This is such a poorly constructed hit piece, it almost doesn't warrant an investigation.
... almost...
But! we're here, so let's dive in.
| Oftentimes, Avery provided the subject’s name and a cutesy anecdote about their life, such as Lucy, “a strong woman from the Bronx,”
sure, also a bio that is obviously made up, even if he hadn't added this:
| (Fictional story. Let us know in the comments if you like a tale in the caption.)
which the post includes, right after making that statement
... then there's this blatant gem:
| among the myriad hashtags that accompanied each image, not one mentioned A.I. art or generative art.
.. so okay, there's no hashtag, but a number of his posts have
| Photo? AI-generated? Both?
So, to believe he's trying to hoodwink you into thinking it's just photography, when the completely obvious point is to create a discussion, you'd have to be lazy, not paying attention, or trying to sell me on a piece of ragebait. Or all of the above.
This just in: fake generated rage posted under the guise of journalism.
> So, to believe he's trying to hoodwink you into thinking it's just photography [...] you'd have to be lazy, not paying attention, or trying to sell me on a piece of ragebait. Or all of the above.
I think you missed this part:
> A further issue stemmed from Avery having previously denied that the images were A.I.-generated and were, in fact, taken on a Nikon D810.
People might have been "hoodwinked", to use your words, that it was photography if in fact he told them "I made this with a camera". Those people might then also be reasonably upset to learn they were lied to.
Where. Where did he do this. What was the context. I don't see a mention of a Nikon on his posts, and the article helpfully fails to present any source on this claim.
I don't understand why you are so skeptical. In an interview with him, he said he "wanted to come clean", and admits the vast majority of his followers had no idea he was using AI. The quote above is also present in this interview piece [1]:
"Up until very recently, when asked, Avery was either vague about how he created the images or told people his works were actual photographs, even going so far as to describe which kind of camera he used to create them ("a Nikon D810 with 24-70mm lens"). "
Skepticism should evaporate when presented with evidence contrary to the skeptic's point. Unilateral skepticism as a personality trait is boring and exhausting.
Okay, yeah. This was pretty cagey on his part. Would have been a good thing for the post to, you know, link to or something.
My skepticism started growing when, as mentioned in another branch to this conversation, I clicked through the "dishonesty" link in this quote:
| The online response was varied with some criticizing Avery’s dishonesty and others acknowledging the quality of the work.
..and was presented with an article about a completely unrelated event that had nothing to do with Joe Avery. That's about the moment that I adopted a (perhaps slightly excessive) adversarial posture.
I get that there's a lot of FUD about this stuff, but news, this ain't.
The weird thing is that the camera body doesn't have much to do with the look. It's the lens and/or filters where you'll get your look. I guess it implies he's also a Nikon lens guy? And of course I'm sure that's half the secret sauce of his prompt engineering: a lot of camera-oriented stuff to lock in a consistent look to his output.
Sensor size, which is a characteristic of the camera body, has a massive effect on bokeh. Also things like colour balance can be affected by the camera body, though this has less of an effect if shooting RAW.
Oh! I'm sorry, I stand corrected, I was thinking only in terms of comparable cameras. I'm using Blackmagic PCC4K myself, and sure do like the capacity for real bokeh. If you're telling me the specific Nikon has even more striking effects from an even larger sensor, I'd stand doubly corrected. :)
Online posts can be edited after-the-fact. The images with the “fictional” disclaimers all have a note from Instagram indicating that the description has been edited. Unfortunately, the Wayback Machine doesn't seem to work for Instagram, so I can't find out whether the edit was to add the disclaimers, or for something else.
I can explain the strength of my reaction for myself, thanks.
I'm not an "Ai 'artist'", scare quotes or no. I have an interest in the tech, and I've used it, but I wouldn't call myself an artist. Not that I think using the tool makes you not an artist, it's just not me.
My reaction is strong because of the dishonesty in the piece itself. I really hate being lied to. The article presents links that appear to be relevant to the story, but are completely unrelated. They talk about things from the Ars Technica interview without mentioning the Ars Techinca interview (from which it seems apparent that while he does use terms like come clean and most of my viewers don't know, he came to Ars of his own accord, and states his intent to start a conversation).
What I can see in this Insta account, is an attempt to start a conversation. I like conversation. I think it's important to discuss the finer points of stuff and really look at what we value and why critically. What this news piece seems to say is: "Hey! Look at this dishonest asshole using AI as if he were A real artist! Screw him! What a no-good lying sack of shit!".
