>If you take any high quality AI content and ask their creator what their workflow is, you'll quickly discover that the complexity and nuance required to actually create something high-quality and something that actually "fulfills your vision" is incredibly complex
This comes off as so tone deaf seeing your AI artwork is only possible due to the millions of hours spent by real people who created the art used to train these models. Maybe it's easier to understand why people don't respect AI "artists" with this in mind.
I also feel unhappy when painters get formal art training which summarizes millions of human hours of work. Even worse they then go to Florence and waste their time stealing art by painting..exact copies of other people’s paintings!
I feel a real artist would make their own tools: brushes, paint, canvas, and above all be truly creative by not unfairly using anything that’s gone before. If they did they aren’t creative; they’re a thief.
Spending thousands of hours honing a craft and along the way learning from those who came before you, is not the same as using these models. You're being overly reductive to try and force a similarity, but in the process you just come off as disingenuous.
Perhaps there are craftsman who buy chisels made by others.
Okay. Then is craft only making furniture with dovetail joints by hand?
Well, I guess people use planers.
So, no it's not just hand made wood working that's craft.
Someone uses a CnC machine with a design they made to cut wood, then hand sands and polishes. Is that craft?
What if you learned it took them three or four times as many hours to learn the CnC machine and design as it did to hand plane a cedar log?
To be clear, I don't identify as an artist at all, but I do have a stake in this conversation -- which is that I'd like more young folks to be positive, pick up tools at their disposal and build good things with them. The future's coming, and it's going to be built out by people with open minds who are soaking up everything they can about whatever tools are available. It's a sort of brain rot to gatekeep technology advances out of creativity.
>which is that I'd like more young folks to be positive, pick up tools at their disposal and build good things with them
People have had access to tools for creating for generations. In the modern era you can buy a pencil and a sketch pad for dollars. You can buy an instrument used for as little as a hundred dollars. Hell, schools teach art and music for free.
>The future's coming, and it's going to be built out by people with open minds who are soaking up everything they can about whatever tools are available.
Not all technology presents a net good for society. These technologies only exist on top the mountain of stolen artwork created by millions of artists, and this tech will continue to hamper the livelihoods of artists as long these companies are pushing them.
>It's a sort of brain rot to gatekeep technology advances out of creativity.
JFC. Don't talk to me about brain rot. The "art" and "creativity" you speak about here is just more finely grained consumption. Now instead of scrolling through a feed, you can ask Google to present your dopamine addicted brain exactly what you want to see in that moment.
In contrast, focusing on improving a craft acts as a sort of antidote to "brain rot" because you're engaging in multiple important things at once:
I agree on the benefits of a hand-type craft, and that it’s an antidote to brain rot. Totally with you.
I agree with the idea of “Amistics” (thanks Neal) - a sort of societal and moral lens to view technologies through and evaluate them. Totally with you there too.
I agree that doomscrolling and social media are cancer-y in the extreme, to the extent that for a number of years I printed a daily personal newspaper. Srsly.
> this tech will continue to hamper the livelihoods of artists …
Nope. We’ll just redefine what an artist is. Pop quiz: did Disney employ more “artists” when each cel of a film was hand drawn and colored, or now when these modern “faux-artists, not like the real ones” have access to rendering clusters?
Or a second pop quiz, when da Vinci or Rubens ran workshops where apprentices painted “da Vincis” or “Rubens(s?)” who was the artist?
By the way, it’s right to redefine what an artist is. I’m going to get super controversial, ca 1900 and say that photographers can be artists. Now I’m going to get super controversial ca 1910 and say that someone mounting a bicycle wheel as a ‘readymade’ and displaying it can be an artist. Wait, now I’m going to move ahead the 1980s and say a cow cut in half and suspended in some sort of formaldehyde can be art. Hang on. A poem on a disk that deletes itself as its read is art.
The art is the creative endeavor itself. It’s the outcome of a creative person engaging with whatever tools they want to create some output. If someone wants to engage with an LLM or diffusion model or whatever and have it make something to those standards, it’s art. Calling them ‘not an artist’ based on their choice of tools is just totally incorrect.
I’m not saying all uses of diffusion models or any other AI assisted imagery is art. But I am saying that ingesting and summarizing publicized images is not theft, and people choosing to use those tools to instantiate a creative vision can absolutely be art, and further that generally the cheaper a form of creative expression becomes the better on balance for the world.
>Calling them ‘not an artist’ based on their choice of tools is just totally incorrect
Here's the crux of the issue I have with this entire conversation--because you now are able to generate "artwork," you expect the artistic community to respect you as an artist. You're waltzing into the room with none of the same battle scars, experiences, or morals and demanding that they bestow upon you the title of "creator".
>By the way, it’s right to redefine what an artist is
Sure, but let artists be the ones who take charge in redefining what art is. How is it right to redefine what "art" and "creating" is without the goodwill or consent of the artistic community at large? You are effectively trying to force a hostile takeover of the space, to demand everyone consider your generated image/song/video be treated with the same amount of respect as actual art.
If you can't even be bothered to respect the artistic community enough to understand why they feel slighted over the creation of these tools, or to empathize with them over their impact in livelihood due to the proliferation of AI slop, why the hell do you expect them to consider you an artist?
Some ad hominem here; and a bunch of goalpost shifting. I’m not claiming to be an artist. Are you, by the way?
If you look through civitai and the stable diffusion subreddit you’ll find people who’ve spent thousands of hours tuning these AI tools to produce something that they imagined. In my mind, they’re artists. It might be bad art, some of it is, some of it is arguably not, but they fit the description to me. They certainly think of themselves as struggling to create things they envisioned, and sometimes achieving it.
As to who gets to define art and what art is: please understand that I’m saying —>> you are gatekeeping <<— by calling people who spend thousands of hours creating imagery they want to create “not part of the artistic community”.
So, I have a broader view of the artistic community than you, full stop. It includes people whose livelihood is going to be disrupted by this technology. It includes a bunch of people who couldn’t create imagery they imagined before but can now.
Just as I can understand why Luddites burned shit in Northern England, I can understand and even respect a fight from interest groups to turn back the clock on new technology. And I am interested to see how strong guilds like SAG navigate and negotiate new economies around creating.
End of the day - I think moralizing in order to limit human creativity with bullshit made up rules about what an artist “is” or should be is foolish, wrong-headed, and ultimately doomed as an endeavor, plus it runs the risk of convincing new creatives not to engage. It’s a net loss for human creative output, while advocates get to pearl-clutch about the evils of tech. It’s just the wrong, wrong, wrong attitude to have about it; probably a waste of time trying to convince one well-spoken person on HN to change their views. But, hopefully you will. You could still rail against the tech by the way, or advocate for protectionism or a bunch of stuff, even if you decided to accept a person could use a diffusion model to make something creative.
You said you're an AI artist, but you've just dismissed all artists upon whose work you build your own art as thieves, so either you've admitted yourself a thief as well or you got some serious trouble with logic
Sorry, I think you missed the sarcasm in my original post. I am saying that gatekeeping what art is, and what theft is, typically ignores exactly how art is made, how artists are trained, and the history of tools impacting creative endeavors -- basically close to what you say here: there are logical and historical errors that invalidate these complaints in my mind.
This comes off as so tone deaf seeing your AI artwork is only possible due to the millions of hours spent by real people who created the art used to train these models. Maybe it's easier to understand why people don't respect AI "artists" with this in mind.