A.I. Art Is Destroying My Life Purpose

[Leo Gura]

1 minute ago, Jake Chambers said:

ditched hiring professional photographers for their work.

1) Photographers still make lots of money and do important work.

2) The advent of phone cameras was a huge net positive. It's good even for photographers.

You need an abundance mindset here.

[Jake Chambers]

11 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

1) Photographers still make lots of money and do important work.

2) The advent of phone cameras was a huge net positive. It's good even for photographers.

You need an abundance mindset here.

1) The point is that literally all photos used to be of very high quality because they were made by photographers who have a lot of skill and taste invested in their work. That changed with the advent of regular people getting a hold of photos, causing a big drop in quality for many photos. That is not necessarily a bad thing, because if I am a dog breeder for example I don’t need a photographer’s quality photos to simply showcase my dogs. But it’s a drop in quality still.

2) Yeah it is but again, them being used by unskilled and tasteless ppl makes the photos suck.

About the abundance mentality, I mean yeah I get your point, but when we are talking about the highest quality of art that mindset flies out of the window. The highest art is not about abundance, but about quality and uniqueness. I think AI will never reach a level to where it can produce art the level of the Mona Lisa, or even Keith Harring for that matter. The human element of these masterpieces is what makes them so good if you understand what I’m saying. The art is truly alive and touches me in a deeply profound, even enlightening way, speaking for myself. AI art just feels dead to me.

Although it is crazy imaginative. It should just be used as inspiration for real artists IMO at this stage, although some standalone AI works do look cool. But not for artists who truly aspire to make upper echelon art.

[Leo Gura]

19 minutes ago, Jake Chambers said:

1) The point is that literally all photos used to be of very high quality because they were made by photographers who have a lot of skill and taste invested in their work. That changed with the advent of regular people getting a hold of photos, causing a big drop in quality for many photos. That is not necessarily a bad thing, because if I am a dog breeder for example I don’t need a photographer’s quality photos to simply showcase my dogs. But it’s a drop in quality still.

We have more quality photos than ever. Ratio of good and bad as fallen, yes. But so what?

Same logic could be applied to computers. Used to be that only PhD scientists could use computers. Now computers are mostly used by morons.

Quote

 I think AI will never reach a level to where it can produce art the level of the Mona Lisa, or even Keith Harring for that matter. The human element of these masterpieces is what makes them so good if you understand what I’m saying. The art is truly alive and touches me in a deeply profound, even enlightening way, speaking for myself. AI art just feels dead to me.

I disagree.

And it doesn't have to be this false choice.

Humans and AI will work beautifully together.

Soon the best art will be a hybrid of human+AI.

Increasing accessibilty to art-making is a good thing.

Edited September 5, 2022 by Leo Gura

[Razard86]

On 9/1/2022 at 1:37 PM, Space said:

I don't disagree and I understand your point. Coming up with the ideas, the vision, the concept is artistry in itself. Just doing what you're told by the vision creator is not being an artist. But lets not forget that it takes a highly skilled and talented monkey to be able to draw good lines. Ultimately there is no art without the line drawer, no matter whos coming up with the ideas.

Even though I am the monkey who draws the lines, I am also the art director because I come up with the ideas and concepts, even though I work with actual art directors at various publishers.

But I think we're moving away from my original concerns though. On a practical day-to-day basis, the freelance jobs that I do are simply at risk of being taken because my assumption and prediction is that it will be easier and cheaper and more convenient for an art director to generate a bunch of images and choose one that looks eye-catching and vaguely suits the article. What happens when 30, 40, 50% of my potential jobs are replaced by an AI art generator because its just more convenient and free to use. And if I can't get any work, or i'm getting such a reduced amount of work each month, is there any point in continuing? 

 

The same fears arose by people who worked in the mail service when email first was created. Notice people still write letters, and some even still use fax machines...(lol no idea why on fax machines) even though email exists. 

We have Uber, Lyft, and yet people still take buses. The creation of new technology does not always wipe out existing avenues. People are still collecting baseball cards, and people are still collecting antique cars, and sports cars.

As states earlier we already know that A.I. are better at Chess and Go than humans, yet they haven't replaced humans as players. Soon we will have A.I. athletes and referees, I'm sure that won't erase jobs for either. Self Driving cars will replace a lot of non- self driving cars but I doubt it will be total replacement. 

Instead of dreading make some changes, A.I. is going to infiltrate all industries by the way, so this isn't some isolated thing.

[Razard86]

3 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

 

Increasing accessibilty to art-making is a good thing.