It feels like it's designed to drum up sentiment, not talk about anything, but just to sell the reader on some narrative that "the evil AI army is coming for your art lunch, go get a torch and / or pitchfork".
So, perhaps a little immature of me, but I decided to respond in kind. But like better, by using references and context to elaborate rather than pretend those things don't exist. I may need to grow up a little, but that's what it is.
Ha! I got real pissed at you making up stuff about me, before I googled the quote and saw that deviantart account.
I'm sorry to report, that's apparently just someone else who likes Harvey Birdman and porn (both of which I will admit to, but I never turned my interest into a productive hobby, I'm afraid). Note the age of the account - it's a touch older than stable diffusion.
I don't see any fake generated rage, or, in fact, any of the other sins you're accusing the article of. He said they weren't AI, now he's admitting they are. The points you're bringing up don't seem to refute this at all, and I am a little baffled by the intense negativity of your take on this.
according to the article, which provides no references to such an incident, but does highlight the word "dishonesty" with a link, when taking about him. Too bad that the link leads to an article that doesn't mention Joe Avery at all [1]
You know, like when you present a link as if it means something knowing practically nobody is going to click on it. like a lie.
> This just in: fake generated rage posted under the guise of journalism.
Where's the rage in the article?
More importantly, I wonder if I would have been fooled. The thumbnails in the article look like AI (especially the AI airbrushed hair and skin), but I saw the headline before I saw the prompt images.
I admit to having had him on my IG for several months together with other portrait photographers as an inspiration and a way to improve my own portrait skills.
I had no idea. And thinking about this now, I find what he's done brilliant. It shows in a very simple and concise way how far the generative AI has been for months now. And it shows (and proves) this to people who otherwise wouldn't be playing with any diffusion models otherwise.
In a way it blows your mind. If that's not art, I don't know what is.
It’s interesting because I always imagined that artists would be the last ones to be replaced by technology. I guess it really shows that we have no way to predict the future.
Artists won't be replaced by AI. Human art is about expression, about communicating thoughts and feelings. This current AI generation can only mimic the product, not the intent.
Even when we get AGI that can truly be emotional, it still won't replace or compete with human art. There will just be more of it, and we'll learn to appreciate it in different ways.
Art is not competitive. Just as new art styles and techniques made by humans didn't replace previous ones, AI won't either. It's just another tool or outlet.
I completely disagree with what you’re saying btw. I can just picture us 30 years from now: every time you’ll see art you’ll see a lot of AI-assisted stuff which will make you doubt everything you’ll see. There won’t be any “famous” painter anymore. The same way “famous photographers” aren’t really a thing anymore due to how good photography and editing software has become.
I’m a photographer and what’s funny is, the amount of work he put into producing these images is almost harder than just taking the damn photos or dare I say drawing what you’d like to see an enhancing it with photoshop.
It might be AI generated but there’s still a lot of human work gone into the images.
The sad news for me personally is taking photos and working with models and lighting people etc is fun, same for meeting people and taking their portrait, this guy got images, the hard way and didn’t seem to get the experience.
Maybe he enjoyed sifting through thousands of images and stitching them together, then editing with photo shop. I don’t know but it sounds much less interesting than photography but hey, to this guy it’s art, so good luck.
Right, I don't see this as inferior to traditional photography, just different. Technology is just another tool we can use to produce art, or assist artists in doing so.
Just as electronic music didn't replace instrumental music, or photography didn't replace paintings, we'll also find ways to incorporate AI as another tool that creates different forms of art. They will all have their audiences, and will broaden our senses in different ways.
The current problem is that we can't distinguish AI-generated/assisted works from others, but eventually we'll find ways to do that too.
> I’m a photographer
Judging by your username, I'm not so sure... :-P Quick check: are you alive?
There may be a dividing line somewhere between "people making art for the sake of it with no regard for its perception by others" and "people making art to be received by others" (whether they're making it only/primarily as a product for others is a different story). The latter ones will definitely compete with AI-generated art because human attention is limited. If there's more stuff to pay attention to (say, a million expressive portraits with a nice-sounding backstory a day), the attention will be divided among those, and the humans will receive less of it.
