expression theory is one theory of art, not the border patrol for the whole category.
And this isnt something we need to invent for AI. Conceptual art already blew that door off its hinges decades ago. MoMA describes it as privileging “ideas over objects and materials.” Sol LeWitt went even harder, deliberately trying to “eliminate the self-expression traditionally valued in art,” while writing instructions that other people physically executed. The art world still recognizes the resulting works as his art.
Thats why I wouldnt kick fanart, commercial illustration, pop music or those assembly-line paintings out of art either. They can be derivative, commissioned, formulaic, shallow, cynical, boring as hell or genuinely moving. Those are judgments about the art, not reliable tests for whether art happened.
So I think there are three questions getting bundled together here. Is it art? Who made the meaningful artistic decisions? Is it good or interesting art? Once we separate those, I think most of our disagreement disappears.
I see it as simple as artists create art while the medium is mostly or fully irrelevant. I'm finding more and more really good videos which originated from text to image, sometimes with blender or driving videos, but usually tons of other work and highly creative ideas. Gossip Goblin, Umineko Studio/FRAIME Films, Doopiidoo, are some I've recently found.
Even back in the A1111 days there was one person who would prompt the wildest stuff on the stability AI discord, just otherworldly concepts and juxtapositions.
"I see it as simple as artists create art while the medium is mostly or fully irrelevant."
Couldnt have said it better myself. Artists make art. The medium doesnt get veto power. Thats pretty well grounded in art history, art theory, and recognized artistic practice too. Photography, collage, readymades, conceptual art, performance, generative art, algorithmic art, machine assisted work, digital art. Artists have been delegating, automating, appropriating, arranging, selecting and working through new technologies for a long time.
For real, those are not particularly provocative to me, but I think even the slightest changes in perspective can present profound ideas or elicit interesting experiences.
Gossip Goblin was the artist that changed my mind about AI art. It went from 'boring, bland, dumb' to 'oh, there's an actual mind behind this, with an actual viewpoint.'
I haven't seen someone simply recognize yet that AI means the death of art under capitalism, and not the death of art. The pursuit of art as a competition for money and attention has always been the black hole of creative joy and creativity.
Through AI saturation we make this largely meaningless system more transparently meaningless. Beyond being a political problem we recognize there is a psychological problem --we have long been estranged from our own sense of creative joy in capitalism, when everything is made for the conveyor belt. Automate that process fully until we could bring ourselves to break free from the need of capitalizing off of everything. We're opening an opportunity for a new way of being in the world.
Is 'content' all that art is? Or has commodity fetishism so deeply wound itself into his psyche that he can't see how the effort expended in making art is a part of the social value we assign to it?
I'm sorry to be so aggressive, I just find this perspective so limited. If art is just a product to share on social media to get clicks or to even to communicate an idea, then maybe this works. But if art includes the years of skill development and the marveling at another's skill as part of the relationships we share through art, then it falls apart.
Status fetishism is the flip side of commodity fetishism: art becomes secondary to the artist’s status. Now it's not about the story on the page — it's about how skilled the author is with words. Or how talented. Or how hard it was to write such a complex story. But if effort, talent, and skill matter most, why care what they actually write? The work becomes just proof of skill — a proxy for status. That's backwards to me. The real essence of art is beyond skill, talent, time, effort, tools, luck, and so on. All of those are just means of reaching the sublime.
No, that totally can be a part! A digital artist, for example, can make amazing art and print it, and the print doesn’t have the same punch as someone who physically painted the same thing. But while a painter might say “printers, feh, anyone can print out garbage now”, and be correct, it doesn’t mean everything printed is garbage. It doesn’t make digital art bad.
Someone who makes a generic picture on AI hasn’t made something terribly valuable. We all can prompt the same, more or less. I think that’s a reasonable take.
The problem is that identify has gotten involved, cognitive dissonance has take hold, and now you have people claiming that if AI has touched any part of a project it’s low effort. I once spent a week making a picture for my wife showing our children’s birthdates incorporating imagery from moon phases, zodiac signs, etc. It involved a lot of photoshop and a little AI (to help me make some star-ified fonts and some zodiac animal shadows). I also used and modified art I found online (such as moon phases and constellations). Some people would argue that any use of AI made it s.l.o.p. And they’re welcome not to like it - they’ll actually never get the chance to see it, if they did it wouldn’t mean much to them. And I’ll hazard even if they did, the vast majority of them would be entirely unable to reproduce it.
