I’m also a cartoonist and illustrator by profession, and though I’m happy the Oatmeal is speaking up, and I personally feel exactly the same way he does about AI, I think his argument is...
Exemplary
I’m also a cartoonist and illustrator by profession, and though I’m happy the Oatmeal is speaking up, and I personally feel exactly the same way he does about AI, I think his argument is conflating “art” and “imagery” and I think most people make the same mistake when arguing about this subject. As a result a lot of these takes are not really going anywhere.
Here’s my take, for whatever it’s worth. “Art” is something important, something we feel. It’s Christina’s World. Imagery is just a picture of something. Sometimes they are one and the same, and this is why we so often conflate them. But imagery doesn’t HAVE to be art. It just needs to be a picture to fill a space. I think there are corporate logos that are works of art. But they don’t have to be. At the end of the day, a logo just needs to be recognizable. Art museums, however, DO need to be filled with art, because the whole point is to look at what someone else thinks is important and full of feeling. This could be an exhibit on corporate logos. Either way, the context matters.
Until now, basically the only way to get imagery was to hire an artist or illustrator. Because we in the modern age have such a massive demand for imagery - we need logos and clipart and banners and flyers and ads ads ads ads and tabletop games and comic books and newsletters and memes and the background art for animated TV shows - artists and illustrators like me and the Oatmeal have had it pretty sweet. If you, person who can’t draw, need a drawing for your card game ripoff of Uno, you need to pay me, person who can draw a bit better than you, to get it. You could also hire a photographer to make photos for the cards instead, though. Or even just put some flat colors (like Uno). You don’t NEED “art.” You need imagery so that the cards aren’t otherwise blank.
But now you can just generate images. This is a godsend for people who need imagery and don’t actually need art. The people making the thing can decide whether they want art or not, but for the people who don’t, they now have a viable option.
And here’s why AI art is here to stay despite most people disliking it: for imagery, MOST PEOPLE DON’T CARE. That includes me! And probably you. If I see an ad for a monster truck rodeo, something I have no interest in, how much do I care whether there was a human artist involved? Same goes for musical jingles for canned ravioli, or flyers for a BBQ, or memes about AI art. I’m happy to see when something is drawn, I like cool drawings. But if it’s not a cool drawing, I don’t care. It’s not a comic book. It’s just imagery. And even comic books - my son reads Donald Duck comics. Those artists are all just copying the same Disney style that’s been reused for decades. How much does he care whether that imagery is drawn by people or generated? How much do I care? It’s not Calvin and Hobbes. It’s yet another Donald Duck comic. It’s imagery.
At the end of the day, most people just don’t care whether something that isn’t “art” is made by an artist. It’s just that until now there was not really any other option. The background art for the TV show in the comic is the perfect example. It’s an amazing work of art. But most people would consume the show anyway even if it wasn’t.
So I predict that art won’t go away, and AI imagery won’t go away. I predict there will still be a demand for artists and illustrators. But that demand will crater, like the demand for oil painters for family portraits and live bands for events. Some things just don’t need to be made by artists. Speaking as the artist, it sure was nice for us while they did, though!
I find this view - of "art" vs. "imagery" - to be extremely confusing. Throughout your post you differentiate between art (as being intended for human consumption and consideration) and imagery...
I find this view - of "art" vs. "imagery" - to be extremely confusing.
Throughout your post you differentiate between art (as being intended for human consumption and consideration) and imagery (as being something "less than" art, and by extension not worth the same degree of consideration). You mention several examples of what you consider to be "imagery" - mostly advertising, but also things like Donald Duck comics.
Can I ask - why do you think that a Donald Duck comic, using the in-house style of a studio, is "less" of a work of art than any other? If Donald Duck comics, drawn in the Disney style, are somehow imagery ... then are modern X-Men comics styled after Jack Kirby or Jim Lee or Chris Clairemont also "imagery"? Those would be similar - artists taking on a house style. I'm honestly confused as to why you bag on other artistic professionals simply because they don't do the same art you profess to doing - even though they very much do. Many artists have gotten their start by doing the house style, then later developing their own.
Furthermore, things like advertising - monster truck posters, musical jingles, etc. - are all paid jobs. People are paid to do them. If they do them particularly well, those images - those songs - stay with you for a long, long time (curse you, Old Navy Performance Fleece). While I doubt anyone would hang a monster truck poster in The Louvre next to the Mona Lisa, there have been plenty of times that advertising art has gone on to be considered art-art, rather than just advertising. Movie posters come to mind - the OG Star Wars movie poster is an all-time classic, something that I think all of us can picture.
Finally, all of AI imagery - literally all of it - is sourced and influenced by stolen art. Every AI-generated image is based on stolen properties by actual artists. Every slop Uno ripoff card art is rooted in dozens of peoples' professional efforts, for which none of them are being paid or recognized. The very existence, IMO, of AI images devalues all art - commercial or otherwise.
You mention how there's cratering demand for oil painters for family portraits and live bands for events. Those industries still exist - oil painting may be more niche these days, but musicians still book gigs all over the place.
I dunno, I just have a very hard time squaring the circle of an artist so devaluing other artists' works.
Not OP, but I would say based on their initial post the distinguishing factor is the degree to which a utilitarian purpose is the main objective of the piece. If the image primarily has a clear,...
Not OP, but I would say based on their initial post the distinguishing factor is the degree to which a utilitarian purpose is the main objective of the piece. If the image primarily has a clear, utilitarian purpose, the main question is whether or not it can meet that purpose, and if it does, it doesn't really matter if it's made by man or machine.
The text you're reading now is cold and precise compared to some of the great calligraphers, being rendered mechanically by a computer, and indeed sometimes a hand-written letter gives meaning and depth that text can't meet, but y'know, we're on a random online forum, so it's fine. You can read it, and that's the purpose done.
squaring the circle of an artist so devaluing other artists' works.
This feels like a very uncharitable reading of OP? I wouldn't say they're purposefully trying to "devalue" anyone's work anymore than a biologist creates a species by writing about it.
What's the opposing position? That all drawn things are of equal value? I feel like that's probably not what you would argue but I'm not sure how else you would frame it.
What's the opposing position? That all drawn things are of equal value? I feel like that's probably not what you would argue but I'm not sure how else you would frame it.
Of equal value, arguably not. But a person putting ink/pencil to paper, or using tools to generate an image, is putting in work. They're making decisions on how they want it to look, what effect...
Of equal value, arguably not. But a person putting ink/pencil to paper, or using tools to generate an image, is putting in work. They're making decisions on how they want it to look, what effect it has on people, whether and how it matches a style.
There's different degrees to art, but even something as "low brow" as an advertising campaign can still be considered art in my view. A Campbell's Soup ad likely won't be on the same footing, artistically speaking, as the roof of The Sistine Chapel ... But then again, Campbell's Soup is integral to some of Andy Warhol's most popular work, and The Sistine Chapel's roof was commissioned work.
EDIT TO ADD: Before anyone chimes in, yes - technically, feeding prompts to an AI image generator can be viewed by some as "using a tool to create art". I would argue otherwise - with Photoshop or with a brush, you're still making creative decisions yourself. You are guiding the creation of the image and what it contains. Even making a collage is effectively taking someone else's works and riffing on them - but it requires your thoughts and actions to do it.
Utilizing an AI image generator, in my opinion, is at best akin to being the commissioner of an artist. You aren't using the tool yourself - you're asking someone/something else to create an image to your liking, then asking them to tweak it in various ways. You aren't doing the work. And I say "at best" because you're still asking a machine to rip off other peoples' copyrighted works to do so, and they don't see a dime from it.
But that's getting into the topic of whether AI image generators are actually "creating" anything, versus just copying existing works - and to the degree that any existing work is truly created, or informed by all preceding works. And that's a bigger conversation than I'm equipped to have.
My interpretation of the comment was that the distinction between "just imagery" and "art" is just shorthand for how much the beholder values the work. So the same thing that is "just imagery" to...
My interpretation of the comment was that the distinction between "just imagery" and "art" is just shorthand for how much the beholder values the work. So the same thing that is "just imagery" to one beholder may be "art" to another.
I think, for me, 'Art' is a two-way conversation between me and the artist. They make a promise of depth, and that if I invest the time in comprehending the work, I'll be rewarded by finding new...
I think, for me, 'Art' is a two-way conversation between me and the artist. They make a promise of depth, and that if I invest the time in comprehending the work, I'll be rewarded by finding new subtleties in that depth, and learn something, about them, myself, or the world. Historically, that promise is communicated by technical expertise and the medium; the more I can perceive the amount of time and effort that went into a piece, the more depth I expect to find. Likewise, I would expect to spend more time delving into a wall-sized oil painting than a wall-sized blown-up photograph. I know the latter was ultimately a button-click on the part of a photographer, and that could've been a lot of up-front work and time spent in the right place to get the perfect shot, but on initial glance, I have a cultural model that tells me "big photo == work", "big painting == WORK!".
I believe a big part of my disappointment on encountering AI generated stuff is that it's a direct contradiction and invalidation of the cultural model I have on these relationships. They make gigantic implicit promises that they then fail to deliver on, because the conversation with the artist is shallow. They said something, to prompt, to LORA, to inpaint, but it's less than what was promised. If I then start critically inspecting the work, expecting a reward, I get nothing, because the detail was 'the statistical median of our training set', not artistic intent. Disappointment.
Going forward, I think this will resolve in two ways: first, my cultural model will update. I will learn that technical expertise is not a promise of depth, and I will treat works with more trepidation. Photorealism went from the pinnacle of paint artistry, to attainable by dangerous and technically difficult works by photographers, to everyone's phone in their pocket. I don't assume a photo is art, without some other mechanism that tells me the conversation is worth initiating (hanging in a gallery, winning an award, etc.). AI does that for art more broadly.
Second, artists will learn to have deep conversations using AI. They will discover how to feed enough of themselves into a work through AI that the resultant work communicates something about themselves, and more universal truths, and will be worth the effort on my part to meet them there. We're not there yet.
I agree overall, although personally I still care about how something was made-- whether it's imagery, art, etc-- for ethical reasons. I also think the demand may crater to the point of...
I agree overall, although personally I still care about how something was made-- whether it's imagery, art, etc-- for ethical reasons.
