that’s art
what the fuck is happening
Hollup, pause.
Does writing the code or feeding the AI the prerequisite information not count as the same caliber of labor as collecting the paint and putting it to canvas? What makes the AI any less of a tool than the brush or a camera?
Literally nothing.
Every new technology is accused of being an artistic “Cheat’ and in every case after the dust settles the cheat is revealed to be a technique. Rembrandt used a camera obscura.
The complaint of push-button, instant, thoughtless nature of the work is a parody of the actual process, which for anything worthwhile is lengthy, difficult, and involves the human hand and vision at every stage of the process. And the work of those just playing with the system for fun have more artistic value than the works of a Roy Lichtenstein,or CIA stooges like Pollock.
The artist above used midjourney, the same AI engine I use, and I can tell you that the process for creating something of the sort he had is not a matter of typing in a single generative phrase and grabbing the first result.
Promptcraft is the term the MJ community uses for the art of constructing a prompt. This is far more art than science, because the AI’s “understanding” of language is as fuzzy as its “understanding” of everything else. An understanding of what the AI understands and misunderstands is needed to get what you want.
Then, once the AI does an initial generation comes the lengthy process of selecting the results that best match your vision. This process does not happen automatically, the artist must pick their options, re-roll ones that don’t work until a lump of semi-final results are compiled.
Even then, even under the most advanced models, additional work is always needed to polish something to a final state. The anatomical coherence (even in that limited, brush-strokey abstracted way) in that picture is not something you can easily get out of v3, which tells me this was either iterated a lot, or photoshop was heavily used in its completion. Probably the latter.
We’ve already decided that photography is art. Photography is the act of artistic selection. You choose your moment and capture it. Maybe you set up the scene. Maybe you massage it in the darkroom (or more likely, photoshop). The AI artist is doing the same.
We know that writing is an art, describing things in a way to evoke a visual in another is art. That’s a part of the process. Declaring something as art is an artistic act that makes a non-art thing art, as demonstrated by Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ And even telling someone else what to do and having them make it in a factory apparently is art, reference Andy Warhol’s whole “deal”
Does AI artwork drop the technical skill barrier for creation of works with certain aesthetic qualities? Yes, very much so. In doing so it is opening people up to expressing themselves in ways not before possible, and in ways that their life circumstances often make impossible. The need to express artistically is human universal, but not everyone has the opportunity to spend the years of dedicated time to honing the skills to do that adequately.
I’m starting to get pain in my finger joints as the family arthritis kicks in, for instance. It’s made drawing very, very difficult. But my ideas are still sharp. My concepts are good. And now even when my hands are agony, or my spoons are low, my work doesn’t have to crawl to a stop.
Is the tech perfect? No. Is it going to be misused? Yes. But that’s been true of photoshop, everyone having a camcorder in their phone, the photocopier, the camera itself… The list goes on. None of those were an artistic apocalypse, and I don’t think this is either.