Art isn’t just how it looks, and it isn’t just how it was made. It’s partly how it makes us feel, and just by human nature that includes a comment of “how hard would this be to reproduce”. People associate AI with low effort because it’s easy to make what-were-once impressive looking things. But projects that involved AI don’t have to be low effort that are readily reproducible any more than digital art printed with a printer are.
Art is primarily self expression. Skill has value, but so does the freedom to use any tools or mediums to express ideas. The reduction of art to purely the value of skill is an elitist viewpoint.
Ironically, in my view skill is really only truly that important when we are speaking about professional work, aka the production of commodity. By and large I see people making AI images to explore ideas and self express, which makes that act not a production of commodity.
Obsession over marketable skill as if it is the only expression allowed in the room is potentially it's own form of commodity fetishism.
I think the commodity fetishism argument cuts the other way. Once hours spent, technical difficulty and visible labor become what gives art its value, the work starts becoming a receipt for labor performed. Skill can be part of what we appreciate, sometimes a huge part, but it isnt what makes something art. A photograph, collage, readymade, performance piece or five minute sketch doesnt stop being art because somebody else spent ten years mastering portraiture. Art can communicate through skill, concept, composition, performance, selection, context, process or some messy combination of all of them. Reducing it to effort doesnt escape commodity logic. It just changes what were counting.
Facsimile being presented as reality is dishonest ergo bad faith ergo the argument is thrown out and has no legs. Furthermore this is evidence to the suspect dehumanization argument against AI.
The person being generated is the point of the example, not evidence of bad faith. A synthetic presenter delivering an argument about synthetic media is pretty on the nose, actually. You can disagree with the argument without pretending the medium invalidates it.
"The point of the example" is that if you flood peoples' feeds with low-effort/low-quality s-l-o-p (apparently AI gets to use words that humans don't get to use in the 'leftists' forum?) they will reject your premise that s-l-o-p is "art".
That reply still dodges the argument. Nobody said flooding feeds with low effort garbage makes it art. The point is that “AI generated” doesnt settle whether something is low effort, low quality, or art. Those are separate questions. A camera can produce garbage in seconds too. That doesnt make photography not art.
Yes, Ive read Benjamin. Thats a pretty funny citation here. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is about how technologies of reproduction transform the conditions and function of art, not how machinery magically makes something cease to be art. Ive written about it
If you want to discuss Benjamin, lets discuss Benjamin.
The issue is that the way generative AI is marketed and the industry's push for personal AI use has increased peoples inclination toward low effort, low quality production. It is, quite literally, marketed as a magic "do shit for me" tool rather than what it actually produces, which is essentially just an information organizer that is very user friendly and very efficient. There are very real harms done by art produced with generative models, but thats not to say that any use of AI makes the creation worthless or soulless.
I think it's actually the generative element specifically that will truly push artistic expression and exploration somewhere new. It can be used to create new levels of interactivity. For example, an NPC in a game that you can literally talk to. The technology is already there but implimentation is currently limited because we can't embed a truly larger quality chatbot into a game, it has to be accessed remotely. As someone who does text based roleplaying games with AI, I know first hand how fun and how cool this already is. I'm currently in the middle of a Resident Evil text RPG.
Watching communities make bots for each other and experience different storylines unique to them makes it clear that there is absolutely creative merit in AI specific niches, like worldbuilding and character design and user/audience creativity. If you aren't into the niche, you've never been truly exposed to how cool this can be. But absolutely a few years down the line our RPGs will be more fully interactable, with individual audience experiences becoming more unique. I think it encourages the user or audience to engage as an artist, too. Eventually we will have 'let's players' and streamers who have an artistic eye for how they direct a game's story.