I also think the demand may crater to the point of unsustainability. Not just in the arts. The rate at which human workers are replaced by AI may outpace the rate at which new work opportunities are created for humans. Unless UBI or other adequate social safety nets are created by then, massive unemployment would just result in a world where AI is doing most of the work and producing most of the things, but there just aren't enough people who can even pay for goods and services at all.
No shade to Carl. What I meant was, how many people will care if tomorrow’s edition of Donald Duck comics are drawn by actual artists in Carl’s style, or AI in Carl’s style?
No shade to Carl. What I meant was, how many people will care if tomorrow’s edition of Donald Duck comics are drawn by actual artists in Carl’s style, or AI in Carl’s style?
The key difference is that C&H was only ever done by one artist. Plenty of other newspaper strips (especially the “zombie” strips), comic books, and cartoons have had different artists maintain...
The key difference is that C&H was only ever done by one artist. Plenty of other newspaper strips (especially the “zombie” strips), comic books, and cartoons have had different artists maintain the same style.
I'm not sure that matters to my point, which is that there's plenty of people, like me, that would be immediately turned off by AI art replacing human work at all. Even if the artist changes,...
I'm not sure that matters to my point, which is that there's plenty of people, like me, that would be immediately turned off by AI art replacing human work at all. Even if the artist changes, there's still an artist.
To me art is a way to convey the intangible elements of the human condition. You use the term imagery to differentiate non-artistic still visuals. I wonder if there is a broader term? Maybe we now...
To me art is a way to convey the intangible elements of the human condition. You use the term imagery to differentiate non-artistic still visuals. I wonder if there is a broader term? Maybe we now need one. One type of content is a way to convey tangible or objective information, one is an attempt to convey intangible or subjective information.
I can show you my family tree, give you all the names and dates connections, but if I want to share how my Grandma made me feel, what she meant to me, I will need more than genealogy. I can use any type of art to try and add this context, a painting, a song, a poem, a dance, a play, or anything else really. The important part is that it tries to capture something human. We use the same mediums to communicate information, and emotion. If all you are trying to convey is surface information, it's not art.
I could definitely get on board with that distinction. Content is the broad utilitarian tool of information conveyance, Art is the attempt to explore that surface information more deeply.
I could definitely get on board with that distinction. Content is the broad utilitarian tool of information conveyance, Art is the attempt to explore that surface information more deeply.
Thank you. Honestly it felt for a long time like it's such a discussion in English speaking communities precisely because the the word "art" refers to imagery as well.
Thank you. Honestly it felt for a long time like it's such a discussion in English speaking communities precisely because the the word "art" refers to imagery as well.
The same thing is happening in the tech industry, businesses know that they don’t need a fully realized software developer to maintain their app or website or whatever, so they hire the cheapest...
The same thing is happening in the tech industry, businesses know that they don’t need a fully realized software developer to maintain their app or website or whatever, so they hire the cheapest person who sort of knows how to code they can find.
The problem is we need that level of actual human beings because maintaining some businesses app is how you learn.
Now theres all kinds of would be software developers and would be artists who never even get to start because no one needs to pay humans for low quality work. The gap between novice and proficient enough to receive payment is large, and so the pool of available workers becomes only those wealthy enough to support themselves through that gap.
I am in charge of some hiring at my company, and I'm increasingly concerned that AI is slowly breaking the natural junior -> senior engineer mentoring progression. I'm afraid we may not see the...
I am in charge of some hiring at my company, and I'm increasingly concerned that AI is slowly breaking the natural junior -> senior engineer mentoring progression. I'm afraid we may not see the full downstream effects for many years, and by then it'll really be way too late to change course.
Same, I have also noticed that the quality of juniors has dropped. I think universities experienced a drop in quality around ten years ago and its been getting worse ever since then. Ive had...
Same, I have also noticed that the quality of juniors has dropped. I think universities experienced a drop in quality around ten years ago and its been getting worse ever since then.
Ive had multiple people with a computer science degree interview who didn’t have any process for solving problems themselves. Its incredibly strange to me that you could graduate with a computer science degree and not be able to even start solving a problem. I’m not even talking leetcode stuff I’m talking, personality interview questions. Easy thought scenario stuff where theres no wrong answer except not answering.
So like, while the gap is growing larger between junior and able to work as a junior, that gap has also grown between juniors now and what skills juniors used to have.
Disappointing take. For one thing, it indulges a bit too much in the gross "ugh, now the worthless talentless PLEBES will be sullying Art with pretensions of sophistication" gatekeeping, which...
Exemplary
Disappointing take. For one thing, it indulges a bit too much in the gross "ugh, now the worthless talentless PLEBES will be sullying Art with pretensions of sophistication" gatekeeping, which kind of undermines his later point about any effort, even scribbles, being worthwhile.
But it also completely overlooks the fact that not all use of AI in art is of the format "insert prompt, receive finished product." For one thing, many artists have already begun experimenting with models fine tuned on their own work, so every output is by definition a reflection of their own artistry. See "A Love Letter to LA," for instance, which took the art of Paul Flores, trained a LORA on his portfolio, and used a different model to extrapolate the resulting assets into 3D (something which Adobe's new Turntable tool makes available publicly). Also, advanced AI tools like ComfyUI let artists endlessly iterate, curate, selectively edit, and recombine AI-generated elements in highly intentional ways, which clearly puts a human stamp on the result.
Ultimately, the creative possibilities of these tools outweigh the downsides (which are a problem of capitalism, not technology). And people who insist on focusing on strawmen like "it's lazy" or "oh no, now Bob in HR thinks he's an artist" remind me of similar pushback against digital art from traditional artists. Or AutoTune. Or modern art. Or photography. Etc.
I don't agree with all of your points because firstly I'm a fan of gatekeeping, surely the problem of "now the internet is going to be flooded with an order of magnitude more shitty content" is...
I don't agree with all of your points because firstly I'm a fan of gatekeeping, surely the problem of "now the internet is going to be flooded with an order of magnitude more shitty content" is real and already happening, and secondly "it's capitalism's fault" usually just means "it's the fault of human nature" and even if it doesn't it might as well because it describes something that's very unlikely to change.
But the main point is spot on. You don't even need to spend the effort to train models on your art, even just using less mainstream models than the ChatGPT tool with default settings in a smart way can create an endless supply of inspiration that you can use in your own work. One thing that LLMs and image generation models seem to have in common is that they work well as hypothesis machines basically, creating really interesting fragments of things when used well. I used to make strange liminal style (but not stereotypical backrooms etc.), weird architecture 3D renders for fun and I have used AI this way. One thing that I struggled with was to add some organic looking dust, grime and other things that would make the scene look worn and abandoned. Turns out you can use directed AI inpainting for that and selectively blend it with the original render.
And AI can be wielded by artists to create actual novel art like this music video that wouldn't be realistically (even if the limitation might only be budget) possible otherwise. I certainly did not feel any disappointment when watching it.
That said, I think the issue of not differentiating between "art" and just "imagery" or "content", where the origin really doesn't matter much, as mentioned in the current top comment here, is a bigger flaw with his take.
It's a bit of irony that the people most opposed to AI tools are the least likely to have used them. There's a lot of people tried midjourney once or twice and think that's all AI is. Like all...
It's a bit of irony that the people most opposed to AI tools are the least likely to have used them.
There's a lot of people tried midjourney once or twice and think that's all AI is.
Like all this outrage about that "AI actor". A lot of people discussing it seem to think that someone is going to type "make a comedy movie" and walk away with zero other input.
Don't necessarily agree with everything, but yeah. I'm not going to pretend like I don't enjoy the fruits of some AI artwork. either on or off the drugs is a song by JPEGMAFIA. I legitimately...
Don't necessarily agree with everything, but yeah. I'm not going to pretend like I don't enjoy the fruits of some AI artwork. either on or off the drugs is a song by JPEGMAFIA. I legitimately enjoy it. But the main sample it is built around is an AI cover of a Future song. I don't know what it makes it.
Speaking of which: when I look at a joke song like BBL Drizzy (a song made in the height of the Kendrick vs Drake beef), I don't believe it could have ever been made in real life, without someone throwing serious cash at it. You'd need session musicians that continue to play this style. You'd need to find a singer specializing in that sound. And all of them willing to record what is effectively a shit post. And like the other example, humans iterated on the song - Metro Boomin with his remix, Tim Henson doing a guitar cover of it, the various entrants to the competition, and even Drake remixing it. Ultimately all of this was disposable, and did not last past ~3 months. But it was interesting.
It doesn't mean I'd willingly listen to 95% of the songs on, say, Suno, but there is something there, that humans can work with to produce interesting things.
On your first point about it being gate-keeping. The entire post ends with him saying it doesn't matter, even your bad squiggly lines should hold more value than the output of ai. So I find it odd...
On your first point about it being gate-keeping. The entire post ends with him saying it doesn't matter, even your bad squiggly lines should hold more value than the output of ai. So I find it odd that you think it's gate-keeping.
I'm talking about the entire middle section where he calls "middle managers, executives, or marketers" who think that AI tools give them a way to express creative ideas "shitbirds" and "talentless...
I'm talking about the entire middle section where he calls "middle managers, executives, or marketers" who think that AI tools give them a way to express creative ideas "shitbirds" and "talentless fucking losers." That people with jobs like "Chief Brand Ambassador" ("or whatever the fuck their job title is") cannot possibly be "storytellers" because they "work in tech". It's of a piece with the sort of thinking you see from AI critics all the time that assumes that people interested in AI (or in the industry broadly) do not have -- or cannot possibly have -- any creative spark, and that any claim to it is worthy of ridicule. It's a really ugly, exclusionary sentiment.
It's also telling that he excuses his own use of AI for "administrative" stuff like backgrounds that he finds dull and unrewarding. Well guess what guy: not everybody enjoys the grind of practice or investing in physical supplies, and some see the actual process of drawing/painting/sculpting to be as tedious as syncing lip movements in animation or cross-hatching a dark background for the 10,000th time. They like AI because it gives them a way to immediately translate the vision they have in their head to something real, and just because it's a shortcut or not entirely under their control doesn't mean it has zero worth.