This is the whole point of technology, to increase accessibility, make things easier. It just frightens people who worked hard to carve out a niche. I get the fear, but I agree with you. Soon regular people can create ridiculous levels of art, such as graphic novels, movies, music, etc. all because of technology. We will literally enter a ridiculously grand age of artistic expression never before seen.

I mean it will be awe inspiring especially when the language barrier gets dissolved as well.

[mmKay]

3 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Soon the best art will be a hybrid of human+AI.

Yeah, about that... 

Can't wait to enjoy some AI generated p*rn for VR with my Google Cardboard ?

Or 24.99 to mod your metaverse harem ?

Edited September 5, 2022 by mmKay

[zurew]

 

Edited September 5, 2022 by zurew

[Space]

2 hours ago, Razard86 said:

The same fears arose by people who worked in the mail service when email first was created. Notice people still write letters, and some even still use fax machines...(lol no idea why on fax machines) even though email exists. 

We have Uber, Lyft, and yet people still take buses. The creation of new technology does not always wipe out existing avenues. People are still collecting baseball cards, and people are still collecting antique cars, and sports cars.

As states earlier we already know that A.I. are better at Chess and Go than humans, yet they haven't replaced humans as players. Soon we will have A.I. athletes and referees, I'm sure that won't erase jobs for either. Self Driving cars will replace a lot of non- self driving cars but I doubt it will be total replacement. 

Instead of dreading make some changes, A.I. is going to infiltrate all industries by the way, so this isn't some isolated thing.

I understand your points and mostly agree. But it's also very easy to say then when your capacity to pay your bills in 6 months time is not affected. Mine is. My sole income is from my freelance work. 

[ZzzleepingBear]

There will be a growing need to be even more consiously aware of not only what you see, but how it came to be. 

The way forward will be in how we engage with art imo. There will be a more vocalized matter of distinguish art based on it's source and closer ties with the artists presence and personal involvement, for those who are engaged with art in a deeper sense.

And there will be a large growing audience of consumer type people that have their base appriciation of what is merely colourful/detailed/texturized variations of objects and characters, who also lack a deeper sense of understanding and interest in origin/meaning/expression/symbolism etc.

From my own experience with photography in general, I can recognize beauty of colour in a image, just to mentioning one aspect. But I don't jump the gun and call it art on that merit alone.  Instagram is a good example of a highly popular media that I avoid at all cost. And that place has probably an unlimited amount of photos that can be recognized as beautiful, from a mental knee-jerk reactions pov. AI-images will be playing a big part of influencing the vast majority who are less selective or conscious in what they consume or chose to call art. 

I think overtime, that there will be a noticable reduction in overall quality of any media company who are tempted to cut costs with auto generated images, even after some editing are done. Just as new moives that try to reuse the same kind of script that has been done a million times before, is more often than not recognized as a generic movie often by taking a quick glance at the movieposter alone.

[Space]

2 hours ago, zurew said:

 

A few bits of new information I took from these videos. 

1) This website is designed to specifically highlight work that has literally stolen the style of human artists. Just highlighting the lack of true creativity in any of this technology. And the lack of any creativity in the prompt writers! They literally have to include 'stylised like X' because without it the work is bland and boring. https://weirdwonderfulai.art/resources/disco-diffusion-70-plus-artist-studies/#foogallery-2432/f:Simon Stalenhag+James Jean+Alex Grey

2) I suspect that making money this way will quickly become obsolete. The market will become very saturated with people trying to sell AI artwork which will reduce the artwork's value considerably. You might see a really great piece on one person's website, but then 20 other suitable works on 20 other websites that all look vaguely similar. But I'm sure some people will make money. People always come up with new ways to sell shit and make money. 

3) In all fairness some of those images looked really great, around 3:48 onwards. I can see why people would buy that. 

4) Despite my dislike for all of this, I feel I should probably make use it and start composing my own portfolio of A.I work. With my experience and critical eye I have a pretty good advantage over some random guy looking to make quick money. 

Edited September 5, 2022 by Space

[Leo Gura]

34 minutes ago, Space said:

I understand your points and mostly agree. But it's also very easy to say then when your capacity to pay your bills in 6 months time is not affected. Mine is. My sole income is from my freelance work. 

Illustrators will still be needed for a decade to come and beyond. In the meantime you can also learn to leverage AI.

[Space]

2 minutes ago, ZzzleepingBear said:

AI-images will be playing a big part of influencing the vast majority who are less selective or conscious in what they consume or chose to call art. 