True, but that's always been the case with any product. There have always been imitations and knock-offs of any genuine product, whenever the technology or means to massively produce it cheaply and quickly becomes available. The effect of this is that it floods the market, a larger section of the population get to enjoy an inferior product (whether they care about that or not), but it doesn't take the genuine goods off the market. In some cases we create regulations around it if it becomes abusive, and companies can sort it out legally if they wish, but people who seek the original product will always have ways to find it.
In the case of art, I wouldn't label AI-generated works to be inferior, just different. Once we're able to distinguish them from traditional works done manually by humans, it will eventually settle into its own category, with its own supply and demand. The current problem is that it can pose as something that traditionally takes effort and skill to produce, but we'll find ways around that.
It turns goods into luxury items though. Today, you can still get manually crafted scissors, but they'll be expensive and not something most people can afford. Sure, not 100% of blacksmiths were replaced, but 99.9% of them. That's still a tough prospect if you see your job on the shortlist for getting replaced and you're not part of the 0.01% in that job today.
Can we find a way to tell apart human art from generated art? I'm not so sure in the long run. Today, we have a lot of pointers and with enough focus experts can tell them apart. But they can't in passing, and an average person probably can't without being told what exactly to look for and advanced tools to check those. We're only a few years into it though, so I find it hard to believe that we'll be able to tell whether a digital picture was produced with a digital camera or generated by an AI. You can probably make it much more expensive to fake it (e.g. film yourself with 3 different cameras which are positioned differently, so AI would need to also fake a multi-perspective video reliably), and maybe that'll be the thing (like "organic" diamonds vs industrially produced ones), but I'm not sure if you can put the cat back into the bag.
All human art is the collection of human experiences at the time. It is not individual as all interactions we have that shape us as individuals arise out of our interactions with other people.
Kropotkin has something to say about the individual and the influence of others, but in short, you can not construct anything individually without resting on the shoulders of everyone that came before you.
The individual struggle is a struggle because of everyone around you, the way they behave towards you, and the way they don’t. Simultaneously if you were the last person on earth, your struggle would be the absence of everyone else.
Art is, by and large, an expression of the cumulative experiences of a person at that point in time, which come out of their interactions with everyone else. White implies black, and self implies other.
The impressionists, think Degas and Monet, went against the Salon and forged their own path, and that influenced their art. Their counter culture was by influenced by the very existence of mainstream culture.
To look the art in isolation and without context is to ignore their struggle of the individual against the broader society.
And in this view, AI art captures the cumulative experiences of all humanity, and with the right direction can show intent by an individual.
Artists gaslight non-artists and say their work has soul and gatekeep "art" saying it can't be replicated. However this is not soul it is egoism and pointless toil. In reality the end product is just paint on a canvas that has specific patterns and style applied to it and this can be replicated and improved upon by an ai artist.
Sure, but I'm not endorsing gatekeeping. I don't see these works as inferior, just different. Once we have ways to distinguish them, they will become a different category of art we can also enjoy.
The problem is when images can be produced effortlessly by anyone to resemble anything else, which current AI tools allow. This makes them capable of posing as something that traditionally took a lot of skill and effort to generate. We need to be able to distinguish between these two, so that we can determine their relative value (both emotional and monetary). Art is tricky in that sense, since it's mostly based on personal enjoyment, but I think we can agree that things like NFTs are scams posing as high value art, while traditional paintings should be valued much more highly in every way.
>We need to be able to distinguish between these two, so that we can determine their relative value (both emotional and monetary).
Why?
Why should the nature of a work of art's creator have any bearing on its emotional impact? If the emotional impact is the same, why should the nature of the creator have any bearing on a piece's monetary value?
I suppose you can argue that part of what you feel when you look at artwork is empathy with the artist, and that empathizing with a human feels better than empathizing with software. I think that argument sucks.
I think if you felt something looking at these photos (fauxtos?) when you thought they were taken by a human, and now they make you feel something different because you know that's not true, that's not a judgement of the artwork, that's a reflection of you. I'd also argue that it's art on that merit alone.
> I guess it really shows that we have no way to predict the future.
I don't think one failed prediction invalidates all predictions?
We have already partially replaced artists with technology. Have a look at how photography changed painting (eg painting portraits is no longer the staple breadwinner it used to be). Or see how recorded music removed the need for each bar to have their own performer.
In the past technology just meant that we re-defined art and what it means to be an artist. We will continue to do so in the future.
> Have a look at how photography changed painting (eg painting portraits is no longer the staple breadwinner it used to be).