I do wonder how people will react if and when we get to the point that generative AI can directly capture the visual images we have in our heads, perhaps through some kind of brain-computer interface. Imagine being able to record memories or dreams to video with the fidelity of Veo or Sora. It would be the purest route from thought to expression in the history of art, and yet I bet there would still be people saying it's tainted or that pure imagination is lazy and doesn't count.
The Oatmeal is always good. He really does keep in touch with the human aspect. I feel like AI art occupies a weird place in people's heads, and everyone is different. I think AI art can be...
The Oatmeal is always good. He really does keep in touch with the human aspect.
I feel like AI art occupies a weird place in people's heads, and everyone is different. I think AI art can be interesting and a way for people without technical art skills to make something beautiful. As long as they remember that all they did was write a prompt and adjust things, that's fine, but sometimes people get weirdly possessive about it, as if they actually did work.
I have just one example where I clashed with someone over their AI art. They had taken a fairly well known cartoon, run it through some AI, and added an extra frame with a drawing and punchline of their own idea, also drawn by AI, and art style similar to the original cartoon. They left the name of the original artist intact: they did not indicate it had been chewed on by AI. Anyone who's a big fan of the OA and his style could probably tell it was not the original. However, if you were not super familiar, you wouldn't know. And my acquaintance did not put his own signature on it.
To me these were points of offense. Typically when cartoonists use or recreate another's work, they credit with "hat tip to" or "apologies to". I often see the characters of Charles Schulz and Bill Watterson get tweaked with, and even then with such nationally and even globally known cartoonists, they still get the "hat tip to" or "apologies to". To not indicate that this was an adjustment of the OA's work, to leave the OA's name there, and to not put his own name on it, felt wrong.
I made my argument, he said giving credit to OA was enough, then accused me of hating AI (which was a bit of a leap of faith there; I make fun of AI but have never gotten fire and brimstone about it). But he took the cartoon down, which was to me a satisfactory course of action, though if he had just added the hat tip stuff and his own name, I would have been fine with it too. But the whole interaction bothered me, and still bothers me. Why did he get so emotional and angry with me? Maybe people just hate being told they did something the wrong way?
Definitely that second part, and it's possible your friend heard it that way even if you didn't say it that directly. But also I believe there's often more to reactions like that. I believe it's...
Why did he get so emotional and angry with me? Maybe people just hate being told they did something the wrong way?
Definitely that second part, and it's possible your friend heard it that way even if you didn't say it that directly.
But also I believe there's often more to reactions like that. I believe it's because the expectations of people are massively misaligned.
Think of a child who makes a child level drawing and shows it to an adult. Every adult can clearly see that it is not "good", it's scribbles or barely identifiable stick figures. But most (not all) adults also know to praise and encourage a child who shows them a drawing so that they will keep doing it and enjoying it.
Now transpose that interaction onto college age people. Each of those students will arrive with varying levels of skill and self confidence. If they begin their classes by being told their art sucks, a lot of people would probably drop the class and maybe go get an MBA. Teachers know this, and most artists know this, and a lot of them are very encouraging. Great art is grounded in emotion and is also emotionally evocative. It takes a lot of support and encouragement to be able to express some of your deepest inner thoughts to other people.
So to bring it back to my assertion that expectations are misaligned. Someone who creates something with AI is creating art. But it's child art. It is often shallow thoughts and feelings that through AI has been given the form of something with far more depth and consideration. And so we often call it out for what it is, and rightfully so. At the same time, we are also crushing that child's crayon drawing and telling them their drawing is slop.
Am I advocating we be nicer to people making slop, and pat them on the head and pin it to the fridge? No definitely not. But I also don't think we should crumple up all their crayon drawings*.
* I'm mostly taking about speaking to individual friends and family or coworkers. Anyone operating at a mass level (techbro, influencer, content mill, etc) can all go kick rocks
What's strange to me is that you definitely can make "art"/express your thoughts without having little to no learnt skills. You can draw stick figure comics and they'll be noticed if your...
What's strange to me is that you definitely can make "art"/express your thoughts without having little to no learnt skills.
You can draw stick figure comics and they'll be noticed if your idea/punchline is good enough.
You can "steal" other comics and turn them into antimemes or r/bonehurtingjuice type nonsense.
You can write two sentence horror stories.
Are they as impactful as someone mastering a craft? Most likely not. But it doesn't mean they're without value, mostly it just means you aren't able to earn a living through them. You can do low effort art without muddying it up with ai.
If you're into art for profit obviously it takes time and effort to master it but that as an end goal is beyond the reach for many artists anyway.
My problem is that image generation relies on images that weren’t necessarily ethically sourced, and it gives me the ick. Every image I’ve generated makes me feel like I’m stepping on someone’s...
My problem is that image generation relies on images that weren’t necessarily ethically sourced, and it gives me the ick. Every image I’ve generated makes me feel like I’m stepping on someone’s face with a jackboot. I don’t like to feel this way, so this cannot be a tool for me.
What if you don’t have the same aesthetic reaction to AI art that Inman has? I found it quite fun to generate AI art for a while, though it would have been more fun to iterate with if it didn’t...
What if you don’t have the same aesthetic reaction to AI art that Inman has?
I found it quite fun to generate AI art for a while, though it would have been more fun to iterate with if it didn’t take so long. I have a collection. But I probably won’t share them, since people don’t seem to like them.
I think this is the first time I've seen someone reference the magic Wand tool in photoshop and it's always the first thing I think of. I'm not an artist but I'm pretty good at photoshop. They've...
I think this is the first time I've seen someone reference the magic Wand tool in photoshop and it's always the first thing I think of.
I'm not an artist but I'm pretty good at photoshop. They've slowly been putting in more and more automated tools. You had the magic Wand which selected on colour. Then the "quick select" tool which had some ability to recognize objects. Then eventually just one button that could select the subject, the sky or auto remove the background.
They added in the repair and remove tools that could automatically fix small mistakes or fill in a gap where you removed something.
Just before generative AI was everywhere, they had a bunch of tools called neural filters. They use AI of some sort but they're very specific. A tool to change the expression on a face, or colorize a black and white photo, or change the time of day or season in a landscape.
When AI images went mainstream to me it felt like just another incremental step in these same tools. I've never been good at drawing and was always more into "photobashing" when I needed to make something. You want to make a cool robot, so you take a bunch of pictures of mechanical things and jam them all together, cutting, pasting, warping and adjusting until you make a new picture. AI just seemed to be doing this faster.
I was honestly really surprised when the world suddenly turned on AI and decided it was going to destroy artistic expression.
Big difference between skilled photoshopper doing a digital collage and a kid saying 'draw a funny robot,' and the AI does all the work, kid never practices drawin. I won't deny that AI tooling...
Big difference between skilled photoshopper doing a digital collage and a kid saying 'draw a funny robot,' and the AI does all the work, kid never practices drawin.
I won't deny that AI tooling has their place. Children and young teens should probably not have unfettered access to them for the same reasons that you can't use a calculator when you're learning to add.
Wow, lots of in-depth arguments here. Mine will seem silly in comparison. I don't even think if images that come out of AI as art at all. I see it as a collection of pixels assembled by a very...
Wow, lots of in-depth arguments here. Mine will seem silly in comparison. I don't even think if images that come out of AI as art at all. I see it as a collection of pixels assembled by a very advanced computer program. It can look cool, I may even like the output sometimes, but I do not perceive it the way I do something in galley. When I see a photograph of a landscape I like to put myself in the photographer's shoes and think "what did they think and feel when they took this photo? What did they find beautiful and worth capturing with their camera?" When I look at an AI image of a similar landscape, all I can think of is "oh, I guess the person was able to write a few sentences into an AI software". It's lacking the depth. If you only take images at face value like "Is this a pretty picture?" then I guess you won't care how it was created.
TLDR; art != pixels
I think this guy is off-base and I would like to explain why. When I think of art, there are a bunch of different partially overlapping conditions for what that might mean. It could be something...
I think this guy is off-base and I would like to explain why.
When I think of art, there are a bunch of different partially overlapping conditions for what that might mean. It could be something that someone has put a lot of passion into beyond its strict utilitarian function, it could be something that has a a lot of personal expression, it could be a deep exploration of a particular media or phenomenon, it could be something with a strong message intended to sway others. Those are all things I could recognize as art, but none of them are necessary conditions, only sufficient. I could probably come up with an example of something I see as art that lacks any specific quality if I really had to.
I think when you are the kind of artist that requires developing some kind of craft or skill over a long period of time that becomes integral to your personal experience of art, but not the universal experience.
Like if you are a concert pianist and you have spent years honing your skills to be able to precisely translate the music in your head to the music that comes out in the real world, thats going to be deeply ingrained in you. When you hear someone else play a difficult piece, it will probably resonate with you and you will relate to how much work it probably took them to get that good, and that will affect your personal emotional response to hearing that piece.
Then later you might hear some music made with sampling and DAWs, that don't require any particular skill at playing an instrument or singing. Maybe that will feel fundamentally lacking to you in particular, because you are not feeling that sense of shared struggle and emotional resonance. But that isn't a problem of artistic value, its a problem of your personal tastes not being fulfilled in the same way.
I am not an artist, so that doesn't really come into play for me when I engage with art. But I still experience value from it, even though I never have that specific feeling of appreciating whats involved in a work. Most art that anyone experiences will probably be in some medium that they are not involved in.
Honestly, I probably know more about how chatGPT works than I know about how they made the dinosaurs in Jurrassic Park. I know it took a lot of hard work by a lot of people. I also know that Stephen Speilberg did not make the dinosaurs, he just described what he wanted and then a bunch of other people did the hard work to make it, and then he adjusted his instructions until it looked the way he wanted. He was just a guy who had a vision of what he wanted his art to look like, and then found a way to manifest that into physical reality. Thats all it really takes.
But you know what? There is in fact a lot of wonder to be found in generative art and artificial intelligence, if you want there to be. Its not interesting to him because he is not putting much thought into it. If you feel like being deep and philosophical about it, its incredibly interesting to think about how a generic algorithm was able to distill out the core meaning of language by just pattern recognition of the structure of sentences. Its interesting to think about how changing one word to a synonym of that same word will change how a model interprets a sentence because of millions of nuances in how it is used by ordinary people. None of that exists if you just want look at chatGPT as a black box of science and capitalism, but it could if you so choose.