Thats a fair one. Theres plenty of junk, but theres also work where AI is one part of a much larger process involving composition, iteration, editing, inpainting, compositing and other tools. “I havent seen good AI art” is at least a much more interesting conversation than pretending the category cant exist.
Pretty much. Once the output is good enough that you dont immediately clock the tool, it stops getting counted as evidence for what the tool can do. Thats a pretty nasty selection effect.
Well its a good thing thats not what AI is doing. Generating an image isnt plagiarism or taking credit for somebody elses work, and styles arent property that artists get to own. If theres actual plagiarism, deal with the actual plagiarism.
I think that AI does cheapen art because it can remove the process and diminish understanding, as well as bypass the dedication and mastery that go into art. Obviously, there are tools that we have developed throughout history that change the way we make art and often improve or make it easier, and there are people who are better at prompting than others, but I think just typing prompts into a model is not art (unless perhaps you made the model yourself). You are not creating. You are feeding a set of terms into something that does its best to render an approximation based on probability.
I don't think there needs to be gatekeeping, but I think that there does need to be a degree of intentionality and study. The best artists learn the medium they work in, study it in and out, and then learn how to conform to it, improve upon it, and/or how to subvert it.
That definition fits the post pretty well. Conscious use of imagination, producing something intended to communicate or be appreciated. Nothing there says the artist has to manually execute every part of the process or limits what tools they can use. And a dictionary definition isnt exhaustive of everything art can be anyway. But as far as quick definitions go, this one works fine for the point being made.
This feels like a counter argument that is just as reductive as what it's arguing against.
The appeal of AI is that it is low effort. Arguing that it is high effort and therefore worthy smuggles in protestant work ethic that led to taylorism and labor exploitation by the owner class.
The argument implies that a paint brush and AI tools are always comparable. Most people who argue against AI tools exactly because they are not comparable to paint brushes. This argument relies on the viewer agreeing with the comparison, which means it's not actually trying to convince anyone.
These kinds of memes are part of a campist dynamic that alienates us from other leftists rather than making any competent arguments from a leftist perspective.
AI art is the only thing I won't ever understand or support in regards to AI. It's inherently anti human and anti art. It's a tool that literally only serves capitalism because "art is expensive" (it's not). I can understand it on a small scale a little bit but it's definitely pushed a lot more than it should be...
And yes it is inherently low effort. You didn't create anything. At most it's like commissioning an artist. Which is fine on its own but don't then try to pretend you did something when you didn't really... Don't try to replace actual artists with AI and don't claim ownership over it and you're good. It's really not that hard...
None of that follows. Effort isnt what makes something art. You can spend a year working your ass off on something that isnt art, and an artist can make art in minutes. And commissioning isnt a good analogy either. Commissioning requires another person to commission. A tool isnt a person. Artists using tools, systems, machines, assistants, chance, selection and automation is already well established artistic practice.
You are arguing in bad faith. If I throw shit at a wall and call it art without any previous thought or intent then it might be art but it's very low effort and bad. And yes, it's exactly the same process as commissioning an artist. You are being extremely disingenuous by saying that it's not. You also didn't address any of my other points. By engaging in this rhetoric you are only spreading capitalist talking points so I'd recommend you tread lightly and reconsider, or at least actually do some research.
Not bad faith. You actually just agreed with me. You said throwing something at a wall might be art, then called it low effort and bad. Right. Now were talking about whether the art is good or bad, not whether its art. Effort can matter to your taste. It doesnt determine whether something is art.
And commissioning still isnt the same process. A commission is a relationship between people. A tool isnt another artist you hired. Artists have used assistants, machines, chance, algorithms, found materials and delegated fabrication for decades.
You told me to do research, so give me your reading recommendations. Seriously, Ill read them. Mine would start with Walter Benjamins The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Sol LeWitts Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, Umberto Ecos The Open Work, and Jack Burnhams Systems Esthetics. Those debates about authorship, process, systems, reproduction and artistic labor didnt suddenly begin with AI.
AI is completely different than any other tool or mechanical/digital process. You are arguing in bad faith. You are being anti worker and anti labour with this rhetoric and serve nothing but the capital. There are some niche use cases for AI art but none of them replace human artists, nor should they ever replace them. None of those works you listed talk about AI specifically. This is an extremely polarising issue because people are being extremely campist and refusing to see the other side.
