Of course it's art. Hell, there's human art that I don't find to be much "art". Some of the stuff I've seen is actually pretty cool. But more useful to me than Dall E/E2, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, etc. is something like ChatGPT (also made by OpenAI) which is starting to blow up:
Absolutely not. There's craftsmanship to it. But art is a communication between the artist and the audience about something that is true and beautiful about our shared reality. An AI doesn't know what beauty is beyond how well a new pattern matches old ones tagged as beautiful. AI also doesn't give a **** about what is true. And AI doesn't share a reality with us. You can see an image that speaks deeply to you about the meaning of life but then you're told a computer made it and the image's meta-properties change. It's no longer a fellow human hitting on your same wavelength about the condition of humanity - no now it's just a trick being played on you, mimicking something real by synthesizing a facsimile of every true thing every real artist may have once rendered which is now housed in a database. By that same token, there's lots of other things I offend people by not calling art. I don't mean disrespect by it. There is lots of craft that takes talent and skill and does a thing, but it's just not a thing I think art is doing.
I find it fascinating that in 10 seconds I can copy someone's art and brush stroke, apply it to a cat photo with the current AI, and create an equally amazing piece of art that is the quality of a master. The only thing I cannot recreate is composition, but I happen to be good at that. What I also love is that I can combine the brushstrokes and style of more than one great painter. Like Van Gogh, Picasso, and Hopper all in one painting. So that makes some incredible blended pieces by the AI. Even more amazing is that a great painter can do it to themselves. So they no longer need to toil over how to create another masterpiece. They simply need to apply what they already created in one painting to a photo. So no more cramming out art for the business side of it to meet their demands on their timeline, which can be a pain, just click and done. The impact is on the level of google where you no longer needed to learn anything, you only needed to perfect how to find the knowledge. In the art world the AI can do the work for you. It's eliminated the need for the artist and put the focus on just wanting to create something.
Machine Learning, as it is now, takes all scanned history/info then teases out linked patterns like a million squared trained monkeys writing Shakespeare. Some people need the element of inspiration or toil for the work to be considered "art", which will compel a future generation of artists to work around or with the oncoming mass produced glut of works. The core struggle will be how this computing is shared, whether for the masses or the privileged few. We talk of starving artists augmenting tech into process, but how much of a chance do they have if Apple's record label is just a collection of independently contracted servers? Or maybe it's a continuation of a dynamic we're all too familiar with?
I’ve been reading about this and haven’t tried DALL-E or ChatGPT yet but as a designer and an amateur philosopher / pontificator I am very concerned about this. There has been a long debate in architecture about the effects of computer aided design (CAD) does to design. Especially now with easy to use and more powerful 3D modeling and rendering tools. The feeling is that not only is the craft of hand drawing and building actual models lost but also the meticulous way of thinking required to design. If you can rapidly create an architecture design in 3D and even render if photorealistically the image created is so compelling there is less actual thought out into how well the design works. There has been a backlash with many pushing for more hand drawing and even requiring students to learn how to draw by hand. I think with these new tools the techniques of painting and drawing will be further lost and as such the craft of art will be lost. That may affect what type of art and the quality we are getting as artists rely more on these tools rather than having to deal with both the conception and production of art.
Maybe but makes those things accessible to "less talented" or rather "Less interested" people People that have talked themselves out of those areas and never pursued them even if they had an interest Rocket River
Art is in the eyes of the beholder. Open to interpretation. AI generated images can be art. The AI itself can be art. The generated images can be used in art. I've seen artists generate images and then go back in to create something entirely new. If you're just typing prompts into Midjourney and passing it off as your own art, I'm rolling my eyes and not taking you seriously. What gets murky is attributing the owners/creators of the original art used to train the AI. There's already been cases of artists having their portfolios scraped to train algorithms without their approval. Interested to see the legal ramifications of all this play out..
You can tell GPT to write your lyrics about "something something" in the style of "blah blah" and then ask it for the chord progression.
Sure these tools make it possible for people with less talent and skill to get into visual art just like point and shoot cameras got people into photography. The question to me though is how much is art through the process of art? Consider why people talk about made from scratch or home cooked. meals. Certainly with food technology a mass produced food like Ramen could still be as tasty and nutritious as something where someone makes the noodles by hand and has made the broth themselves. There is a craft that a lot of people comes through the effort. In visual art such as painting there is a tactile sense to the painting such as the technique of the brush strokes. The act of putting the paint onto the canvas is a feedback mechanism to the artist to how the create the image. If you can just have an AI do that for you that very well could change how the art is made because the process of painting is lost.
Part of what makes art, that nobody else in this thread has mentioned, is the story behind the art and the context in which the art was created. As humans, we like the narrative that surrounds the art. For example, "Banana Taped To Wall" was blasted for not being art and people were outraged that it fetched $120,000. So the story behind a simple banana was what made it interesting, not the physical object in and of itself. While not in this case, often art has a backstory of pain or hardship that no AI can replicate. Secondarily, the seemingly contradictory concepts of art and capitalism are fundamentally linked together. So put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Video killed the radio star I'm not saying the argument of losing the art of painting to AI generating paintings is comparable to video/radio. It just reminds me of the song so that is why I did this pic, for the funs. I use AI art for quick brainstorming of ideas and for the almost instant gratification in the generations of the grids.