I know I started this by saying art doesn't have any specific criterion that necessarily makes it art, but after reading this guys perspective I feel that he is not really an "artist", but more of a professional illustrator who happens to think of himself as the definition of an artist. He is not worried about the denigration of art as an act of creation, he is worried about the denigration of art as a profession.
Even looking at it this way, are you impressed by the LLM's ability to interpret input, or by the programmers who came up with the logic to allow it to do so? It's not like the LLM's capabilities...
But you know what? There is in fact a lot of wonder to be found in generative art and artificial intelligence, if you want there to be. Its not interesting to him because he is not putting much thought into it. If you feel like being deep and philosophical about it, its incredibly interesting to think about how a generic algorithm was able to distill out the core meaning of language by just pattern recognition of the structure of sentences. Its interesting to think about how changing one word to a synonym of that same word will change how a model interprets a sentence because of millions of nuances in how it is used by ordinary people. None of that exists if you just want look at chatGPT as a black box of science and capitalism, but it could if you so choose.
Even looking at it this way, are you impressed by the LLM's ability to interpret input, or by the programmers who came up with the logic to allow it to do so? It's not like the LLM's capabilities came about pseudo-randomly as a matter of evolution over millions of years, these things were designed very intentionally and with a significant amount of effort and ingenuity by humans in a relatively short time span. We should give credit where credit is due; artists should be acknowledged for the effort and intention in their art, and LLM creators for the effort and ability to create an algorithm that can competently mimic human work. That doesn't necessarily mean AI-generated art is inherently lower-value than human-made art, and odds are the majority of people won't care as long as it's of passable quality and within their budget, but it will mean that there will be a need for an "artisanal" exclusively human-made art market, as LLMs currently can't generate novel ideas of their own and it's important that we support artists that do, lest we stagnate.
Personally I dont really think that matters. What you are saying is true, but thats a political ane economic discussion moreso than anything about art. There is a saying that there are no original...
Personally I dont really think that matters. What you are saying is true, but thats a political ane economic discussion moreso than anything about art.
There is a saying that there are no original ideas, and that everything is just remixing recycled ideas. In some ways big AI models are mirrors of the collective consciousness of society, so its doing the same thing.
If you write a story about a hero fights a monster, someone might reasonably make some argument that your ideas ultimately came from Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein and Homer writing The Odyssey, and you just stole those ideas through the process of cultural osmosis, and that would kind of be true.
But nobody actually cares about that unless that already had some other reason to care. People dont insist that you list out all your inspirations in the appendix of your book so you dont accidentally pretend you had an original idea. No one makes you pay royalties to Mary Shellys decendents for monetizing her work. That guy who made a millions of dollars for taping a banana to a canvas probably didnt even grow the banana himself.
The only reason people are getting so riled up about that here is because AI is run by big corporations nobody cares about, and frankly you could come up with any kind of flimsy excuse for why they deserve to have all their money taken away and redistributed and have millions of people be on your side.
I agree. Its probably not truly creative. Its certainly not going to ever replicate genuine humanity, by definition. But neither of those things are necessary for art, or even good art. They are just ingredients that can contribute to good art when they are available.
Original art has more nuance and depth to it than simply coming up with a new idea or setting though. A writer could write a story following all the usual tropes of that genre, but add enough of...
Original art has more nuance and depth to it than simply coming up with a new idea or setting though. A writer could write a story following all the usual tropes of that genre, but add enough of their own unique nuance, pacing, humor, worldbuilding, etc. to make it THEIR style that stands out. An artist like the Oatmeal certainly isn't original when it comes to creating crude and humorous art, but it is the way he draws his characters and lays out his panels that makes his work distinct. AI as it is cannot add this element of uniqueness to its output, it can only rehash or remix what's been provided to it, and that's fine when we just want more of what we already have but we cannot let that devalue distinct, human-made art. You say it's more of a political and economic discussion but such things are a direct reflection of cultural value; if the culture ends up valuing AI art significantly more than human-made art, then ultimately human-made art will decline.
[citation needed] I’m half joking there, but I am genuinely interested to know what you mean, because I hear this refrain a lot and I really struggle to understand what people are getting at with...
AI as it is cannot add this element of uniqueness to its output, it can only rehash or remix what's been provided to it
[citation needed]
I’m half joking there, but I am genuinely interested to know what you mean, because I hear this refrain a lot and I really struggle to understand what people are getting at with it.
What’s the meaningful bar for uniqueness that matters in your mind? Because you can trivially get a unique style just by randomising some parameters, or you can get a unique image by using a photo of yourself as the basis for a generated output and asking for a situation you’ve never been in, or you can get into much more interesting (in my opinion) experimental territory by letting adversarial models optimise towards goals like “create things that don’t look like your training data, but that are still interpretable by an image classification model”.
I understand the basis for most of what people say in these conversations, even if I might disagree with it, but the specific idea that AI can’t create something unique is one I see repeated often, almost verbatim, with the assumption that we all accept it as an axiom - and maybe I’m just being excessively literal, but I just don’t get it! That doesn’t seem to line up with what I see at all?
Oversimplifying it to an extreme degree, the most core logic behind how an LLM generates output is determining and choosing what the most likely answers are, with some flex room to increase...
Oversimplifying it to an extreme degree, the most core logic behind how an LLM generates output is determining and choosing what the most likely answers are, with some flex room to increase variation in output. So when you ask it to create a unique image using something else as a basis, that unique riff it adds is always going to be based on the other images it's been trained on. Perhaps it can come up with some combination of images and styles that hasn't yet been made by humans, like, I dunno, cyberpunk-gothic carebears, but the end result is just a remix of what it knows. You can ask it to create something that doesn't look like its training data, but it literally can't by design. If you've got an image-generating LLM that's trained on Dali, Picasso, Michelangelo, and Warhol, you can certainly get some very interesting and novel combinations from that, but you'll always be able to tell that it's borrowing from those without really adding any new style of its own. It's never going to make a Pollock.
Are you assuming only pretrained, commercial models are in play here? That would make more sense to me, because those are pretty limited and pretty middle-of-the-road in a lot of ways, but I think...
Are you assuming only pretrained, commercial models are in play here? That would make more sense to me, because those are pretty limited and pretty middle-of-the-road in a lot of ways, but I think it's a shame to tar the entire field of "AI" (I'll spare you the whole post I've written a few times before about why I dislike the terminology) with blanket statements about what it's capable of based on something that's essentially the McDonalds version of the technology.
You can absolutely create a loss function that'd simultaneously maximise the distance from the training images (i.e. minimise the similarity) while keeping a term that enforces recognisable outputs as defined by a classification model to stop it just returning random noise, for example. I'm not sure what the results would look like, or how much tuning it'd take to create that function in a way that gives a decent output, but it's absolutely within the capabilities of "AI" as most people define it. I might even give it a go if I get the free time, it'd be a fun little experiment!
But, even putting aside the very technical side, I'm still not getting it... Looking at these:
the end result is just a remix of what it knows
you'll always be able to tell that it's borrowing from those without really adding any new style of its own
It seems like you have a very strong idea of where the line is between "remix" and "original"... but I don't have that kind of confidence in the distinction at all. I couldn't tell you what proportion of my own thoughts and ideas are original vs. coming from half seen and half remembered snippets of what I've experienced in my life.
If I can't say with certainty what "original" means in the context of a human mind - my own human mind, no less, the only one I can experience from the inside - I just really struggle with the idea that there's a definitive line of where a machine is or isn't making something original. Does it become original when it passes the point you can't tell it's borrowing? Because I think we're already there in the very best outputs, even though there are by definition 100 or 1000 or 10,000 mediocre outputs for every one of those exceptional ones.
In terms of what the line between "remix" and "original" is, it's ultimately subjective - I mean, it's art after all, everything is in the eyes (or ears, or other sensory organs) of the beholder....
In terms of what the line between "remix" and "original" is, it's ultimately subjective - I mean, it's art after all, everything is in the eyes (or ears, or other sensory organs) of the beholder. And it's certainly not like humans themselves aren't guilty of creating works that are only "remixes" of existing works. I definitely couldn't tell that the graffiti in my city was done by different artists since so many of them choose to adopt a similar style.
So just as my personal take, I think the "originality" itself would be more akin to a particular style or bias that becomes synonymous with the artist. A new Taylor Swift track will very likely be just another catchy pop love song (please do not doxx me Swifties I mean no offense), but it's still distinctly a Taylor Swift track. It's hard to have that kind of attribution of bias to an LLM's output because of its flexibility in output based on whatever it was trained on. You would have to specifically prompt for it to try and generate results in a certain way and at that point it's you trying to inject the bias, not the LLM doing it inherently.
This does actually help me a lot, thanks for that! I think I interpret the idea of originality quite strongly on its difference from what’s come before, and what you’re saying is that you focus...
This does actually help me a lot, thanks for that! I think I interpret the idea of originality quite strongly on its difference from what’s come before, and what you’re saying is that you focus more on its coherence or personality within the body of work.
I was going to say something about distinctiveness but I realised that actually has both connotations too: distinct (different from previous), and distinct (identifiable to a particular style or origin). Even in the vocabulary itself, the concepts are clearly very closely intertwined!
I’ve definitely got a clearer handle on where you’re coming from now, and in some ways I do agree. I think all I’d say is you might be surprised at what AI (as a broad term for neural net technology) can do, far beyond what you see from AI (commercially driven content generation products from major tech companies).
A model with a style truly its own, derived from an incentive function very different to “make something that a human will, on average, approve of for this text prompt”, is entirely possible. I’m not suggesting organic creativity or thought, but if you step beyond just prompting and actually dive into the way systems are trained and the degrees of freedom available there, I think that originality and distinctiveness are absolutely on the table. But probably not alongside profitability, and certainly not big tech levels of profitability, even if it could maybe make for an interesting PhD project or arts foundation grant.
Well there is inherent randomness to an AI, even if its only pseudorandom. Like the initial weights used to create the model or the random shuffling of training data order. So that creates a kind...
Well there is inherent randomness to an AI, even if its only pseudorandom. Like the initial weights used to create the model or the random shuffling of training data order. So that creates a kind of initial seed value that would make different iterations distinct and unique. Then you build off that initial random state by comparing to other stuff to make a work thats coherent but still individualized.