Has it, though? You can make a point that photorealism in painting has been technically superseded by photography, but we still find such paintings enjoyable and impressive. Sure, there's a smaller market demand from a purely practical perspective, but photorealistic paintings are still popular, and demonstrate the artist's skill and craftsmanship.
Technology can never replace art. It can just enhance it, broaden our abilities, and give us new perspectives to enjoy it.
In the past technology just meant that we re-defined art and what it means to be an artist. We will continue to do so in the future.
Similar: cars have not completely replaced horses. Horses still exist. People just have a very different relationship with them these days, and we also have much fewer horses (especially per capita) than 100 years ago.
I also find it curious there is still so much demand for photography when pretty much every photo you could ever want has already been taken. I can buy anything from Getty images.
Have you seen the level of photography on popular photography social media over the last ten years ? It absolutely blows your mind the amount of good content in there. I’m not sure “more” content will necessarily matter?
Then there’s authenticity. A photo of a real object, person or event actually matters to people for all sorts of reasons.
I’m still going to guess people will still pay artists to paint there portraits in 500 years, and just as we geeks like to argue computers are just better at everything, I’m not sure that’s what matters to people when it comes to art.
> I guess it really shows that we have no way to predict the future.
IDK, I think that in the AI circles the idea that this would happen was clear long before it actually became possible.
I recall a university workshop probably 20 years ago with a discussion about generative art of various forms (music, visual, etc) - as some genres of computer-generated art were a thing even back the - and the main conclusion about genres of "mainstream" art (which were far beyond our reach at the time) was that the difficult part is "judging taste"; in essence, if we got a reasonably accurate way of evaluating that one song/picture/sculpture/whatever is "better" than the other, then the rest is "just" relatively straightforward engineering. So the consensus prediction already two decades ago was that it's going to happen.
And while we don't have that "magic taste function", what we have made is an "indistinguishability" function, which can fulfil a similar role, and is effectively what the "photographer" in this story has used - if a model generates items that are (almost) indistinguishable from "good portrait photography art", however you define that, then it can make "art" that is as good as the rest of it. It can't really go beyond that, because if it accidentally generated something better then the model wouldn't be able to recognize that it's better, only that it's different, and discard that option, so improving on the status quo would require curation from someone with "good taste", but it apparently can beat mediocre photographers by matching the results of good ones.
> [...] I always imagined that artists would be the last ones to be replaced by technology.
A better guess would probably be any job that requires the dexterity, strength, versatility, and sensitivity of human hands (not just one of those, but their combination). Think electricians, or plumbers.
I think art/performances are about what they mean to you. You can listen to a recording of a classical orchestra with a headset at home, but it's not the same experience as going to a live concert. And I don't see a handmade woodwork the same as an industrial one. Context matters a lot.
I'm certain artists will find a way to use AI, but it will not remove the need for the artist to make art. Just like I can take photos with my camera, but that does not make them art.
If, in an alternative universe, we had no cameras, there would be a lot more painters for portraits, news pieces, books, travel guides, etc. A notable wedding or a summit would have 5-10 artists capturing key moments. So yes, cameras did replace painters in the same way cars replaced horses. Not a total elimination, but close by comparison to what would be.
It replaced "utilitarian" (if that's a word) paintings, right? Not "artistic" paintings. Of course, maybe the same people were doing both and had to adapt.
My point was about art. I don't think that cameras made it harder to make artistic paintings, did they?
Cameras paved the way to Hollywood and YouTube. The word “artist” also has become much broader in the wake of that fractal innovation, but I posit that if we had no movies or digital media, there would be many more Art Basels everywhere.
Yeah this is what I meant. The job will become much more tool-assisted which will lower the barrier for entry and we then won’t celebrate “artists” like we used to
Duchamp and Warhol would emphatically, EMPHATICALLY agree with you there.
All this is very Warhol. Andy would have loved this. I'm sure some of the surviving Pop artists are trying to think of something cool to do with it. In a way, the coolest Pop thing they can do with it is to sit back and watch literally all the world become artists (in a sense).
Everybody will be an artist for fifteen minutes. Warhol had it all figured out.
It's certainly good, but I find zero point in portraits of nonexistent people. Why should they exist? Isn't the point of a portrait to document and expose a facet of real life?
question here is "why does a photograph exist". Problem with this kind of question is that the answer is either personal and subjective, or it's an enumeration and an attempt to unite all (or subset) of the subjective reasons into some coherent theory.