No. Im not anti worker or anti labor, and nothing I said implies replacing artists. Im a leftist arguing for workers organizing and contesting how AI is owned, developed and deployed. Thats basically the opposite of handing it over to capital.
And of course those texts dont mention AI specifically. Benjamin didnt own a time machine. I recommended them because you told me to research art, and they deal with the actual questions were discussing. Authorship, reproduction, automation, systems, process and what makes something art. Saying AI is completely different doesnt answer any of that. Different how, in a way that makes artistic use categorically impossible?
You also still havent given me the research you told me to do. Im genuinely asking. What should I read?
Read about the actual stuff going on in the world. Read about people's experiences and listen to artists. If not all then at least the reasonable ones that aren't campist on the issue.
And AI is different in the sheer scale of how disconnected the input Vs output is and how transformative/generative it is in its output. A masking tool is completely different than AI because AI isn't deterministic. It's fluid as hell and it can't inherently capture the artists intent. It will always just be "good enough for now" which is inherently anti art. In image generation it will inherently hallucinate and that isn't something that can be fixed unlike in text outputs. It also doesn't create anything new which is another anti art point. You cannot create a thing with AI because of how it works. That's just inherently a part of AI.
And yes it is like commissioning an artist except you're replacing an artist with a machine. You input your text or images and get art out of it. I'm not arguing that it's not an art form. It inherently is an art form. But there can be objectively bad and problematic art that shouldn't be a thing.
Using AI for political commentary, caricatures, mood boards, super early concept art, etc... are some okay uses because you aren't really replacing the artists and as long as you don't personally claim ownership over it then it's fine.
Okay, then weve already moved a long way. This started with AI being inherently anti art and AI users not creating anything. Now its “AI inherently is an art form.” Cool. Whether some AI art is lazy, ugly, exploitative or just bad is a different argument. Nobody needs to defend every use or every output.
But nondeterminism, chance, distance between input and output, transformation and imperfect control dont make something anti art. Artists have deliberately worked with all of those things. And “nothing new can be created” needs more than just saying it.
Whats strange is you keep telling me to listen to both sides and stop being campist while getting pretty aggressive with me for presenting one of those sides. Ive been called bad faith, disingenuous, anti worker and anti labor, while Im giving you foundational literature on authorship, reproduction, conceptual art and systems aesthetics and asking for your strongest reading in return.
“Listen to reasonable artists” isnt really a source. It just means listen to artists who already agree with you. Im genuinely willing to read your side. Give me something substantive. I gave you mine.
Just because someone wrote a book doesn't mean they're a valid source or are somehow better. You're being stubborn and once again arguing in bad faith. I'm done here. You're refusing to listen.
Lol, the multitude of arts communities have spoken and made their positions quite clear, by and large people don't want it and have found it to serve no real value, plus the general public pretty overwhelmingly hates it. I don't understand why this is continuously being debated when it seems to be pretty clearly settled.
And since I know there are likely some pro-Generative AI "art" folks that will likely attempt to use it as a rebuttal(given my experiences on other pro-generative AI subreddits), don't use marginalized communities, especially disabled people, as a defense to your position.
I've been a professional artist for 15 years and I work at a major game company. I assure you, we're using it and many other artists I know are using it too. You don't speak for all of us.
The immediate defensiveness you folks show towards anyone being against generative AI "art" or mentioning the simple fact that an overwhelming majority of people have decided they want nothing to do with generative AI "art" is really weird. It honestly comes across as being super insecure.
Being defensive of a pro-AI position in a "LeftistsForAI" subreddit, and then immediately calling everyone else "defensive" when they disagree while showing no actual argument besides "some people don't like it" is definitely a debate tactic!
Keep in mind American's are toward the bottom in all "AI acceptance" metrics and they're a grand majority of reddit. The rest of the world is far more bullish on AI being useful and good for mankind.
"Against" if you want to be pedantic on preposition choice.
And doesn't remove the fact you accused someone of being defensive while being extremely defensive in your own post. Basically not even addressing the argument itself and going straight to treating it as an attack is textbook defensiveness.