To try to map that onto human experience, if I was trying to write a unique song Id probably just make up random melodies in my head until I stumbled upon something that sounded good to me, and then Id build off that melody by trying to figure out harmonies and music theory and other sort of standardized methods for figuring out music. I could imagine an AI being capable of doing something like that just fine.
So if you take that original output and use it as part of your input vector for future works, you get a set of works that all kind of correlated to whatever style the first one had, but each still having randomness and variations.
As for what you say about AI devaluing art, thats probably true. I think thats natural. Civization is always changing and people need to adapt to keep up.
If I could generate a virtuoso level rendition of some piece of classical music I really like, it would probably be interesting for a few times and I assume it would then be incredibly boring....
If I could generate a virtuoso level rendition of some piece of classical music I really like, it would probably be interesting for a few times and I assume it would then be incredibly boring. That's not the kind of stuff I'd use AI for. I'd use it to help me do something.
We should mostly use technology to create, not consume.
This gets confusing because both fakery and authentic performances are valid when they're in the right setting and the audience gets it. Consider the differences between a basketball game and a...
This gets confusing because both fakery and authentic performances are valid when they're in the right setting and the audience gets it.
Consider the differences between a basketball game and a basketball movie. Part of the point of a basketball game is to watch authentic performances of skilled athletes, and also to watch a contest where the outcome is in doubt. A movie is not the same since the athletic performances are faked and the game is fixed, but you might still enjoy it for other reasons, because of the skill of the actors and technical staff, and because you like the story. An anime is different; they use voice actors and an army of artists. Pixar is different from hand-drawn animation due to computer assistance, since a lot of work goes into crafting particular scenes. But in the context of a video game, even well-rendered cut scenes are often seen as an annoying distraction.
I think the main problem with AI-generated art is that the context is often unclear and you don't know what you're looking at. When a computer graphics lab is demonstrating the effects of their new algorithm, I think it's genuinely inspiring to see what they were able to do. In other contexts, though, maybe it's slop.
There is so much fakery and special effects in movies that I think any amount of AI is fair game and the only question is whether you can make something interesting. But there are other contexts where it should be against the rules.
What about web comics? I think you make your own rules and stick with them. In an art contest, it would make sense for AI and hand-drawn art to be different categories.
I feel that this, coming from The Oatmeal, is a bit ironic. I stopped at this quote: “And when I watch AI videos, I get the sense that the people making these things are unable to come up with...
I feel that this, coming from The Oatmeal, is a bit ironic.
I stopped at this quote: “And when I watch AI videos, I get the sense that the people making these things are unable to come up with anything genuinely clever beyond the feat itself.”
Change the first part to “And when I see board games from The Oatmeal on store shelves” and that’s exactly what I do think. Kudos to him for not needing AI to keep churning out that particular slop. How many times can they reskin Spoons or make a mechanically mediocre game that gets by on fart jokes?
Now, credit where due, they do have a fun game for toddlers where their typical shortcomings work very well for the intended audience.
This is a criticism that can be leveled at basically any game out there. Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh card games are just crappy IP reskins of Magic The Gathering. Cards Against Humanity is just crude Mad...
How many times can they reskin Spoons or make a mechanically mediocre game that gets by on fart jokes?
This is a criticism that can be leveled at basically any game out there. Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh card games are just crappy IP reskins of Magic The Gathering. Cards Against Humanity is just crude Mad Libs. Lots of games are basically Charades With Extra Steps.
Sure, crude humour isn't for you, that's fine. The art isn't to your liking, that's fine. But let's not pretend they're doing anything different from pretty much any other board game creator. Or that their opinion on the matter is somehow invalidated just because their art isn't for you.
If I completely copied this take and subbed out the drawings with art from say, Virgil Marti, would you consider it valid then?
I’m also a cartoonist and illustrator by profession, and though I’m happy the Oatmeal is speaking up, and I personally feel exactly the same way he does about AI, I think his argument is conflating “art” and “imagery” and I think most people make the same mistake when arguing about this subject. As a result a lot of these takes are not really going anywhere.
Here’s my take, for whatever it’s worth. “Art” is something important, something we feel. It’s Christina’s World. Imagery is just a picture of something. Sometimes they are one and the same, and this is why we so often conflate them. But imagery doesn’t HAVE to be art. It just needs to be a picture to fill a space. I think there are corporate logos that are works of art. But they don’t have to be. At the end of the day, a logo just needs to be recognizable. Art museums, however, DO need to be filled with art, because the whole point is to look at what someone else thinks is important and full of feeling. This could be an exhibit on corporate logos. Either way, the context matters.
Until now, basically the only way to get imagery was to hire an artist or illustrator. Because we in the modern age have such a massive demand for imagery - we need logos and clipart and banners and flyers and ads ads ads ads and tabletop games and comic books and newsletters and memes and the background art for animated TV shows - artists and illustrators like me and the Oatmeal have had it pretty sweet. If you, person who can’t draw, need a drawing for your card game ripoff of Uno, you need to pay me, person who can draw a bit better than you, to get it. You could also hire a photographer to make photos for the cards instead, though. Or even just put some flat colors (like Uno). You don’t NEED “art.” You need imagery so that the cards aren’t otherwise blank.
But now you can just generate images. This is a godsend for people who need imagery and don’t actually need art. The people making the thing can decide whether they want art or not, but for the people who don’t, they now have a viable option.
And here’s why AI art is here to stay despite most people disliking it: for imagery, MOST PEOPLE DON’T CARE. That includes me! And probably you. If I see an ad for a monster truck rodeo, something I have no interest in, how much do I care whether there was a human artist involved? Same goes for musical jingles for canned ravioli, or flyers for a BBQ, or memes about AI art. I’m happy to see when something is drawn, I like cool drawings. But if it’s not a cool drawing, I don’t care. It’s not a comic book. It’s just imagery. And even comic books - my son reads Donald Duck comics. Those artists are all just copying the same Disney style that’s been reused for decades. How much does he care whether that imagery is drawn by people or generated? How much do I care? It’s not Calvin and Hobbes. It’s yet another Donald Duck comic. It’s imagery.
At the end of the day, most people just don’t care whether something that isn’t “art” is made by an artist. It’s just that until now there was not really any other option. The background art for the TV show in the comic is the perfect example. It’s an amazing work of art. But most people would consume the show anyway even if it wasn’t.
So I predict that art won’t go away, and AI imagery won’t go away. I predict there will still be a demand for artists and illustrators. But that demand will crater, like the demand for oil painters for family portraits and live bands for events. Some things just don’t need to be made by artists. Speaking as the artist, it sure was nice for us while they did, though!
I find this view - of "art" vs. "imagery" - to be extremely confusing.
Throughout your post you differentiate between art (as being intended for human consumption and consideration) and imagery (as being something "less than" art, and by extension not worth the same degree of consideration). You mention several examples of what you consider to be "imagery" - mostly advertising, but also things like Donald Duck comics.
Can I ask - why do you think that a Donald Duck comic, using the in-house style of a studio, is "less" of a work of art than any other? If Donald Duck comics, drawn in the Disney style, are somehow imagery ... then are modern X-Men comics styled after Jack Kirby or Jim Lee or Chris Clairemont also "imagery"? Those would be similar - artists taking on a house style. I'm honestly confused as to why you bag on other artistic professionals simply because they don't do the same art you profess to doing - even though they very much do. Many artists have gotten their start by doing the house style, then later developing their own.
Furthermore, things like advertising - monster truck posters, musical jingles, etc. - are all paid jobs. People are paid to do them. If they do them particularly well, those images - those songs - stay with you for a long, long time (curse you, Old Navy Performance Fleece). While I doubt anyone would hang a monster truck poster in The Louvre next to the Mona Lisa, there have been plenty of times that advertising art has gone on to be considered art-art, rather than just advertising. Movie posters come to mind - the OG Star Wars movie poster is an all-time classic, something that I think all of us can picture.
Finally, all of AI imagery - literally all of it - is sourced and influenced by stolen art. Every AI-generated image is based on stolen properties by actual artists. Every slop Uno ripoff card art is rooted in dozens of peoples' professional efforts, for which none of them are being paid or recognized. The very existence, IMO, of AI images devalues all art - commercial or otherwise.
You mention how there's cratering demand for oil painters for family portraits and live bands for events. Those industries still exist - oil painting may be more niche these days, but musicians still book gigs all over the place.
I dunno, I just have a very hard time squaring the circle of an artist so devaluing other artists' works.
Not OP, but I would say based on their initial post the distinguishing factor is the degree to which a utilitarian purpose is the main objective of the piece. If the image primarily has a clear, utilitarian purpose, the main question is whether or not it can meet that purpose, and if it does, it doesn't really matter if it's made by man or machine.
The text you're reading now is cold and precise compared to some of the great calligraphers, being rendered mechanically by a computer, and indeed sometimes a hand-written letter gives meaning and depth that text can't meet, but y'know, we're on a random online forum, so it's fine. You can read it, and that's the purpose done.
This feels like a very uncharitable reading of OP? I wouldn't say they're purposefully trying to "devalue" anyone's work anymore than a biologist creates a species by writing about it.
The OP specifically mentions artist's work on Donald Duck as "just another Donald Duck comic", which in my reading is devaluing said works.
What's the opposing position? That all drawn things are of equal value? I feel like that's probably not what you would argue but I'm not sure how else you would frame it.
Of equal value, arguably not. But a person putting ink/pencil to paper, or using tools to generate an image, is putting in work. They're making decisions on how they want it to look, what effect it has on people, whether and how it matches a style.
There's different degrees to art, but even something as "low brow" as an advertising campaign can still be considered art in my view. A Campbell's Soup ad likely won't be on the same footing, artistically speaking, as the roof of The Sistine Chapel ... But then again, Campbell's Soup is integral to some of Andy Warhol's most popular work, and The Sistine Chapel's roof was commissioned work.
EDIT TO ADD: Before anyone chimes in, yes - technically, feeding prompts to an AI image generator can be viewed by some as "using a tool to create art". I would argue otherwise - with Photoshop or with a brush, you're still making creative decisions yourself. You are guiding the creation of the image and what it contains. Even making a collage is effectively taking someone else's works and riffing on them - but it requires your thoughts and actions to do it.