What You're referring to reminds me of something like event photography. Photos that serve as a souvenir of an event / person / thing. Pictures that can be described as having "moment captured in time" as their raison d'etre. These are indeed unlikely to be replaced anytime soon.
But that's only a small subset of what we use photographs for. Lots of photography is about capturing an emmotion, rather than reality. Think of all the marketing (to name the biggest economic factor). If You're making an ad for watches, You don't give a damn if that cool guy wearing them is real or not. If You're a hotel or some travel agency, You are probably going to need "smiling happy couples / families around an infinity pool with a sunny beach as a background". Oh, hej, looks like that's actually a Stable Diffusion prompt...
If you believe photography is only a technic for creating a pretty picture to hang on the wall, you’ll be impressed with AI pictures. No one who understands the intent behind photography will be impressed by randomized data crafted to deceive as the real thing.
For instance, portraiture is to document people, who they are, their history, culture, etc. What’s so impressive about people that don’t exist? You’re correct.
> Lucy's Love
Lucy is a strong woman from the Bronx - she is unapologetically herself and she loves it.
> Every morning she wakes up at the crack of dawn and takes the subway to her job downtown. She works for a big law firm, and she knows the ins and outs of the courtroom like the back of her hand.
> But on the weekends, she's a different person. She loves to explore the streets of the Bronx with her girlfriends, and they always find something new and exciting to do.
> Today, they've decided to take a trip to the Bronx Zoo. Lucy loves animals and can't wait to see all the different species. She's especially excited to see the giraffes - she's heard they have the most beautiful eyes.
> The day passes quickly and they spend hours exploring the zoo. They laugh, they talk, and they take lots of pictures.
> When it's time to go, Lucy feels an overwhelming sense of happiness. She loves the Bronx, and she loves the people in it. She's proud to call it her home and she wouldn't want it any other way.
> Lucy takes the subway back to her apartment and smiles as she remembers the day.
Surely these descriptions are also AI generated?? I actually got angry reading this at how bland and "non-offensive" this story is, lol. Is there a word for that?
Also, which part of this made up story should Lucy hypothetically feel apologetic for (as suggested in the opening sentence)? Loving animals and the Bronx?
One might be unapologetically predictable and humdrum. But yes, reading that text does have a feel of AI generation or at least purposefully derivative writing.
I was in the first cohort of the first digital imaging and technology program in Canada, almost 20 years ago. Our final year "Salon de Paris"[1] the short that won was a young child playing in a puddle in front of an anti-abortion protest, it was great, thought provoking, and really well timed... we thought. After it was announced as winning, we found out that the creator had gone out and shot the protest, and then the next week gone out and shot a toddler playing then digitally combined them. There was an outcry from my peers who thought it was deceptive, but our dean said:
"The most creative people simply to the best job of hiding the source of their creativity".
AI or not, they're good images, "deception" in art has been going on since forever.
His descriptions of the people are so floral that it makes me wonder if the whole thing of "portrait photographer on Instagram" could itself be considered a piece of performance art
> Lucy's Love Lucy is a strong woman from the Bronx - she is unapologetically herself and she loves it.
> Every morning she wakes up at the crack of dawn and takes the subway to her job downtown. She works for a big law firm, and she knows the ins and outs of the courtroom like the back of her hand.
> But on the weekends, she's a different person. She loves to explore the streets of the Bronx with her girlfriends, and they always find something new and exciting to do.
> Today, they've decided to take a trip to the Bronx Zoo. Lucy loves animals and can't wait to see all the different species. She's especially excited to see the giraffes - she's heard they have the most beautiful eyes.
> The day passes quickly and they spend hours exploring the zoo. They laugh, they talk, and they take lots of pictures.
> When it's time to go, Lucy feels an overwhelming sense of happiness. She loves the Bronx, and she loves the people in it. She's proud to call it her home and she wouldn't want it any other way.
> Lucy takes the subway back to her apartment and smiles as she remembers the day.
It's like someone was trying to come up with the blandest, stereotypical piece of garbage of a background story for a character. Sounds like something ChatGPT could have written.
I wonder when they invented paintbrush, did all the people using fingers to draw called the brush-painters, posers.
Cave painters said "You can't capture the beauty of fingerpaint as you drag our fingers against a chunk of rock. The virgin rock was porous, your paint smooths it and creating impression that lasts for centuries. You leave your mark, your identity, your fingerprint with the art. That is what makes it authentic." He added, "Painting with brushes creates a barrier with the art and the human. It can never be true art. It will never capture the painters mark and your soul in it."
