barsoap

Slight correction: Lemmy.ml is their reach-out and diplomacy instance. Their actual instance is lemmygrad.

If you iterate, you are not in control of what changes. You only find out what has changed after the result has been generated.

If you think that's the case then you don't understand the medium. Once you've explored a model, seen into its mind, understand how it understands things, you can direct it quite precisely. At least as precisely as a photographer taking a picture of a tree -- yes, if you care about the arrangement of leaves then it might take a couple of tries until the wind moves them just right but you've made a point of going to the right tree, in the right season, on a day with the right weather, at a time with the right light.

Whereas today, generative AI is not being made as a critique to anything.

I'm not claiming that. There's an incidental artistry in the sense that now some progressives have their underwear in a twist just as conservatives had theirs in a twist about Fountain but I'll readily grant that there was no human intent behind it. Sometimes it's not artists who troll people but the general machinations of the world. Still worthy of appreciation but calling it "art" is not a hill I would die on.

What I'm claiming is that you can't judge art by the level of craft involved: It can be zero and still be art. Any argument involving craft is literally missing the point of what art is.

Sorry, I’ve got to ask though, can you give me an example of “bougie shit”?

(I'm not the one you replied to)

That banksy getting shredded at the art auction. It was beautiful. A gazillion bougie fucks smelling their own farts about the artistic value of getting shown a middle finger, thereby devaluing the finger. A truly bougie understanding of art and banksy called it, made the bougie shit his medium.

That won't get you into art school but it also won't get you kicked out.

*adjusts horn-rims* yesyes very neat do you have anything else to say but that you're whimsical?

That particular quote you pointed out, was specific to generative AI, because you don’t make those same choices. The model and the training data is what produces those results for you.

And for a photographer, their surroundings is what produces many results, leading them to not make choices about those things. They focus on other things, don't express themselves in the arrangement of leaves on a tree, leave that stuff to chance.

The important part is not that choices are made for you, but that you do make, at the very least, a choice. One single choice suffices to have intent. It is not even necessary to make that choice during the creation of the piece, splattering five buckets of paint onto five canvases and choosing the one that sparks the right impression a choice.

because the whole concept of that particular piece was that it was absurdist - an every day object raised to status of art by the artist.

Yes, precisely. That one concept, the single choice, "yep a urinal should be both provocative and banal enough", is what made it art.

There is no minimum level of craft necessary for art.

He put it there leveraging a whole urinal factory. Transported into today's world, instead of clicking "generate" on a prompt with "urinal" on it he put "urinal" in the amazon search box, picked the first result, and then hit "buy".

The art is in the idea, the message, the thought or impression that's getting transmitted, the effect in the recipient's mind (in this case it was a shitpost to troll conservatives on the one side and have a good chuckle among people who got it on the other). The rest is craft. Craft, on its own, can be fucking impressive but it's not art.

And, of course, yes, not everyone hitting "generate" is putting a urinal on a pedestal. Much of the AI stuff out there is devoid of artistic intent, much of it isn't even crafty, but that doesn't mean that something being AI generated cannot be art, or that it would need craftiness to become art.

In the case of his bicycle wheel thing he went through a gazillion wheels -- hitting generate a million times if you want -- until he found one that was neither beautiful, nor ugly, but one that was profoundly uninteresting, "just a wheel, nothing special". That was work, the actual work of an artist (judging the impression something makes), and with precise artistic intent -- to make a statement about how art should be about engaging the mind, be not about aesthetics.

The people producing profoundly uninteresting works with AI don't do that. Just goes on to show that the author is very much not dead.

Unless you are creating your own AI model from scratch and training it purely on your own artworks, I don’t see how you can, in good conscience, claim the results to be your own.

Did you create all the textures you put onto your 3d models? Did you use substance painter? Any sort of asset library? If you're working in 2d, did you create your own brush textures?

Did you create colour and perspective theory from scratch? If not, how can you call yourself a painter?

Did Duchamp study the manufacture of ceramics before putting a factory-made urinal on a pedestal and called it a piece of art?

I have no idea but yes I didn't delete my account. Here's a link to the thread on old.reddit.com, it's the link in the top comment.

Yeah and there are tons of angles and gestures for human subjects that AI just can’t figure out still.

Actually less so because it can't draw the stuff but because it doesn't want to on its own, and there's no way to ask it to do anything different with built-in tools, you have to bring your own.

Say I ask you to draw a car. You're probably going to do a profile or 3/4th view (is that the right terminology for car portraits?), possibly a head-on, you're utterly unlikely to draw the car from the top, or from the perspective of a mechanic lying under it.

Combine that tendency to draw cars from a limited set of perspectives because "that's how you draw cars" with the inability of CLIP (the language model stable diffusion uses) to understand pretty much, well, anything (it's not a LLM), and you'll have no chance getting the model to draw the car from a non-standard perspective.

Throw in some other kind of conditioning, though, like a depth map, doesn't even need to be accurate it can be very rough, the information density equivalent of me gesturing the outline of a car and a camera, and suddenly all kinds of angles are possible. Probably not under the car as the model is unlikely to know much about it, but everything else should work just fine.

SDXL can paint, say, a man in a tuxedo doing one-hand pullups while eating a sandwich with the other. Good luck prompting that only with text, though.

Then those same people will also dismiss bananas taped to the wall for requiring "zero skill" and thus out themselves as having no idea what art actually is.

people forget that what makes art impressive is also the skill of the artist in the respective medium

I bet you don't like it when people put urinals on a pedestal.

The images.

Not terrible, usable as rough concept art but not nearly good enough to be reference. While the general likeness has consistency there's inconsistencies in the eybrows and ears and don't get me started on the costumes they're all plain different.

The main issue I have here, knowing that it's AI, is whether he's holding his blade by the, well, blade because he's just that kind of vampire or because the AI messed up and the human didn't notice.