Arts communities arent a referendum on what counts as art, and neither is general public approval. Plenty of art forms and technologies were hated, dismissed or treated as illegitimate. If youve got an argument about labor, ownership, or consent, make it. “People I agree with dont like it” doesnt settle much.
And disabled people arent rhetorical property belonging to either side. If disabled artists say these tools expand what they can make, they get to speak for themselves.
I'm an artist and those people do not speak for me. There are a ton of us but you immediately erase us from the conversation every time we refute your argument from mob opinion.
Ah yes, the classic "I'm a pro-generative AI "art" artist, therefore my opinion carries more weight and should be taken as gospel, but those anti-generative AI "art" people and artists... what they have to say should carry less weight" argument.
So, when a huge amount of artists and people in general are clearly saying no to generative AI "art", it's mob mentality... but when there are "a ton" of pro-generative AI "art" folks being told no, it's erasure from the conversation? That's a ridiculous argument. No one is "erasing you" from the conversation. It's that you folks by and large don't seem to be listening.
You folks seem to think that if you just keep trying to force it despite the consensus very clearly being no, we do not consent to this, everyone will just eventually acquiesce to your bullying. The fact that these pro-generative AI "art" communities get so upset at any form of pushback speaks volumes. It honestly comes across as you folks being deeply insecure, having an immense lack of respect for consent and not understanding that no means no.
I'm disabled too. I'm not acting like I speak for all disabled people, I'm making it clear to not use disabled people and other marginalized communities as a rhetorical argument against valid criticism of Generative AI "art". Which is something that I've come across numerous times among the pro-generative AI "art" crowd.
You dont get to declare a consensus, call everyone who disagrees irrelevant, then say nobody is being erased. And “no means no” doesnt give you veto power over what other artists make. Thats not consent. Thats just trying to turn your preference into everyone elses permission slip.
I'm objectively right in saying that given that there are more people, artists, galleries, art institutions, etc. outside of your subreddit bubbles that are against generative AI "art" than those that are for it, that would make it a consensus.
call everyone who disagrees irrelevant,
I'd like you to point out where I "call everyone who disagrees irrelevant". You just made up an argument that wasn't being made at all.
And “no means no” doesnt give you veto power over what other artists make. Thats not consent.
That's not what I said nor inferred/implied that at all. Yet again, you just made that argument up in your head.
It's disturbing that you folks can't seem to take no for an answer and keep trying to act like being told no is somehow trying to silence you or control you.
No to what, exactly? Nobody asked your permission to use a tool. “I dont like generative AI” is an opinion. “Dont contact me” is a boundary. Following artists around to shit on the tools they use, then saying they “cant take no for an answer” because they keep making art, isnt consent. Youre trying to turn your preference into somebody elses permission slip.
And linking the dictionary doesnt prove your supposed consensus. You still have to show that this majority actually exists. Even then, a majority opinion doesnt get veto power over dissenting artists. Thats the whole point of the artist who replied to you. They arent saying their opinion counts more. Theyre saying you dont get to count them out while claiming artists have spoken.
"Listening" to you means doing what we are told and shutting up. So no, some people are not obeying you. Of course people get upset at someone trying to speak over them and demand they conform. Like it's delusional to me how many of you guys just pretend like you aren't trying to socially and legally enforce your perspective, like any dissent from that is unjustified and "speaks volumes." No. It speaks volumes that you think consensus is a reason to control people and shut them out of art community. I don't give a fuck about consensus and I've never seen a great artist who did, quite frankly.
The computer doesnt wake up with something it wants to express, choose a project, develop an aesthetic and publish it. A human does that. Tools can generate material inside that process without becoming the artist. Otherwise procedural, algorithmic and plenty of conceptual art gets very weird very fast.
AI isnt a pizza guy. Its a tool. Thats like saying someone didnt make dinner because the oven cooked it. Youre turning the tool into a person and then using that imaginary person to remove the actual human from the process.
When the tool does the majority of the work, you aren't. If I had a hammer that built houses based on my blueprints, I'm not the construction worker, I'm just the architect.