Utilizing an AI image generator, in my opinion, is at best akin to being the commissioner of an artist. You aren't using the tool yourself - you're asking someone/something else to create an image to your liking, then asking them to tweak it in various ways. You aren't doing the work. And I say "at best" because you're still asking a machine to rip off other peoples' copyrighted works to do so, and they don't see a dime from it.
But that's getting into the topic of whether AI image generators are actually "creating" anything, versus just copying existing works - and to the degree that any existing work is truly created, or informed by all preceding works. And that's a bigger conversation than I'm equipped to have.
My interpretation of the comment was that the distinction between "just imagery" and "art" is just shorthand for how much the beholder values the work. So the same thing that is "just imagery" to one beholder may be "art" to another.
That's a totally reasonable interpretation as well.
I think, for me, 'Art' is a two-way conversation between me and the artist. They make a promise of depth, and that if I invest the time in comprehending the work, I'll be rewarded by finding new subtleties in that depth, and learn something, about them, myself, or the world. Historically, that promise is communicated by technical expertise and the medium; the more I can perceive the amount of time and effort that went into a piece, the more depth I expect to find. Likewise, I would expect to spend more time delving into a wall-sized oil painting than a wall-sized blown-up photograph. I know the latter was ultimately a button-click on the part of a photographer, and that could've been a lot of up-front work and time spent in the right place to get the perfect shot, but on initial glance, I have a cultural model that tells me "big photo == work", "big painting == WORK!".
I believe a big part of my disappointment on encountering AI generated stuff is that it's a direct contradiction and invalidation of the cultural model I have on these relationships. They make gigantic implicit promises that they then fail to deliver on, because the conversation with the artist is shallow. They said something, to prompt, to LORA, to inpaint, but it's less than what was promised. If I then start critically inspecting the work, expecting a reward, I get nothing, because the detail was 'the statistical median of our training set', not artistic intent. Disappointment.
Going forward, I think this will resolve in two ways: first, my cultural model will update. I will learn that technical expertise is not a promise of depth, and I will treat works with more trepidation. Photorealism went from the pinnacle of paint artistry, to attainable by dangerous and technically difficult works by photographers, to everyone's phone in their pocket. I don't assume a photo is art, without some other mechanism that tells me the conversation is worth initiating (hanging in a gallery, winning an award, etc.). AI does that for art more broadly.
Second, artists will learn to have deep conversations using AI. They will discover how to feed enough of themselves into a work through AI that the resultant work communicates something about themselves, and more universal truths, and will be worth the effort on my part to meet them there. We're not there yet.
I agree overall, although personally I still care about how something was made-- whether it's imagery, art, etc-- for ethical reasons.
I also think the demand may crater to the point of unsustainability. Not just in the arts. The rate at which human workers are replaced by AI may outpace the rate at which new work opportunities are created for humans. Unless UBI or other adequate social safety nets are created by then, massive unemployment would just result in a world where AI is doing most of the work and producing most of the things, but there just aren't enough people who can even pay for goods and services at all.
While I agree with many of your points, I gotta pull you up for casting shade on Donald Duck comics. Carl Barks deserves his due, man.
No shade to Carl. What I meant was, how many people will care if tomorrow’s edition of Donald Duck comics are drawn by actual artists in Carl’s style, or AI in Carl’s style?
Probably more than you think. I assume you, as I, would care if Calvin and Hobbes suddenly resurfaced as an AI-created strip.
The key difference is that C&H was only ever done by one artist. Plenty of other newspaper strips (especially the “zombie” strips), comic books, and cartoons have had different artists maintain the same style.
I'm not sure that matters to my point, which is that there's plenty of people, like me, that would be immediately turned off by AI art replacing human work at all. Even if the artist changes, there's still an artist.
To me art is a way to convey the intangible elements of the human condition. You use the term imagery to differentiate non-artistic still visuals. I wonder if there is a broader term? Maybe we now need one. One type of content is a way to convey tangible or objective information, one is an attempt to convey intangible or subjective information.
I can show you my family tree, give you all the names and dates connections, but if I want to share how my Grandma made me feel, what she meant to me, I will need more than genealogy. I can use any type of art to try and add this context, a painting, a song, a poem, a dance, a play, or anything else really. The important part is that it tries to capture something human. We use the same mediums to communicate information, and emotion. If all you are trying to convey is surface information, it's not art.
I think you’re on to something with art vs. content. Content and Imagery seem interchangeable in the top level post.
I could definitely get on board with that distinction. Content is the broad utilitarian tool of information conveyance, Art is the attempt to explore that surface information more deeply.
Thank you. Honestly it felt for a long time like it's such a discussion in English speaking communities precisely because the the word "art" refers to imagery as well.
The same thing is happening in the tech industry, businesses know that they don’t need a fully realized software developer to maintain their app or website or whatever, so they hire the cheapest person who sort of knows how to code they can find.
The problem is we need that level of actual human beings because maintaining some businesses app is how you learn.
Now theres all kinds of would be software developers and would be artists who never even get to start because no one needs to pay humans for low quality work. The gap between novice and proficient enough to receive payment is large, and so the pool of available workers becomes only those wealthy enough to support themselves through that gap.
I am in charge of some hiring at my company, and I'm increasingly concerned that AI is slowly breaking the natural junior -> senior engineer mentoring progression. I'm afraid we may not see the full downstream effects for many years, and by then it'll really be way too late to change course.
Same, I have also noticed that the quality of juniors has dropped. I think universities experienced a drop in quality around ten years ago and its been getting worse ever since then.
Ive had multiple people with a computer science degree interview who didn’t have any process for solving problems themselves. Its incredibly strange to me that you could graduate with a computer science degree and not be able to even start solving a problem. I’m not even talking leetcode stuff I’m talking, personality interview questions. Easy thought scenario stuff where theres no wrong answer except not answering.
So like, while the gap is growing larger between junior and able to work as a junior, that gap has also grown between juniors now and what skills juniors used to have.
Disappointing take. For one thing, it indulges a bit too much in the gross "ugh, now the worthless talentless PLEBES will be sullying Art with pretensions of sophistication" gatekeeping, which kind of undermines his later point about any effort, even scribbles, being worthwhile.
But it also completely overlooks the fact that not all use of AI in art is of the format "insert prompt, receive finished product." For one thing, many artists have already begun experimenting with models fine tuned on their own work, so every output is by definition a reflection of their own artistry. See "A Love Letter to LA," for instance, which took the art of Paul Flores, trained a LORA on his portfolio, and used a different model to extrapolate the resulting assets into 3D (something which Adobe's new Turntable tool makes available publicly). Also, advanced AI tools like ComfyUI let artists endlessly iterate, curate, selectively edit, and recombine AI-generated elements in highly intentional ways, which clearly puts a human stamp on the result.
Ultimately, the creative possibilities of these tools outweigh the downsides (which are a problem of capitalism, not technology). And people who insist on focusing on strawmen like "it's lazy" or "oh no, now Bob in HR thinks he's an artist" remind me of similar pushback against digital art from traditional artists. Or AutoTune. Or modern art. Or photography. Etc.
I don't agree with all of your points because firstly I'm a fan of gatekeeping, surely the problem of "now the internet is going to be flooded with an order of magnitude more shitty content" is real and already happening, and secondly "it's capitalism's fault" usually just means "it's the fault of human nature" and even if it doesn't it might as well because it describes something that's very unlikely to change.
But the main point is spot on. You don't even need to spend the effort to train models on your art, even just using less mainstream models than the ChatGPT tool with default settings in a smart way can create an endless supply of inspiration that you can use in your own work. One thing that LLMs and image generation models seem to have in common is that they work well as hypothesis machines basically, creating really interesting fragments of things when used well. I used to make strange liminal style (but not stereotypical backrooms etc.), weird architecture 3D renders for fun and I have used AI this way. One thing that I struggled with was to add some organic looking dust, grime and other things that would make the scene look worn and abandoned. Turns out you can use directed AI inpainting for that and selectively blend it with the original render.
And AI can be wielded by artists to create actual novel art like this music video that wouldn't be realistically (even if the limitation might only be budget) possible otherwise. I certainly did not feel any disappointment when watching it.
That said, I think the issue of not differentiating between "art" and just "imagery" or "content", where the origin really doesn't matter much, as mentioned in the current top comment here, is a bigger flaw with his take.
It's a bit of irony that the people most opposed to AI tools are the least likely to have used them.
There's a lot of people tried midjourney once or twice and think that's all AI is.
Like all this outrage about that "AI actor". A lot of people discussing it seem to think that someone is going to type "make a comedy movie" and walk away with zero other input.
Don't necessarily agree with everything, but yeah. I'm not going to pretend like I don't enjoy the fruits of some AI artwork. either on or off the drugs is a song by JPEGMAFIA. I legitimately enjoy it. But the main sample it is built around is an AI cover of a Future song. I don't know what it makes it.
Speaking of which: when I look at a joke song like BBL Drizzy (a song made in the height of the Kendrick vs Drake beef), I don't believe it could have ever been made in real life, without someone throwing serious cash at it. You'd need session musicians that continue to play this style. You'd need to find a singer specializing in that sound. And all of them willing to record what is effectively a shit post. And like the other example, humans iterated on the song - Metro Boomin with his remix, Tim Henson doing a guitar cover of it, the various entrants to the competition, and even Drake remixing it. Ultimately all of this was disposable, and did not last past ~3 months. But it was interesting.
It doesn't mean I'd willingly listen to 95% of the songs on, say, Suno, but there is something there, that humans can work with to produce interesting things.
On your first point about it being gate-keeping. The entire post ends with him saying it doesn't matter, even your bad squiggly lines should hold more value than the output of ai. So I find it odd that you think it's gate-keeping.
I'm talking about the entire middle section where he calls "middle managers, executives, or marketers" who think that AI tools give them a way to express creative ideas "shitbirds" and "talentless fucking losers." That people with jobs like "Chief Brand Ambassador" ("or whatever the fuck their job title is") cannot possibly be "storytellers" because they "work in tech". It's of a piece with the sort of thinking you see from AI critics all the time that assumes that people interested in AI (or in the industry broadly) do not have -- or cannot possibly have -- any creative spark, and that any claim to it is worthy of ridicule. It's a really ugly, exclusionary sentiment.