I think overtime, that there will be a noticable reduction in overall quality of any media company who are tempted to cut costs with auto generated images, even after some editing are done. Just as new moives that try to reuse the same kind of script that has been done a million times before, is more often than not recognized as a generic movie often by taking a quick glance at the movieposter alone.

2 good points here that I agree with.

The masses, who don't consume and work with art in a more critical professional context will be enamoured and heavily influenced by all of this. 

And like you, I will always refer to these images as 'AI-images' and not 'AI-art'. I do not consider it art in any way because, for me, art is not only the pretty picture, but also the original and unique concept for the image before it's creation. 

And to you point about media companies, we'll have to see how good AI-images become. I think the distinction between AI-images and art will slowly be reduced to the point where it becomes very difficult to tell the difference. It definitely depends on the image and the prompt though, of course. But my main point here is that depending on the quality of the AI art in a year or two, there may not even be a reduction in overall quality. 

[Leo Gura]

This development is actually very similar to Youtube. YT made video broadcast accessible to all, not just a few. Is YT bad for traditional broadcasters who had exclusive positions? Yeah. Now they have to compete harder.

And think about interpreters. What has Google Translate done to their decades of learning languages?

Edited September 5, 2022 by Leo Gura

[zurew]

1 minute ago, Space said:

4) Despite my dislike for all of this, I feel I should probably make use it and start composing my own portfolio of A.I work.

I think prompt design has its own future, and I think we will see a strong specialization in the art market. Sure normal people will be able to use it, but not everyone has the time and the right skillset to use prompts the right way. The best prompt designers will know the best templates, will have a lot of experience with various prompts and they will know how to make a random person's vision to reality.

 

[ZzzleepingBear]

6 minutes ago, Space said:

4) Despite my dislike for all of this, I feel I should probably make use it and start composing my own portfolio of A.I work. 

I would honestly think twice before doing so. Only incorporate any A.I aspect in your work that you feel enhance your own sense of direction/expression.

As you mentioned, it will soon be a saturated market, and your portfolio can start to look generic if you buy in early on this AI hype train and mix in too much of it into your own work to fast.

 

[ZzzleepingBear]

4 minutes ago, Space said:

2 good points here that I agree with.

The masses, who don't consume and work with art in a more critical professional context will be enamoured and heavily influenced by all of this. 

And like you, I will always refer to these images as 'AI-images' and not 'AI-art'. I do not consider it art in any way because, for me, art is not only the pretty picture, but also the original and unique concept for the image before it's creation. 

And to you point about media companies, we'll have to see how good AI-images become. I think the distinction between AI-images and art will slowly be reduced to the point where it becomes very difficult to tell the difference. It definitely depends on the image and the prompt though, of course. But my main point here is that depending on the quality of the AI art in a year or two, there may not even be a reduction in overall quality. 

Yeah, I felt the need to call it AI-images, as that is what it does in general tbh. I totally agree with your take on art.

My guess is that this AI will be a hard beast to tame into precision, since it's function is a balance point between precision and randomness to create something "unique" with it's innherit lack of emotional meaning to it's working process. If the AI start to become too precise to what it is told to depict, then the images will become super generic once the promt is replicated. And if the randomness is too high, it will be hard to get it to depict what you hope for it do depict in general. So we will see, but I think that it takes an actual artist to make those final calls that is needed to make true art, and not this calibration between randomness and precision that AI will have an endless struggle with, since that is a process of two polar opposites that can't be meet.

[Space]

3 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Illustrators will still be needed for a decade to come and beyond. In the meantime you can also learn to leverage AI.

Yes, I definitely do agree with this. But the question is how many illustrators will there be and what will that job look like.

3 minutes ago, zurew said:

I think prompt design has its own future, and I think we will see a strong specialization in the art market. Sure normal people will be able to use it, but not everyone has the time and the right skillset to use prompts the right way. The best prompt designers will know the best templates, will have a lot of experience with various prompts and they will know how to make a random person's vision to reality.

Yea there's some truth in this. You can get very specific and quite technical with the prompts - weighing certain words higher than other words, weighing certain colours over other colours, and a lot more.

I think what I'm curious about is whether AI-images will go beyond the bubble of 'AI-images'. I'm not sure how to articulate this, but at the moment there is a certain limit to AI-images. They're almost limited to a particular style which, for lack of a better term, I call the 'AI-style' which in itself encompasses a lot of different sub-styles but all still looks like AI work. It's like there's an infinite amount of possibilities...within a limited bubble. Just a thought.