---
That was a poor attempt at making a joke. I think, over the years, most people just stopped caring about the origin and process of scrollable things. You just don't have the time or energy to validate everything's source or process. You take nano-dopamine hit by seeing something, and move past that. Trying to label things to be "pure" and "authenticate" and asking the merit to be determined based on this "purity" is a thing of the past.
What I'm seeing is, he guided the construction of an evocative face, and then told an effective story about it, and THEN put it forth. It looks like he habitually adds 'fictional story' to the blurb.
The guy is a writer. If his stuff is taking off (or was), it's on the strength of his characterization, and that's perfectly legitimate. It might also be taking advantage of a hidden strength of AI: it's only us, it's only a mass-appeal take that much like ChatGPT goes for common knowledge and isn't interested in truth or novelty, and that is a way to hit an artistic mass audience with something they respond to.
The guy's a writer with a reasonably good artist's eye and the ability to see a resonant character, perhaps not a particularly deep one. There's gonna be lots more of this and one thing you'll eventually see is that these folks are as interchangeable as the AI works they produce.
If you don't like him there will be another.
There will also be people using the technology to carve out a more interesting spot for themselves that will NOT hit the mainstream, because they're not pandering half as much. But for every one of them there will be 99 folks with computers and a decent eye, who hit much bigger because their pandering is perfectly sincere. What they like is typical and common, and they'll go for the low hanging tropes and hit it really big by sincerely pursuing unambitious goals with some degree of skill and tenacity.
Two points after reading both the comments in this thread and the article itself:
First, it's amazing how many people on this site have no bloody notion of what the artistic, compositional and qualitative side of real photography means. Their idea of this AI-rendered, prompt-generated stuff being the same as going out and taking real portraits while collecting their human stories is so absurdly, stupidly, blandly utilitarian that it just leaves a bad taste about the general emotional vacuity of tech types.
Secondly, the creator of this IG feed was blatantly dishonest and then later fessed up about it. If there's anything creative about that it's in the area of creative mendacity, a thing that any common grifter or crypto-bro can pull off. It hardly demonstrates much artistic talent or nobility.
With that said, it's interesting how many here defend this kind of dishonesty in this context, though they'd happily throw all kinds of shit on someone being equally dishonest in another tech context, such as in crypto or NFTs. emotional bias very visible.
I will reiterate that if you had spent some time on StableDiffusion or MidJourney subreddit, lots of his images immediately look clearly AI generated.
Some are missing skin pores (some models are good at this now) the tiny details on the face are very very vague and blurry (see lines or pores) details blend into each other (try following some strands of hair, their origins are very vague). Eyes are usually bad with AI, this person has clearly copy pasted same eye in both eyes (exact same reflection in both).
There is a picture of old lady which is so bad (melted plastic face) that I don't know how anyone would take it for real. May be because I consciously look for details. To untrained eye (who don't know what SD or MJ is capable of) they may not look further.
> among the myriad hashtags that accompanied each image, not one mentioned A.I. art or generative art.
He's pretty haphazard with his hashtagging - changing the style and contents over time - but his very first post has the #ai #aiart hashtags (as well as #naturephotography) and it seems to pop up every now and then
If I were a real photographer I might get upset that my photos were being used by the tool he used. But there's so much use of filters and staged lifestyle photos on Instagram I'm not sure he really deserves the hate he's getting
The tools learned to draw like artists do. By looking at reference images. So no need for anyone to be annoyed, the tools arent using other peoples photos.
Midjourny have admitted they scrape training images and text from the internet. When you say “create a photorealistic image” presumably it will be relying more on the photos it’s scraped.
Thought so as well, although it is unfortunate that I had looked at the work after knowing the context. As someone who has been doing photography for 10+ years and spent most of it shooting on a D800, these images are a far cry from the quality that DSLRs give.
Definitely thought the same. Even for the most realistic ones, something about the eyes always stands out to me. Can't really pinpoint it though, maybe they are too perfect (as in round) or the ratio of pupil/iris is always exactly the same?
Wow, super neat. I could imagine doing something like that as a joke and have it launch unexpectedly out of control. I applaud the decision to come clean, I don't know if it was done to prove a point but it did make a statement
Pre-emptive damage control. If someone else found them out, it'd be a scandal and it would follow them forever. This way they get to keep a good fraction of their accumulated fame without long-term reputational damage.