It's also telling that he excuses his own use of AI for "administrative" stuff like backgrounds that he finds dull and unrewarding. Well guess what guy: not everybody enjoys the grind of practice or investing in physical supplies, and some see the actual process of drawing/painting/sculpting to be as tedious as syncing lip movements in animation or cross-hatching a dark background for the 10,000th time. They like AI because it gives them a way to immediately translate the vision they have in their head to something real, and just because it's a shortcut or not entirely under their control doesn't mean it has zero worth.
I do wonder how people will react if and when we get to the point that generative AI can directly capture the visual images we have in our heads, perhaps through some kind of brain-computer interface. Imagine being able to record memories or dreams to video with the fidelity of Veo or Sora. It would be the purest route from thought to expression in the history of art, and yet I bet there would still be people saying it's tainted or that pure imagination is lazy and doesn't count.
The Oatmeal is always good. He really does keep in touch with the human aspect.
I feel like AI art occupies a weird place in people's heads, and everyone is different. I think AI art can be interesting and a way for people without technical art skills to make something beautiful. As long as they remember that all they did was write a prompt and adjust things, that's fine, but sometimes people get weirdly possessive about it, as if they actually did work.
I have just one example where I clashed with someone over their AI art. They had taken a fairly well known cartoon, run it through some AI, and added an extra frame with a drawing and punchline of their own idea, also drawn by AI, and art style similar to the original cartoon. They left the name of the original artist intact: they did not indicate it had been chewed on by AI. Anyone who's a big fan of the OA and his style could probably tell it was not the original. However, if you were not super familiar, you wouldn't know. And my acquaintance did not put his own signature on it.
To me these were points of offense. Typically when cartoonists use or recreate another's work, they credit with "hat tip to" or "apologies to". I often see the characters of Charles Schulz and Bill Watterson get tweaked with, and even then with such nationally and even globally known cartoonists, they still get the "hat tip to" or "apologies to". To not indicate that this was an adjustment of the OA's work, to leave the OA's name there, and to not put his own name on it, felt wrong.
I made my argument, he said giving credit to OA was enough, then accused me of hating AI (which was a bit of a leap of faith there; I make fun of AI but have never gotten fire and brimstone about it). But he took the cartoon down, which was to me a satisfactory course of action, though if he had just added the hat tip stuff and his own name, I would have been fine with it too. But the whole interaction bothered me, and still bothers me. Why did he get so emotional and angry with me? Maybe people just hate being told they did something the wrong way?
Definitely that second part, and it's possible your friend heard it that way even if you didn't say it that directly.
But also I believe there's often more to reactions like that. I believe it's because the expectations of people are massively misaligned.
Think of a child who makes a child level drawing and shows it to an adult. Every adult can clearly see that it is not "good", it's scribbles or barely identifiable stick figures. But most (not all) adults also know to praise and encourage a child who shows them a drawing so that they will keep doing it and enjoying it.
Now transpose that interaction onto college age people. Each of those students will arrive with varying levels of skill and self confidence. If they begin their classes by being told their art sucks, a lot of people would probably drop the class and maybe go get an MBA. Teachers know this, and most artists know this, and a lot of them are very encouraging. Great art is grounded in emotion and is also emotionally evocative. It takes a lot of support and encouragement to be able to express some of your deepest inner thoughts to other people.
So to bring it back to my assertion that expectations are misaligned. Someone who creates something with AI is creating art. But it's child art. It is often shallow thoughts and feelings that through AI has been given the form of something with far more depth and consideration. And so we often call it out for what it is, and rightfully so. At the same time, we are also crushing that child's crayon drawing and telling them their drawing is slop.
Am I advocating we be nicer to people making slop, and pat them on the head and pin it to the fridge? No definitely not. But I also don't think we should crumple up all their crayon drawings*.
* I'm mostly taking about speaking to individual friends and family or coworkers. Anyone operating at a mass level (techbro, influencer, content mill, etc) can all go kick rocks
What's strange to me is that you definitely can make "art"/express your thoughts without having little to no learnt skills.
You can draw stick figure comics and they'll be noticed if your idea/punchline is good enough.
You can "steal" other comics and turn them into antimemes or r/bonehurtingjuice type nonsense.
You can write two sentence horror stories.
Are they as impactful as someone mastering a craft? Most likely not. But it doesn't mean they're without value, mostly it just means you aren't able to earn a living through them. You can do low effort art without muddying it up with ai.
If you're into art for profit obviously it takes time and effort to master it but that as an end goal is beyond the reach for many artists anyway.
My problem is that image generation relies on images that weren’t necessarily ethically sourced, and it gives me the ick. Every image I’ve generated makes me feel like I’m stepping on someone’s face with a jackboot. I don’t like to feel this way, so this cannot be a tool for me.
What if you don’t have the same aesthetic reaction to AI art that Inman has?
I found it quite fun to generate AI art for a while, though it would have been more fun to iterate with if it didn’t take so long. I have a collection. But I probably won’t share them, since people don’t seem to like them.
I saw this today (from a post on Mastodon) and almost shared it here!
I think this is the first time I've seen someone reference the magic Wand tool in photoshop and it's always the first thing I think of.
I'm not an artist but I'm pretty good at photoshop. They've slowly been putting in more and more automated tools. You had the magic Wand which selected on colour. Then the "quick select" tool which had some ability to recognize objects. Then eventually just one button that could select the subject, the sky or auto remove the background.
They added in the repair and remove tools that could automatically fix small mistakes or fill in a gap where you removed something.
Just before generative AI was everywhere, they had a bunch of tools called neural filters. They use AI of some sort but they're very specific. A tool to change the expression on a face, or colorize a black and white photo, or change the time of day or season in a landscape.
When AI images went mainstream to me it felt like just another incremental step in these same tools. I've never been good at drawing and was always more into "photobashing" when I needed to make something. You want to make a cool robot, so you take a bunch of pictures of mechanical things and jam them all together, cutting, pasting, warping and adjusting until you make a new picture. AI just seemed to be doing this faster.
I was honestly really surprised when the world suddenly turned on AI and decided it was going to destroy artistic expression.
Big difference between skilled photoshopper doing a digital collage and a kid saying 'draw a funny robot,' and the AI does all the work, kid never practices drawin.
I won't deny that AI tooling has their place. Children and young teens should probably not have unfettered access to them for the same reasons that you can't use a calculator when you're learning to add.
Wow, lots of in-depth arguments here. Mine will seem silly in comparison. I don't even think if images that come out of AI as art at all. I see it as a collection of pixels assembled by a very advanced computer program. It can look cool, I may even like the output sometimes, but I do not perceive it the way I do something in galley. When I see a photograph of a landscape I like to put myself in the photographer's shoes and think "what did they think and feel when they took this photo? What did they find beautiful and worth capturing with their camera?" When I look at an AI image of a similar landscape, all I can think of is "oh, I guess the person was able to write a few sentences into an AI software". It's lacking the depth. If you only take images at face value like "Is this a pretty picture?" then I guess you won't care how it was created.
TLDR; art != pixels
I think this guy is off-base and I would like to explain why.
When I think of art, there are a bunch of different partially overlapping conditions for what that might mean. It could be something that someone has put a lot of passion into beyond its strict utilitarian function, it could be something that has a a lot of personal expression, it could be a deep exploration of a particular media or phenomenon, it could be something with a strong message intended to sway others. Those are all things I could recognize as art, but none of them are necessary conditions, only sufficient. I could probably come up with an example of something I see as art that lacks any specific quality if I really had to.
I think when you are the kind of artist that requires developing some kind of craft or skill over a long period of time that becomes integral to your personal experience of art, but not the universal experience.
Like if you are a concert pianist and you have spent years honing your skills to be able to precisely translate the music in your head to the music that comes out in the real world, thats going to be deeply ingrained in you. When you hear someone else play a difficult piece, it will probably resonate with you and you will relate to how much work it probably took them to get that good, and that will affect your personal emotional response to hearing that piece.
Then later you might hear some music made with sampling and DAWs, that don't require any particular skill at playing an instrument or singing. Maybe that will feel fundamentally lacking to you in particular, because you are not feeling that sense of shared struggle and emotional resonance. But that isn't a problem of artistic value, its a problem of your personal tastes not being fulfilled in the same way.
I am not an artist, so that doesn't really come into play for me when I engage with art. But I still experience value from it, even though I never have that specific feeling of appreciating whats involved in a work. Most art that anyone experiences will probably be in some medium that they are not involved in.
Honestly, I probably know more about how chatGPT works than I know about how they made the dinosaurs in Jurrassic Park. I know it took a lot of hard work by a lot of people. I also know that Stephen Speilberg did not make the dinosaurs, he just described what he wanted and then a bunch of other people did the hard work to make it, and then he adjusted his instructions until it looked the way he wanted. He was just a guy who had a vision of what he wanted his art to look like, and then found a way to manifest that into physical reality. Thats all it really takes.
But you know what? There is in fact a lot of wonder to be found in generative art and artificial intelligence, if you want there to be. Its not interesting to him because he is not putting much thought into it. If you feel like being deep and philosophical about it, its incredibly interesting to think about how a generic algorithm was able to distill out the core meaning of language by just pattern recognition of the structure of sentences. Its interesting to think about how changing one word to a synonym of that same word will change how a model interprets a sentence because of millions of nuances in how it is used by ordinary people. None of that exists if you just want look at chatGPT as a black box of science and capitalism, but it could if you so choose.
I know I started this by saying art doesn't have any specific criterion that necessarily makes it art, but after reading this guys perspective I feel that he is not really an "artist", but more of a professional illustrator who happens to think of himself as the definition of an artist. He is not worried about the denigration of art as an act of creation, he is worried about the denigration of art as a profession.
Even looking at it this way, are you impressed by the LLM's ability to interpret input, or by the programmers who came up with the logic to allow it to do so? It's not like the LLM's capabilities came about pseudo-randomly as a matter of evolution over millions of years, these things were designed very intentionally and with a significant amount of effort and ingenuity by humans in a relatively short time span. We should give credit where credit is due; artists should be acknowledged for the effort and intention in their art, and LLM creators for the effort and ability to create an algorithm that can competently mimic human work. That doesn't necessarily mean AI-generated art is inherently lower-value than human-made art, and odds are the majority of people won't care as long as it's of passable quality and within their budget, but it will mean that there will be a need for an "artisanal" exclusively human-made art market, as LLMs currently can't generate novel ideas of their own and it's important that we support artists that do, lest we stagnate.