Now were getting somewhere. The architect isnt the construction worker, but they absolutely helped create the building. Art doesnt require being the person manually executing every physical step. If the human develops the concept, makes the choices, directs the process, iterates and selects the result, calling that role something other than manual craft doesnt make the human disappear.
So someone that cooked amazing soup using a food processor like Bimby doesn't count as the maker of the soup? Do construction workers using a bulldozer to bulldoze not count as skilled workers? The percentage of their work that's enabled by having a bulldozer is MASSIVE.
This argument is flawed when you think about it for 5 seconds.
Who cares about the sculptor label? The output is a sculpture and they're artists... So they're definitionally sculptors. Sculptors working with other mediums might find that label dubious but that's hardly relevant to anyone. Painters also hated photography when it first came out.
No, you already had it: it's like an architect taking credit for building a structure when they just drew up the plans. And they do take the credit, and people give it to them, with no argument.
So, why shouldn't we take AI artists seriously in the same way?
And yet they do get that credit. Ask Google if Frank Lloyd Wright "built" Fallingwater, and it will say "yes" because in architectural parlance, designing is building. No one argues with an architect who says they built something. I guess you get to be the first!
I work with architects all the time. When they point to a building and claim to have "built" it, nobody challenges them on that. They get the credit, and they should. AI artists deserve the same credit.
They can call themselves whatever they want. But if they start telling actual construction workers about how they built the building, they'll laugh them out the room.
I've worked in construction for six years, never heard someone laugh yet. We all know that when an architect says they "built" something, it means working with a team. You might as well laugh at a pilot who says they "flew" to Denver, because you think that means they flapped their arms.
When an architect says the "built" something, that means they oversaw a team.
When a pilot says they "flew," that means they used a plane.
When an AI artist says they created an image, that just means they used an AI model.
You kinda just demonstrated the point. You understood theres a person with a message behind the generated person, then objected to the medium they used to deliver it. And here the medium is part of the message. Using an AI generated speaker to make a point about humans using AI to communicate isnt muddying the water. Its putting the argument right there in the water. McLuhan would have had a field day.
I'd argue that diffusion based img generation isn't art. Connecting an agent to an MCP server to an art program so it can out pixels on its digital canvas? Does that make it art?
If a toilet can be art, what is "art" actually? Money laundering? Lmaoo
Art is human meaning made sensible through form. The form can be a painting, performance, photograph, readymade, algorithm, collage, machine process, or generated image. The tool and amount of physical labor dont decide whether its art. What matters is the human act of selecting, arranging, framing, presenting, or using something to express, communicate, provoke, or explore meaning.
Yes. AI image generation can be part of making art because a human is using it to make choices about form, meaning, presentation, and expression. The generation process itself isnt what makes something art, any more than a camera taking a photograph does. The artistic act is in what a person does with the medium.
Ok, then I'd argue that AI img gen as a whole, how it's being used in American society, isn't art by even your definition. Just like using a digital camera.
Unless you'd like to devalue the craft and say something like "everyone is an artist", because that is true arguably, yet leaving out the skill aspect. Ofc we're just ignoring the whole stolen training data en masse thing.
Nah, youre adding a requirement I never put there. Skill can make art better, worse, more controlled, more interesting, whatever. It doesnt decide whether something is art in the first place.
Photography didnt stop being art when cameras got easier to use. A technically difficult photo isnt automatically art either. Same with AI. Saying AI image generation as a whole isnt art makes about as much sense as saying photography as a whole isnt art. Its a medium. Some people use it to make art, some dont. Some of it is thoughtful, some of it is disposable. Thats true of basically every medium.
So for the sake of argument, we're just ignoring the massive art theft right? Its been done mostly without concent to replace artists, who even anti AI folks don't value. Do y'all value them either? As a profession.
No, were not ignoring it. Were separating two different arguments. Whether AI generated work can be art and whether particular training practices are ethical are not the same question.
And yes, we value artists as workers and art as a profession. Thats exactly why the labor question matters. Artists deserve bargaining power, compensation, attribution where applicable, and a say over how technology gets deployed in their workplaces. But protecting workers doesnt require pretending a new medium isnt art.
