this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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people said the same thing about photography. And that was before digital photography, back when some level of knowledge of photochemistry was required, and you needed a dark room to develop in, etc. People said that it was just an imitation of painting. That turned out to not be quite the case and photography developed into its own art form, and painting became less focused on realism and documenting reality since that became the domain of photography. What photography really accomplished was reducing the amount of time and technical ability required to produce art. Same with AI stuff even if it's reactionary junk a lot of the time, that says more about who's writing the prompt and who's curating the database that the model is trained on. I imagine sculptors were also upset when 3D modeling and 3D printing showed up.
I go with Marx on this and stress that the problem isn't the means of production but who controls it. Even in the context of AI generated art, the labor is reduced to the amount of time needed to think up and write a prompt (the labor of thinking of and writing a prompt is very small) but you can then take the output and manually refine it using traditional methods if you're capable, or refine/iterate the prompt etc. So there is some creativity going into it. And then of course AI models usually have a database of art that has already been created to draw statistical data from when generating new art. The process of curating/maintaining/labelling that database requires a huge amount of labor, as does the process of writing and maintaining the model itself. Technology is what Marx called constant capital. Constant capital is just dead labor. i.e. labor that was already performed in the past. When you generate AI art it's not that there's no labor going into it, it's just that the labor was performed in the past by countless people. Same as when you use a hammer you bought from a store. You still exercise labor power to use the hammer, it's just that the labor of making the hammer was performed in the past for you by different people.
It's also not only prompt writing but also image-to-image. So you can take a crudely drawn input image and have the AI refine it. So that still requires creativity on your part, as well.
the bot made zero choices. It consulted your prompt (a choice you made) and then it consulted a database full of pre-existing human-made art that has been curated and labelled and statistically sorted. Also at some point some random noise is introduced so it doesn't generate the same thing twice. Bots do not make choices. These are statistical models. It's helpful not to mystify them or attribute agency to them.
Also I don't get the point of gatekeeping art according to technical ability, which just comes down to how much free time you have to practice, your level of educational attainment, how much disposable income you have to pay for said education, and your physical ability. If a person with no arms decides to generate a painting with AI from a carefully written prompt they came up with, and someone says "that's not real art because you didn't use your hands"... what is the point of that? If an idea comes to mind, you should be free to make it however you want.
you said
Now that you have clarified what you really meant, that is helpful, but I hope you can see why I was confused by your original wording (bolded above). Also I don't think it removes choices from the artist since the artist is still free to discard whatever the AI makes and re-generate it or use a more traditional method. The freedom to reject the output if you don't like it is a choice along with the choice to make the prompt.
That's fair. I'm sorry for misunderstanding you in that regard. I just find this subject interesting. I'm not coming at this from a place of anger or trying to annoy people.
Your correct and I wouldn't dream of disagreeing with this.
Nevertheless I think it's more of a tool than a toy. The problem is that the tools are made by the workers and owned by the capitalists. We should be reacting to that economic arrangement and not the tools themselves.
This is a really good argument I think for excluding most AI content from "art". You put into words that disappointing, unamused feeling you get after the novelty wears off when you learn an image is AI. Like it's illegitimate but you can't explain why because historically art has always been pushing boundaries and making people question art itself. Maybe in the future, people saying this will be considered luddites who can't appreciate "painting with words" or whatever.
Fair point; my bad
I was just thinking about the original reaction painters had to photography and extending that to other fields which was lazy on my part.
Nah you didn't sound like an ass, no worries
glad to hear