this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2024
377 points (87.9% liked)

Technology

59569 readers
3431 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Setting aside the usual arguments on the anti- and pro-AI art debate and the nature of creativity itself, perhaps the negative reaction that the Redditor encountered is part of a sea change in opinion among many people that think corporate AI platforms are exploitive and extractive in nature because their datasets rely on copyrighted material without the original artists' permission. And that's without getting into AI's negative drag on the environment.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] glassware@lemmy.world 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

How does this argument not also apply to photography? A modern camera is a computer, you fiddle with the settings, press a button and it automatically makes a picture for you. People produce billions of shitty photographs a day which aren't art, but that doesn't mean someone working in photography as a medium can't be an artist.

In my experience it's only non-artists who make this argument, because in their heads they're comparing AI to painting. But for visual artists there are tons of mediums and disciplines where you don't physically make the marks yourself and it's the concept and composition that's important.

There was an exhibition of AI generated art at the big local gallery here last year and I expected artist friends to be against it, but they were just like "oh, that's interesting". They just see AI generation as another way of creating an image and whether a particular image is or isn't art depends on the intention not the process.

[–] Mastengwe@lemm.ee 8 points 8 months ago

In the hands of someone that doesn’t know what they’re doing, a camera is useless. Any one can make a computer create an image. All it takes is being able to complete a descriptive sentence.

It’s an unskilled task. It’s not art.

[–] Ashe@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 8 months ago

Taking medium into account changes everything. A sculpture artist or painter doesn't have the same interest or concern about AI art yet, and may never. They also tend to not have the same comprehensive view of AI generation as well as training data.

That being said, digital photography doesn't remotely compare. If I were to set my DSLR up with a lens, set an F stop and shutter speed, the results would be similar to that of a film camera. A sensor takes in light in the same way film does. A 30 second exposure at a 500 ISO will compare to a 30 second camera on a certain film type, which is comparable to ISO settings.

Artificially bumping up light sensitivity on a DSLR degrades image quality. Analog and digital are largely comparable. So how would it apply to photography? It's not just automatically making a picture, and if it were doing that on auto, it's still not all that different from a film photo with generic catch all sensors and light metering.

Photography is all about catching the moment, personally I captured night landscapes via manual long exposure on a DSLR, but none of that is automatic.