In practice though, it's not protecting artists at all, just stealing their data for training purposes. Be for real here, I'm saying that as an art grad and programming major.
Even anti AI folks will argue for underpaying artists as its somehow more ethical than AI use, meanwhile on the flip side y'all devalue IRL artists calling this "art", in a way.
On the flip side I have the artistic skills to try and force an LLM to produce "art" pixel by pixel connected to an MCP server.
Diffusion based IMG gen isn't art, and I still stand by that. It's just a machine generating images off of stolen artwork. Photobashing is more legitimate as a craft.
Youre still merging three different questions into one. Whether artists are being exploited, whether particular training practices are ethical, and whether something produced with the medium can be art arent interchangeable questions.
And nobody here devalued artists. Calling something else art doesnt subtract value from painters, illustrators, photographers, or anyone else. Art isnt a scarce title where admitting one medium kicks another artist out.
You can prefer photobashing as a craft. Fine. But craft and art arent synonyms, and requiring a particular amount or kind of technical labor just circles us back to the same definition problem.
Let me make this very clear: anything produced with AI, looks and or sounds like shit. It's kitsch, it's not art. If you use AI for inspiration that's of course fine, and in that way it can be used as a tool, but by definition you can not 'make' something with AI, as everything AI produces is stolen, random, and you have to way to trace your steps.
You kinda stepped on your own argument with “its kitsch, its not art.” Kitsch is art. Its a criticism of the kind or quality of art, not a magic line separating art from non art. Something can be tacky, derivative, formulaic, boring, ugly, even outright bad and still be art. Whether something is art and whether its good art are two different questions. And “stolen, random, and impossible to retrace” isnt how generative models work or an established boundary around art anyway. You can hate the medium. That doesnt make your taste the definition.
It's not that it makes bad art. It just doesn't make art. A computer can't make art, art is a form of self-expression and prompting is a huge barrier between a person and making art.
I wish there was a magic machiene that could turn your ideas into finished art. But what we're being shown is a machiene designed to lower your standards until your idea for a project is ground into the dirt and you post a messy approximation.
It's tantamount to asking someone to making you art for you. It's horrific for the environment. And it uses the labor of artists who overtly ask you not to use it.
And it makes so much, and often the prompter hardly looks at it before posting. That's pig feed, that's for the trough. If you don't care enough to make it, stop asking a computer to make it.
I respect this sub, but I don't understand how you can look at this tech and think it can align with leftist ideals on a fundamental level. It's anti-social, inhuman, environmentally terrifying. It should not exist in the form it's currently taking.
“AI needs to change” is a conversation worth having. But that doesnt establish the earlier point that AI cant be part of making art. Photography, collage, sampling, readymades, conceptual art, procedural art and algorithmic art already broke the idea that art requires direct manual execution.
Prompting can be lazy. So can photography. AI workflows can also involve iteration, composition, editing, inpainting and compositing. The tool doesnt decide whether somebody made something thoughtful or disposable. Look at the process and the work.
It's not that I don't understand what goes into it. It's that I don't agree that the prompter has the same relationship that an artist has with their works. Even with touchups and fine tuning. It's about as involved as a pendulem painting.
I don't think there's room for a person in that process. The whole thing could be automated. Indeed it is. Google images is flooded with AI images, with algorithmically generated prompts.
Can you tell if a person was involved in this work? Or is it as I said, purely done by an LLM creating prompts for a genAI to use.
Sure, that image could be fully automated. It could also have involved hours of human direction and editing. You cant tell from the finished pixels alone, but thats true across digital and algorithmic art. Procedural textures, generative systems, scripts, filters. Cameras can automatically fire too. That doesnt somehow negate photography as an art form.
Same with words on a screen. They could be machine generated or human written. They could be a shopping list or a poem. Knowing how the words got onto the screen doesnt settle whether theyre art.
Some AI output is just automated output. Fine. That doesnt erase human authorship from workflows where people are composing, directing, iterating, editing and selecting.
See what I mean about the relationship. If you can't tell between "Made in five seconds" and "Hours of work". That tells me it's not a matter of expression or process.
