> In the modern art interpretation artists will not lose to SD. SD will enable them to do different things.
Indeed. There was a time in the past ages in which one had to wait for a certain dye to arrive in your local merchant, take it and mix it with another dye in order to be able to paint a color that you need painted in your painting. They also waited and scoured for brushes and other supplies.
Those tools and supplies becoming available widespread and easy did not reduce the quality of art. It made it easier to do art. Artists gained more time to express what they exactly had in mind rather than going through the mundanities of having to deal with tools and supplies.
Computers have done the same. A lot of the art that can be done through computers these days, including the much-underappreciated art of creating virtual worlds and tales in computer games, would be dreams for the artists of earlier ages.
AI won't be any different.
The artists now will be able to say "Put a distant view of Shangri-La, half visible behind a misty mountain during sunset, as the traveler gazes at it and wonders when he will finally arrive there". And they will have it.
Now, from this point on it gets interesting: Notice that how it was extremely easy for the artist to get a scene that conveys a particular emotion created. What was difficult now, and what was the final work of art in the earlier times, is now just a simple statement. Everything got much simpler.
Meaning that, the artist will be able to convey more complex emotions and situations, creating more refined art.
That's what happens when we give more tools to people and make a given level of doing anything simpler: People start building more advanced stuff, and the complexity moves to the newly emerging level. Like in software. Will be the same in art.
This reminds me of the early days of the synthesizer. Oh, no. Music is over. First it was novel and interesting, then it was poorly done and cliche and then the artists did what they do, they turned it into something new and fresh and then it was awesome. Same story, new tech. I'm just keeping my eye out for the Stevie Wonder of SD.
> The artists now will be able to say "Put a distant view of Shangri-La, half visible behind a misty mountain during sunset, as the traveler gazes at it and wonders when he will finally arrive there". And they will have it.
Not so fast. To me this is the part that people are glossing over a bit too quickly in those discussions.
How does the person making this know it's actually good art? How do they pick between the 40,000,000 variations of that composition they're capable of generating?
Wouldn't they have to be familiar with principles of composition, color, dynamics, and so on?
As it becomes easier to generate the art, it becomes more important to be capable of differentiating it (except for purely "industrial" production where "good enough" will do).
And people will need to refine their taste to extreme levels to get there.
It's the same with poetry. What's the AI worth if it's supposed to generate Shakespeare-level writing, but no one is capable of assessing its quality?
Does it mean art essentially becomes a purely curation, taste-based endeavor?
> How does the person making this know it's actually good art?
How did Van Gogh know he was making good art when he cut off his ear...
> Wouldn't they have to be familiar with principles of composition, color, dynamics, and so on?
It really doesn't feel like art is something that can be formulated and constrained as such. And it never was. All of those are techniques to effect certain results to convey the emotion or the idea. If the computer already does the technique part, what's left to the artist is to imagine, feel and express.
> As it becomes easier to generate the art, it becomes more important to be capable of differentiating it (except for purely "industrial" production where "good enough" will do).
And you can be sure that people will differentiate themselves. Like how they did in every age before. Moreover, those who had a talent for art, but not a talent for all the techniques and the tricks that goes into making that art happen, will now start making art.
> What's the AI worth if it's supposed to generate Shakespeare-level writing, but no one is capable of assessing its quality?
If an AI is generating Shakespeare-level writing, and no one is capable of assessing its quality, then that's Shakespeare-level writing and its good.
Let's face it: Most of the 'high quality' criteria comes from our beautification and exaggeration of the arts of the past. There isn't any objective formula that is used to assess the 'quality' of any art.
If art creates thoughts and emotions in you, its good art.
> How did Van Gogh know he was making good art when he cut off his ear...
I wouldn't know, but I'm not sure what that point illustrates?
I'm fairly sure Van Gogh had a pretty good idea how his art was different/stood out from what existed, and could articulate why he did it a certain why (i.e. why it was good, to him at least). I'm far less certain about some random person with no art background typing a prompt being capable of the same analysis/understanding (that's also why 99% of AI art so far is transparently derivative).
