I think this is completely missing the point when it’s talking about “the minutiae of art”. It’s making two claims at the same time: art is better when you suffer for it and the art is good whether or not you suffered. But none of that is relevant.

When Wyeth made Christina’s World, I don’t know if he suffered or not when painting that grass. What I do know is that he was a human with limited time and the fact that he spent so much of his time detailing every blade of grass means that he’s saying something. That The Oatmeal doesn’t draw backgrounds might be because he’s lazy, but he also doesn’t need them. These are choices we make to put effort in one part and ignore some other part.

AI doesn’t make choices. It doesn’t need to. A detailed background is exactly the same amount of work as a plain one. And so a generated picture has this evenly distributed level of detail, no focus at all. You don’t really know where to look, what’s important, what the picture is trying to say. Because it’s not saying anything. It isn’t a rat with a big butt, it’s just a cloud of noise that happens to resemble a rat with a big butt.

I often hear AI enthusiasts say that AI democratized art. As if art weren’t already democratized. Most anyone can pick up a pen, draw, write, type, move a mouse, etc. What AI democratizes in art, is the perception of skill. Which is why when you find out a piece of art was madeby inputting some short prompt into a generator, you brcomr disappointed. Because it would be cool, if the person actually had the skill to draw that. Pushing a few buttons to get that, not so much.

“Yes, but I’ll be quick, I promise.”

Isn’t quick.

I appreciate this bit out of context:

Also loved the shoutout to Allie Brosh!

As a passable quality 3D artist who does it for a living I’ve found AI art (which can do 3D now to some degree) has kind of narrowed the scope for me. If you want generic Unreal style pseudo-realism or disney toon then AI can do that for you* I’ve had to focus much more on creating a unique style and also optimizing my work in ways that AI just doesn’t have the ability to do because they require longer chains of actual reasoning.

For AI in general I think this pattern holds, it can quickly create something generic and increasingly do it without extranious fingers but no matter how much you tweak a prompt its damn near impossible to get a specific idea into image form. Its like a hero shooter with skins VS actually creating your own character.

*Right now AI models use more tris to re-create the default blender cube than my entire lifetime portfolio but I’m assuming that can be resolved since we already have partially automated re-topology tools.

I forgot how loooong Oatmeal cartoons are. I don’t think I have made it to the end of one in years.

I made a comment about a week ago about how copying people’s art is still art, and it was a bit of an aha moment as I pinpointed for myself a big part of why I find image generators and the like so soulless, inwardly echoing a lot of what Inman lays out here.

All human made art, from the worst to the best, embodies the effort of the artist. Their intent and their skill. Their attempt to make something, to communicate something. It has meaning. All generative art does is barf up random noise that looks like pictures. It’s impressive technology, and I understand that it’s exciting, but it’s not art. If humans ever end up creating actual artificial intelligence, then we can talk about machine made art. Until then, it’s hardly more than a printer in terms of artistic merit.

Thanks for sharing! I haven’t read much of the Oatmeal in quite a while but I’ve always liked their style and humor.

I think AI art serves a different purpose from the art we talk about when we say “real art has heart” or “the process of creating the art affected me when I looked at it”.

I think about how I feel when I’m scrolling through pictures in some app on my phone - some will be memes, some will be cats, but then some will be there for artistic purposes. As I’m scrolling through, such a picture will spark a brief glimmer of emotion - “huh, that looks neat” for example. I’m not looking close and examining the brush strokes, not thinking about what troubles the artist went through, and not thinking about the process of its creation at all.

In that context I don’t think it makes much difference that it’s AI-generated. I’d kind of like to know, and I don’t want to see a dozen different outputs of the same prompt because whoever hit the button couldn’t even apply the modicum of effort require to pick their favourite, but AI-generated images are just as able to instigate that glimmer of “hey that looks cool” that any image can.

It was an ok read for me, but mostly because I enjoyed the art rather than relating to the entirety of the sentiment.

I’m an artist and I find AI art evocative and illustrating things in a way that I wish that I could illustrate, but feel that is only because it comes from real human artists. I agree that it is a void in terms of difficulty to process, but there is still skill involved in both using search engines and describing something to an llm. A minute amount of skill, but still a skill.

I hate AI art because it is stealing from artists, not because it doesn’t feel right. It can have a million iterations and only needs to get it right once to count as feeling right to me. The relationship between the content and their artists to the ultimate product is removed, this to me is the wrongfulness of claiming new art from it. It is just stealing in a more wind-about manor. This isn’t like generating fractal art or something.

After all these years of corporations fucking up the literal social fabric and and how we communicate over IP law, for them to turn around and steal everything and just get a pass is an extra slap in face. Stealing only gets allowed2 one way in our society, and AI is just another example of that.

I’m honestly surprised to not see this take more from others and felt like i needed to mention it.

edit: emphasized that by making AI art taking skill, I only mean just a minute amount.

I watched a short saying you might be an art director, at best, but not really an artist. Because you have the vision but you’re only telling someone (something) to materialize it. I was kind of happy with that.

That was a beautiful read.

But do i find myself conflicted about dismissing it as a potential technical skill all together.

I have seen comfy-ui workflows that are build in a very complex way, some have the canvas devided in different zones, each having its own prompts. Some have no prompts and extract concepts like composition or color values from other files.

I compare these with collage-art which also exists from pre existing material to create something new.

Such tools take practice, there are choices to be made, there is a creative process but its mostly technological knowledge so if its about such it would be right to call it a technical skill.

The sad reality however, is how easy it is to remove parts of that complexity “because its to hard” and barebones it to simple prompt to output. At which point all technical skill fades and it becomes no different from the online generators you find.

I want to touch on how he mentions hitting the button to automatically make music on a Casio keyboard.

I fully realize I’m being reductive to the point of being offensive but that’s not my intent and I preemptively apologize, when I say: that’s at least in part, the very first seed to becoming a professional DJ. That’s not nothing.

Using AI to generate images can be the same thing if it’s extrapolated out into complexity and layered nuance. It might not make you an artist exactly, in the same way that a DJ might not be a musician but it IS a skillset that potentially has value.

And even if you think I’m totally off-base in saying so? I liked pretending with the little automatic music button on the keyboard.

This was a great read! As someone who was initially excited about the possibilities of AI art, it’s been hit or miss with me.

I’ve come to realise over time that I like the connection that art offers. The little moment of ‘I wonder what the artist was thinking when they imagined this and what experiences did someone have to get to a place where they could visualize and create this?’

And I think that’s what missing with AI art. Sure, it can enable someone like me who has no skill with drawing to create something but it doesn’t get to the point of putting my actual imagination down. The repeated tries can only get to point of ‘close enough’.

For me, looking at a piece and then learning it’s AI art is basically realizing that I’m looking at a computer generated imitation of someone’s imagination. Except the imitation was created by describing the art instead of the imitator ever looking at it. An connection I could have felt with original human is watered down as to be non-existent.

That was excellent. Thanks for sharing… although I’m more into pottery, I’m sure some soulless shithead will want to “democratize” it with a janky robot hand controlled by a dumb algo.