10 minutes ago, ZzzleepingBear said:

I would honestly think twice before doing so. Only incorporate any A.I aspect in your work that you feel enhance your own sense of direction/expression.

As you mentioned, it will soon be a saturated market, and your portfolio can start to look generic if you buy in early on this AI hype train and mix in too much of it into your own work to fast.

I will never incorporate AI-images into my own illustration work. I will likely continue to develop my own work and style as I have been doing for the past few years without it being infected by AI. I could brand my own work as 'pure 100% human-made artwork'.

But what this might look like is just creating a whole new separate portfolio. I'd literally have a separate tab on my website called 'AI-images' or whatever. It wouldn't cross over into my social media but I might provide a link to a separate social media page.

[Leo Gura]

39 minutes ago, Space said:

This website is designed to specifically highlight work that has literally stolen the style of human artists. Just highlighting the lack of true creativity in any of this technology. And the lack of any creativity in the prompt writers! They literally have to include 'stylised like X' because without it the work is bland and boring.

If this is true, then what are you worried about?

In reality, even the world's best and most unique artists got their inspiration and style from somewhere. These AI show that creativity requires lots of input and recombination. Artists develop their styles and craft through imitating other artists. This is well known. All art copies itself. Picasso famously developed his unique style by taking motifs from African masks and elsewhere. Now I can take Picasso's style and throw it into an AI, blend it with something else, and get some cool new art.

In the future these AI tools will become much more flexible, powerful, and diverse. Right now they are still far too limited.

Really Adobe needs to buy out these AI start-ups and create a professional AI tool for artists which has infinite flexibility and power. Such a tool would be worth billions.

Edited September 5, 2022 by Leo Gura

[ZzzleepingBear]

3 minutes ago, Space said:

I think what I'm curious about is whether AI-images will go beyond the bubble of 'AI-images'. I'm not sure how to articulate this, but at the moment there is a certain limit to AI-images. They're almost limited to a particular style which, for lack of a better term, I call the 'AI-style' which in itself encompasses a lot of different sub-styles but all still looks like AI work. It's like there's an infinite amount of possibilities...within a limited bubble. Just a thought.

That is exactly what I felt aswell. There is a sort of aftertaste of AI generated images. One thing I noticed is that any detail in AI images is often depicted by random noise, so you can never really appriciate it's fine details to be fully connected because of this.

8 minutes ago, Space said:

I will never incorporate AI-images into my own illustration work. I will likely continue to develop my own work and style as I have been doing for the past few years without it being infected by AI. I could brand my own work as 'pure 100% human-made artwork'.

But what this might look like is just creating a whole new separate portfolio. I'd literally have a separate tab on my website called 'AI-images' or whatever. It wouldn't cross over into my social media but I might provide a link to a separate social media page.

That sounds like a good take. It will probably be an important stance to take aswell now that AI images is on the rise.

[Space]

11 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

If this is true, then what are you worried about?

In reality, even the world's best and most unique artists got their inspiration and style from somewhere. These AI show that creativity requires lots of input and recombination. Artists develop their styles and craft through imitating other artists. This is well known. All art copies itself. Picasso famously developed his unique style by taking motifs from African masks and elsewhere. Now I can take Picasso's style and throw it into an AI, blend it with something else, and get some cool new art.

In the future these AI tools will become much more flexible, powerful, and diverse. Right now they are still far too limited.

Really Adobe needs to buy out these AI start-ups and create a professional AI tool for artists which has infinite flexibility and power. Such a tool would be worth billions.

I think there's an important distinction between being inspired by an artist's style vs copying their style. Atleast on that website, I see the AI copying the artist's style. When an artist is inspired by another artist, there are always differences. Style is actually very difficult to copy as a human because style is developed over years of work and trial and error. So it's always an interpretation rather than straight up copying. But I see the AI having the capability to fully copy their style. A very good (and sad) example on that website is Simon Stalenhag (https://tinyurl.com/2p9f5z6r). One of my favourite artists around today. It's a blatant rip-off of his style. But I suppose it could be argued that this actually increases the value of Simon's work. A rip-off of Simon's work is essentially value-less.

This raises an important question of whether an artist owns copyright over their style. I'm not sure what the legalities of this are. It would be difficult to define and draw boundaries around one's art style so there's definitely some grey-area here. 

Yea either Adobe will buy these companies or develop their own. My bet is that they'll just develop their own and integrate it fully into all the Adobe software suite. I've already seen videos showing third-party plugins, but it seems quite rudimentary at the moment.