To be clear — my point isn't that AI-art is bad or whatever. It's that it could displace/change the nature of what making art is about, and that incidentally it might require new skills or more extreme versions of existing skills, making the fear of the disappearance of "artists" overblown (and as a corollary making the idea that anyone can become capable of creating meaningful art exaggerated as well).
> It really doesn't feel like art is something that can be formulated and constrained as such. And it never was. All of those are techniques to effect certain results to convey the emotion or the idea. If the computer already does the technique part, what's left to the artist is to imagine, feel and express.
Right, but "expression" isn't something trivial, that's the point. If the prompt is "Harbor scene", there's a billion ways to realize that. Someone would presumably have to have the vocabulary/knowledge to navigate that space and produce something worthwhile in the end.
There's probably something to be said about the amount of control the artist gets on the output as well. The more we try to reintroduce post-hoc adjustments to e.g. an AI-generated image, the more we make "new art" look like "old art" (i.e. requires significant specific technical knowledge, albeit with different tools that paint and brushes).
Maybe it hits a balance, maybe it just goes back to the same situation as before.
> And you can be sure that people will differentiate themselves. Like how they did in every age before. Moreover, those who had a talent for art, but not a talent for all the techniques and the tricks that goes into making that art happen, will now start making art.
Yup, that's another important point. AI just becomes the new normal. But it will take skills to stand out given that new tool set. AI generated "art" will be seen the same way we see children doodles.
> If an AI is generating Shakespeare-level writing, and no one is capable of assessing its quality, then that's Shakespeare-level writing and its good.
Eh, disagree. If people had no knowledge of what poetry existed in the past or no understanding of it (think average college freshman essay), it certainly wouldn't follow that AI-generated crappy nursery rhymes would become Shakespeare-level poetry.
> Let's face it: Most of the 'high quality' criteria comes from our beautification and exaggeration of the arts of the past. There isn't any objective formula that is used to assess the 'quality' of any art.
That's why I made the point about curation.
If there's no "objective" quality to art, it's entirely narrative-based, whether on a past canon, or some sort of manifesto/principles something should stick to (think of modern art movements).
The job becomes completely different — it's not about the technical details of the work itself, but about how it's inserted in a larger cultural phenomenon ascribing certain values to art itself or certain principles in particular.
> If art creates thoughts and emotions in you, its good art.
To the person creating it, maybe, but then we're definitely talking about something different than ("high") art the way it's been talked about in academic discourse for the past ~2500 y. There has so be at least a common perception about the value of a piece of art for it to be considered as such.
Indeed. There was a time in the past ages in which one had to wait for a certain dye to arrive in your local merchant, take it and mix it with another dye in order to be able to paint a color that you need painted in your painting. They also waited and scoured for brushes and other supplies.
Those tools and supplies becoming available widespread and easy did not reduce the quality of art. It made it easier to do art. Artists gained more time to express what they exactly had in mind rather than going through the mundanities of having to deal with tools and supplies.
Computers have done the same. A lot of the art that can be done through computers these days, including the much-underappreciated art of creating virtual worlds and tales in computer games, would be dreams for the artists of earlier ages.
AI won't be any different.
The artists now will be able to say "Put a distant view of Shangri-La, half visible behind a misty mountain during sunset, as the traveler gazes at it and wonders when he will finally arrive there". And they will have it.
Now, from this point on it gets interesting: Notice that how it was extremely easy for the artist to get a scene that conveys a particular emotion created. What was difficult now, and what was the final work of art in the earlier times, is now just a simple statement. Everything got much simpler.
Meaning that, the artist will be able to convey more complex emotions and situations, creating more refined art.
That's what happens when we give more tools to people and make a given level of doing anything simpler: People start building more advanced stuff, and the complexity moves to the newly emerging level. Like in software. Will be the same in art.