What are your thoughts on AI-generated works?

[Jotari]

1 hour ago, maru said:

(With apologies for necroposting — this is still high up on the first page of the board.)

I feel like it's tempting to look at generative art purely at an object-level, as its own project. In a lot of ways there's never quite been anything like it — sort of a more declarative, information-first approach to making aesthetic content, where everyone is the director. When I make art with people, it's not all that different from what prompting is: just giving some directions for a desired asset, seeing what is produced, what needs to be tinkered with.

I think, though, that AI art follows in the wake of nearly a century of supply chain consolidation. Say you go from California to New Hampshire. If the same factories make the same foods that supply restaurants, then no matter what, your food always tastes at least a bit similar. Due to inflationary pressures being non-uniform, some things appear to cost the same, and others appear to dramatically rise in cost, due to "real factors" in production. A cheap restaurant will use cans of food, globalised supply chains, consolidated ingredients, bla bla bla. But if you want local food, it's become a lot more expensive to provide the same meal. Labour and supply costs for the actual item in the old-style process have been priced out, as the dollar's real purchasing power lowers. And so we grow accustomed to providing for ourselves through less expensive means as time goes on, weaning ourself on same-y stuff.

Do you understand the analogy? It's that as it becomes cheaper to produce art — so long as we all have the same artist — the art itself will just seem ... kinda familiar. You know? I think you can extend the variety for sure, you can use different models, but even they are ridiculously expensive and so the variety will be downright microscopic compared to before. And if you want some "artisanal content," that's become ludicrously expensive.

This bimodal distribution has been at play vis-a-vis mobile and PC gaming for a while now, but I think it will become catalysed. The thing is, I am not sure how to levy my sadness at "AI art" specifically. This appears to be the function of the huge machine we live in. At least, it has since the 80s or the 90s.

I get what you're saying. If someone's issue with AI art is that it will turn our media into a soulless melange of basic and bland quality then that's an understandable fear. But it's also true we have been true that industrialization has been trending us in that direction for decades now and a lot of the major things pushed on us is exactly that, with or without AI art. If anything, AI art could make art more individualistic and interesting. I make Fire Emblem fan games. I consider myself pretty decent at writing, coding and map design. But I am not good at creating portraits or combat sprites. So if there's something specific I need on that front I need to hope someone talented has made it already or spend hours doing it myself to an end result that still looks subpar. If I could simply tell a computer to whip up a unique combat animation or portrait that would make the construction of the overall art piece, the game I want to actually make, so much easier, less time consuming and, considering my skills on this front, probably better. I think I might have said it earlier in this thread, but humans instinctively want to create art for the sake of art. I don't think that will change with the existence of AI. Just like the invention of digital art and digital music, we'll just incorporate into the art we make because art for the sake of art is the goal.

[vanguard333]

I think that AI generated images can never be art, as art, on some level, requires meaning and/or intent, and AI is incapable of either. I say this as a computational mathematician; we will very likely never see an AI that actually knows what it is doing.

Something I learned in my Theory of Automata (essentially fundamentals of machines) course: the human brain operates by meaning. Machines, meanwhile, operate by grammar. A text/image-generating AI will only ever be regurgitating words/pieces of images; it will never actually know what those words mean or what image it's trying to make.

For this reason, I think that generative AI is a scam. It's yet another piece of programming being heavily advertised as the future despite its stated benefits being questionable at best, and its very real problems being feature-not-bug for scammers and thieves. First it was blockchain, and now it's generative AI.

I also think that they're ruining Google Images. I try to look online for some good images of various things, only for the search results to be flooded with ai-generated mulch. There needs to be a way to automatically filter out ai images from search results.

[Etrurian emperor]

My stance on the matter is negative. In part because I think its endangering the work of artists and replacing it with soulless slob. 

But I also dabbled in the matter briefly out of morbid curiosity and consider myself unimpressed. If you asked for a character dual wielding swords you're just as likely to get some monstrosity that has swords fused into his arms. 

[maru]

8 hours ago, Etrurian emperor said:

In part because I think its endangering the work of artists and replacing it with soulless slob. 

I am not sure this is a good enough argument by itself. Like, I get the merits, hell I even agree with it, but I feel like protecting jobs for their own sakes instead of demonstrating a real, actual advantage is backwards. To me there is a real advantage in the variety and the output of human labour. I also think artists are on the whole kinda cheap. They're not as cheap as "typing 5 words into my $20/mo subscription", but paying $40 to get a bespoke drawing that nearly always outweighs my expectations ... ? It feels priceless.

It's crazy to me that webcomics were such an early medium, given how much consistent effort it required and for such little pay.

I feel like there's this feeling where some people think we're in a post-scarcity world already, if only some people would share; some people think of it as a high-scarcity world, but gradually improving; some people see their work doing all this consolidation of production and for lower cost at lower purchasing power as introducing the post-scarcity world a little at a time. But it is like, once there's replicators, you're never going to know a meal the same way again. The rest of your life... well, in some sense you're eating rations.