Personally I dont really think that matters. What you are saying is true, but thats a political ane economic discussion moreso than anything about art.
There is a saying that there are no original ideas, and that everything is just remixing recycled ideas. In some ways big AI models are mirrors of the collective consciousness of society, so its doing the same thing.
If you write a story about a hero fights a monster, someone might reasonably make some argument that your ideas ultimately came from Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein and Homer writing The Odyssey, and you just stole those ideas through the process of cultural osmosis, and that would kind of be true.
But nobody actually cares about that unless that already had some other reason to care. People dont insist that you list out all your inspirations in the appendix of your book so you dont accidentally pretend you had an original idea. No one makes you pay royalties to Mary Shellys decendents for monetizing her work. That guy who made a millions of dollars for taping a banana to a canvas probably didnt even grow the banana himself.
The only reason people are getting so riled up about that here is because AI is run by big corporations nobody cares about, and frankly you could come up with any kind of flimsy excuse for why they deserve to have all their money taken away and redistributed and have millions of people be on your side.
I agree. Its probably not truly creative. Its certainly not going to ever replicate genuine humanity, by definition. But neither of those things are necessary for art, or even good art. They are just ingredients that can contribute to good art when they are available.
Original art has more nuance and depth to it than simply coming up with a new idea or setting though. A writer could write a story following all the usual tropes of that genre, but add enough of their own unique nuance, pacing, humor, worldbuilding, etc. to make it THEIR style that stands out. An artist like the Oatmeal certainly isn't original when it comes to creating crude and humorous art, but it is the way he draws his characters and lays out his panels that makes his work distinct. AI as it is cannot add this element of uniqueness to its output, it can only rehash or remix what's been provided to it, and that's fine when we just want more of what we already have but we cannot let that devalue distinct, human-made art. You say it's more of a political and economic discussion but such things are a direct reflection of cultural value; if the culture ends up valuing AI art significantly more than human-made art, then ultimately human-made art will decline.
[citation needed]
I’m half joking there, but I am genuinely interested to know what you mean, because I hear this refrain a lot and I really struggle to understand what people are getting at with it.
What’s the meaningful bar for uniqueness that matters in your mind? Because you can trivially get a unique style just by randomising some parameters, or you can get a unique image by using a photo of yourself as the basis for a generated output and asking for a situation you’ve never been in, or you can get into much more interesting (in my opinion) experimental territory by letting adversarial models optimise towards goals like “create things that don’t look like your training data, but that are still interpretable by an image classification model”.
I understand the basis for most of what people say in these conversations, even if I might disagree with it, but the specific idea that AI can’t create something unique is one I see repeated often, almost verbatim, with the assumption that we all accept it as an axiom - and maybe I’m just being excessively literal, but I just don’t get it! That doesn’t seem to line up with what I see at all?
Oversimplifying it to an extreme degree, the most core logic behind how an LLM generates output is determining and choosing what the most likely answers are, with some flex room to increase variation in output. So when you ask it to create a unique image using something else as a basis, that unique riff it adds is always going to be based on the other images it's been trained on. Perhaps it can come up with some combination of images and styles that hasn't yet been made by humans, like, I dunno, cyberpunk-gothic carebears, but the end result is just a remix of what it knows. You can ask it to create something that doesn't look like its training data, but it literally can't by design. If you've got an image-generating LLM that's trained on Dali, Picasso, Michelangelo, and Warhol, you can certainly get some very interesting and novel combinations from that, but you'll always be able to tell that it's borrowing from those without really adding any new style of its own. It's never going to make a Pollock.
Are you assuming only pretrained, commercial models are in play here? That would make more sense to me, because those are pretty limited and pretty middle-of-the-road in a lot of ways, but I think it's a shame to tar the entire field of "AI" (I'll spare you the whole post I've written a few times before about why I dislike the terminology) with blanket statements about what it's capable of based on something that's essentially the McDonalds version of the technology.
You can absolutely create a loss function that'd simultaneously maximise the distance from the training images (i.e. minimise the similarity) while keeping a term that enforces recognisable outputs as defined by a classification model to stop it just returning random noise, for example. I'm not sure what the results would look like, or how much tuning it'd take to create that function in a way that gives a decent output, but it's absolutely within the capabilities of "AI" as most people define it. I might even give it a go if I get the free time, it'd be a fun little experiment!
But, even putting aside the very technical side, I'm still not getting it... Looking at these:
It seems like you have a very strong idea of where the line is between "remix" and "original"... but I don't have that kind of confidence in the distinction at all. I couldn't tell you what proportion of my own thoughts and ideas are original vs. coming from half seen and half remembered snippets of what I've experienced in my life.
If I can't say with certainty what "original" means in the context of a human mind - my own human mind, no less, the only one I can experience from the inside - I just really struggle with the idea that there's a definitive line of where a machine is or isn't making something original. Does it become original when it passes the point you can't tell it's borrowing? Because I think we're already there in the very best outputs, even though there are by definition 100 or 1000 or 10,000 mediocre outputs for every one of those exceptional ones.
In terms of what the line between "remix" and "original" is, it's ultimately subjective - I mean, it's art after all, everything is in the eyes (or ears, or other sensory organs) of the beholder. And it's certainly not like humans themselves aren't guilty of creating works that are only "remixes" of existing works. I definitely couldn't tell that the graffiti in my city was done by different artists since so many of them choose to adopt a similar style.
So just as my personal take, I think the "originality" itself would be more akin to a particular style or bias that becomes synonymous with the artist. A new Taylor Swift track will very likely be just another catchy pop love song (please do not doxx me Swifties I mean no offense), but it's still distinctly a Taylor Swift track. It's hard to have that kind of attribution of bias to an LLM's output because of its flexibility in output based on whatever it was trained on. You would have to specifically prompt for it to try and generate results in a certain way and at that point it's you trying to inject the bias, not the LLM doing it inherently.
This does actually help me a lot, thanks for that! I think I interpret the idea of originality quite strongly on its difference from what’s come before, and what you’re saying is that you focus more on its coherence or personality within the body of work.
I was going to say something about distinctiveness but I realised that actually has both connotations too: distinct (different from previous), and distinct (identifiable to a particular style or origin). Even in the vocabulary itself, the concepts are clearly very closely intertwined!
I’ve definitely got a clearer handle on where you’re coming from now, and in some ways I do agree. I think all I’d say is you might be surprised at what AI (as a broad term for neural net technology) can do, far beyond what you see from AI (commercially driven content generation products from major tech companies).
A model with a style truly its own, derived from an incentive function very different to “make something that a human will, on average, approve of for this text prompt”, is entirely possible. I’m not suggesting organic creativity or thought, but if you step beyond just prompting and actually dive into the way systems are trained and the degrees of freedom available there, I think that originality and distinctiveness are absolutely on the table. But probably not alongside profitability, and certainly not big tech levels of profitability, even if it could maybe make for an interesting PhD project or arts foundation grant.
Well there is inherent randomness to an AI, even if its only pseudorandom. Like the initial weights used to create the model or the random shuffling of training data order. So that creates a kind of initial seed value that would make different iterations distinct and unique. Then you build off that initial random state by comparing to other stuff to make a work thats coherent but still individualized.
To try to map that onto human experience, if I was trying to write a unique song Id probably just make up random melodies in my head until I stumbled upon something that sounded good to me, and then Id build off that melody by trying to figure out harmonies and music theory and other sort of standardized methods for figuring out music. I could imagine an AI being capable of doing something like that just fine.
So if you take that original output and use it as part of your input vector for future works, you get a set of works that all kind of correlated to whatever style the first one had, but each still having randomness and variations.
As for what you say about AI devaluing art, thats probably true. I think thats natural. Civization is always changing and people need to adapt to keep up.
If I could generate a virtuoso level rendition of some piece of classical music I really like, it would probably be interesting for a few times and I assume it would then be incredibly boring. That's not the kind of stuff I'd use AI for. I'd use it to help me do something.
We should mostly use technology to create, not consume.
This gets confusing because both fakery and authentic performances are valid when they're in the right setting and the audience gets it.
Consider the differences between a basketball game and a basketball movie. Part of the point of a basketball game is to watch authentic performances of skilled athletes, and also to watch a contest where the outcome is in doubt. A movie is not the same since the athletic performances are faked and the game is fixed, but you might still enjoy it for other reasons, because of the skill of the actors and technical staff, and because you like the story. An anime is different; they use voice actors and an army of artists. Pixar is different from hand-drawn animation due to computer assistance, since a lot of work goes into crafting particular scenes. But in the context of a video game, even well-rendered cut scenes are often seen as an annoying distraction.
I think the main problem with AI-generated art is that the context is often unclear and you don't know what you're looking at. When a computer graphics lab is demonstrating the effects of their new algorithm, I think it's genuinely inspiring to see what they were able to do. In other contexts, though, maybe it's slop.
There is so much fakery and special effects in movies that I think any amount of AI is fair game and the only question is whether you can make something interesting. But there are other contexts where it should be against the rules.
What about web comics? I think you make your own rules and stick with them. In an art contest, it would make sense for AI and hand-drawn art to be different categories.
I feel that this, coming from The Oatmeal, is a bit ironic.
I stopped at this quote: “And when I watch AI videos, I get the sense that the people making these things are unable to come up with anything genuinely clever beyond the feat itself.”
Change the first part to “And when I see board games from The Oatmeal on store shelves” and that’s exactly what I do think. Kudos to him for not needing AI to keep churning out that particular slop. How many times can they reskin Spoons or make a mechanically mediocre game that gets by on fart jokes?
Now, credit where due, they do have a fun game for toddlers where their typical shortcomings work very well for the intended audience.
This is a criticism that can be leveled at basically any game out there. Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh card games are just crappy IP reskins of Magic The Gathering. Cards Against Humanity is just crude Mad Libs. Lots of games are basically Charades With Extra Steps.
Sure, crude humour isn't for you, that's fine. The art isn't to your liking, that's fine. But let's not pretend they're doing anything different from pretty much any other board game creator. Or that their opinion on the matter is somehow invalidated just because their art isn't for you.
If I completely copied this take and subbed out the drawings with art from say, Virgil Marti, would you consider it valid then?