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points by sashank_1509 4 days ago | 0 comments

I find it amusing, that

> my uncle can create software

Is considered great

> my uncle can create music or art

Is not considered great.

I guess humans have agreed, that art is a skill you must learn if you want to produce it, but engineering or software is not a skill worth learning and we are happy if computers can do that for us.

So it’s great and amazing if anyone can create their gizmos and software to help them but not if they create music or digital images, which apparently it is wrong to prompt, and not a sign of a great future.

[–] augment_me 4 days ago

Isn't this directly from that most people can relate to music/art but not with programming?

If you specified to someone that the AI is replacing the farting-into-mic-core music genre, they would not care. Same with programming, the average person is not exposed to this

[–] sashank_1509 4 days ago

Maybe, I suspect also resentment towards programmers and their high salaries also plays a role.

[–] zahlman 4 days ago

> I guess humans have agreed, that art is a skill you must learn if you want to produce it, but engineering or software is not a skill worth learning and we are happy if computers can do that for us.

No; it's a conclusion about the product rather than the endeavour. People don't think of the software itself as "art", but as just a means to an end; so they don't mind the idea of any old fool being able to produce it.

Oddly enough, I've come to feel similarly about music. Most of what you hear in "pop music" is highly uninspired, including pre-AI; but it serves the purpose. And now we have AI that doesn't give any indication that it could compete with humans on mash-up ideas, experimental microtonal stuff, etc.; but executes "yet another four-on-the-floor, standard chord progression club anthem" very well. (Except the lyrics. Ugh.)

[–] SoftTalker 4 days ago

Art is by definition a human expression. A machine cannot produce art.

[–] ragequittah 4 days ago

This rings hollow to me for many reasons. When making CGI for movies quite a lot of the process has been completely automated for quite some time. So that scene in the movie is no longer art? Making video games you can use procedural generation to create a landscape, trees, rocks, etc. and most developers do at this point. Do we disregard all that when considering if the game is good or not? Or just blanket "it's bad because of that" like some people are doing with AI created stuff these days?

AI created art and photography keeps winning contests and people get all upset after the fact saying it's not real art. If it's not real art then why are the judges so impressed by it before they hear the word AI? I get the sentimental "but a soul that has experienced pain didn't create it" but if it's fun to look at and gives you joy is that not enough? And there is of course always a person in the loop creating it.

Definition of art: The conscious use of the imagination in the production of objects intended to be contemplated or appreciated as beautiful, as in the arrangement of forms, sounds, or words.

A director imagines the movie scene and has a rough storyboard sketched, then CGI artists make it who then usually have some form of algorithm or ML help them. I'm sure most people would agree that's art even though the director only had his thoughts interpreted by many different people / machines. Why is that so different than a person asking ChatGPT or Seedance to create something they (and only they) imagined? Is it the effort involved? What if they spent 2 hours refining 1 photo to obsessively to get exactly what was in their imagination onto the screen?

[–] rdedev 4 days ago

> The conscious use of the imagination

I guess this is what is missing from vibed AI art. Usually it's someone with a quick prompt and nothing else. No effort or creativity from the human and that's probably what we don't like about AI art.

This is different from AI art looking all the same though

[–] ragequittah 4 days ago

I kinda disagree with both points maybe because I've been using / seeing AI art extensively for a while. Some people put in absolutely monumental effort into their stuff, and if it all looks the same then toy story looks the same as ghibli looks the same as 1950s Disney looks the same as Wallace and grommit (all of which you can replicate fairly faithfully, combine into something that looks new, whatever else).

I think AI art is much like ai coding where people used 1 model a couple of times then wrote it off completely as garbage. Then years of very quick progress happened and all the 10 fingers on a hand and every picture looking the same disappeared.

https://civitai.com/images

If you can make it through the first 20 images on civit and tell me nobody is expressing themselves or their imagination in some of these pictures I guess we agree to disagree.

[–] suddenlybananas 4 days ago

If that list of images is like art to you, you're a philistine, I hate to break it to you.

[–] ragequittah 3 days ago

Is the crayon drawing made by a child "art"? I believe it is. They put what was in their head onto a piece of paper. Those images are no different. Some of the things people come up with is actually really neat to look at. If they did it in Photoshop pre-AI you'd probably be impressed. But now the outlook is tainted.

I'm a pretty big fan of this one and I'm not sure how anyone could say there's no creativity being shown just because it didn't take as much effort as it would've 5 years ago:

https://civitai.com/images/147579069

Being able to express your imagination with more fidelity should be celebrated shouldn't it? Taking what's in your mind and showing it to other people is a really neat thing that used to be restricted to a few people. Not sure why expanding it out is so controversial. And again once you take the word AI out of it you start to win a bunch of art contests, so it can't be all that bad.

[–] suddenlybananas 3 days ago

A child's drawing is obviously art, and is vastly more important than this slop.

Like I'm sorry that photo you sent me is dreadful, I find it hard to believe you chose it as an example of how ai "art" is good.

[–] sashank_1509 4 days ago

Most of them look like they could pass the product of a human artist, pre AI. There are no obvious tells that I can see and so I’m comfortable calling it “art”.

If we are going to say, humans should learn these skills to produce this and not just keep typing prompts into a chatbot, I agree, but I also think it applies to maths, coding, engineering and everything else. I don’t see why we need to draw an arbitrary line around supposed art.

[–] baggy_trough 3 days ago

Ironically, yours is the comment of a philistine.

[–] suddenlybananas 3 days ago

I disagree and I think the vast majority of artists or people involved in the art scene would agree with me.

[–] sashank_1509 4 days ago

Code is the same for many

[–] eluru 4 days ago

ooooof trying to define art, lets call socrates

[–] wiseowise 4 days ago

Because I’ve seen both and code created by your uncle might work and look good enough, and music and art created by your uncle is a fucking garbage that pollutes the internet.

[–] eluru 4 days ago

Then i have no issues being sunned by society, such a double faced bunch of folks