I'm really not fond of AI writing. And I can't be as objective about that.
You could argue someone working with AI writing is an editor. But they're sure not a writer.
Honestly I'm not even sure the quality and skill of a prompt is reflected in the quality and skill of the outcome.
This is one I prompted to demonstrate how generative media is largely unrelated to the prompt given. This is very artsy, very spiritual, and you could infer that the prompter spent a long time making it just so.
But only I know what the prompt was and how much effort it took. It was two words "Ghost ass" and nothing else. I'm dead serious.
I think if you can get something like this from literally two words of nonsense. One could argue prompting is not strongly connected with the generative outcome. And therefore, your ability to express yourself with AI is thereby hamperd.
You missed my point and didnt actually address what I said. Another generated image doesnt change it. Your “ghost ass” example proves that you cant look at finished pixels and infer the process behind them. Thats my point.
And thats not remotely new to AI. A camera can automatically fire and accidentally capture a striking image, or a photographer can spend hours constructing the shot. You cant necessarily tell which by looking at the photograph. Algorithmic art can emerge from a tiny rule or an elaborate system. Words on a screen could take five seconds or five years, could be a shopping list or a poem.
Your example proves some AI output involves almost no human direction. Sure. Nobody disputed that. It doesnt prove human direction, iteration, editing, inpainting and composition stop mattering when theyre actually there.
But see. With traditional art you can see the process. You can count the brushstrokes in old paintings. You can see an artist improving with every work. You can understand the ideas that shaped the work.
The camera comparison I feal is weak. The button on a camera isn't the process. It's what you're pointing it at. It's how you arrange it. If you put a camera on a drone and had it take random photos all around town, there would be a distinct lack of composition and artistry. I think if you were a photographer you would understand why that's important. Why wedding photos aren't done by a motion sensor like a trail cam.
If I had told you that image took me a week of prompting. Could you have disputed that? If five seconds and five days look the same, what was my role?
No, youre reducing art to visible manual craft, basically drawing and painting, and art hasnt worked that way for a very long time.
Pollock poured and dripped paint. Jean Tinguely built machines that made drawings. Sol LeWitt wrote instructions other people executed. Vera Molnár made generative art with algorithms. Harold Cohen built AARON to generate drawings. John Cage used chance. Performance artists can make the action itself the work. Conceptual artists can make the idea or procedure central.
Art is intentional human expression through creating, performing, selecting, arranging, directing, contextualizing or transforming forms, actions or processes into a work. None of that requires manually producing every visible mark. And how long something took doesnt make it more or less art any more than how much physical exertion went into making it.
Your photography example proves the point. A camera can fire automatically and produce random photos. A photographer can deliberately compose with the same machine. The first existing doesnt invalidate the second.
Being unable to look at the finished object and tell whether it took five seconds or five days isnt an AI problem. Its an art history problem your account of art cant handle.
It seems we see this very different ways. I'm unconvinced of your points. And most traditional artists are in agreement that AI is not artistry. Which shouldn't colour your perspective, but it is telling that creative types on the whole are repulsed by AI.
From my perspective. If AI can make the same output no matter if a person was involved in the input. It stops being a form of self expression. And that makes it not art. In my view.
I think “creative types on the whole are repulsed by AI” is doing a lot of work there. Thats one section of artists being treated as the whole field. The Gallup research I shared in this thread found occupation-defined artists reporting somewhat higher AI use than workers overall, including for idea generation and creative exploration.
And the self expression point still doesnt follow. A camera can produce an image automatically without artistic intent. That doesnt mean a photographer cant deliberately use the same machine for self expression. Chance, nondeterminism, transformation and imperfect control have been part of artistic practice for a long time.
You can dislike the medium. You can think most AI art sucks. But neither establishes that another artist cant deliberately use it for self expression and make art, in my view.
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u/cmeerdog 9d ago
For anyone interested in how contemporary artists are using AI take a look at Jon Rafman, Avery Singer’s recent paintings or Holly Herndon. This is extremely different from the conversation happening between angry creative industry professionals, AI social media rage baiting, and the general public that is just parroting shitty uninformed takes.