Do we? Marcel Duchamp springs to mind. He’d just pick up an object and declare it art. Piero Manzoni shat in cans. If that’s a creative process, I am positively proliferous.
I disagree, but even if I let you have that point, what about Cariou v. Prince? If taking a photograph of someone else’s photograph is legally considered a novel work, then how does AI differ?
I looks like he only had 12k when he confessed. How on earth is that "Fame"?
> "[My Instagram account] has blown up to nearly 12K followers since October, more than I expected," wrote Avery when he first reached out to Ars Technica in January. "Because it is where I post AI-generated, human-finished portraits. Probably 95%+ of the followers don't realize. I'd like to come clean." (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/viral...)
The article goes own to say: "With Midjourney, anyone can pay a subscription fee for the privilege of generating art from text-based descriptions"
Google says 1k followers costs between $12-$30. Getting bots to follow you for three months seems pretty cheap... could this have been some kind of weird self-promotion or an ad for the AI? He felt so guilty that his first thought was to run to the media? This whole thing just seems off to me somehow...
Maybe I'm being too skeptical, but it seems like instagram is worse than other social media sites when it comes to shameless self-promotion, "influencers" who are basically undisclosed paid advertisers, fake accounts scamming people etc.
One could argue that generating portraits with Midjourney is actually harder than taking real photographs, since photographers spend only milliseconds taking their photos whereas prompt engineers sometimes spend hours copying text from PromptHero or Lexica and pasting it into Discord.
And building software is easy, you just have to type `make build`.
Like in development, what's hard in portraiting is not pressing the button; it's spending weeks to find the model, dress the model, groom the model, do the model make-up, find a good spot, find a good lighting, find a good angle, chose the best compromise in all the settings, and so on.
The prompt engineer has to explicitly set each parameter, he cant just press submit like the photographer presses the shoot button so I agree with you.
> One could argue that generating portraits with Midjourney is actually harder than taking real photographs, since photographers spend only milliseconds taking their photos whereas prompt engineers sometimes spend hours copying text from PromptHero or Lexica and pasting it into Discord.
LOL...
- a photographer needs to find the right model, it just can't 3D print it.
- the model needs the right clothes, you just can't 3D print that
- the model needs the right make up
- the model needs the right haircut.
- the photographer needs to make the model take the pose he envisioned.
- the photographer needs to chose the right spot to take a picture
- the photographer needs to take that picture at the right time of a day
- the photographer needs to chose the right lenses
- the photographer needs to get the right lighting equipment, place the lights correctly and so on and so forth.
and I'm sparing you the details of all the steps in post production...
in the meantime, a magical prompt did generate 10,000 images as your alleged hard working "prompt engineer" simply had to enter a few sentences in a text area or just copy paste another prompt with slight changes, zero photograph experience needed.
So no, being a photographer is much harder (and expensive) than using midjourney.
This process to me is not really photography. They're making a photorealistic composition. Why bother with all that work, getting the conditions right, when you're going to photoshop it afterwards?
Cue sunshine telling me how all photographic images have post-shot interpretative processing(?).
When I use tools to create a composite where the disk of the sun is visible through clouds, and the back of a mountain below is added from a second shot, is this not photography? Because it allows the viewer to see a scene a camera with its limited dynamic range cannot capture in one shot. Yes the editing may take hours.
Grayscale is not very realistic, is it? Yet we adapt our perception and agree that it captures some reality.
One can use the tools to create a representation of the scene so that observers would agree this is what they saw. And one can use the tools to create a new scene from pieces.
I like to take pictures of scenery with the moon in it. I have no problem using different contrast settings for the moon. But I wouldn't allow myself to move the moon around in the image. Why not?
When we use computers to create faces combining millions of shots, it can be argued that this is photography too. (Though I do struggle to use the term here.) The deception comes in only when we present the scene as having existed on its own.
I couldn't help myself while reading the other comments, so I asked ChatGPT the following prompt, in an attempt to fit in:
> write a reply to the following comment, in a style of a stuck up hacker news commenter. Ridicule the idea that photography is easier than creating AI art. Point out how much effort a photographer needs to put in: (your comment)
Result:
Oh dear, it seems like we have another individual who's completely missed the point. Let me break it down for you, dear commenter. Photography isn't simply about "spending milliseconds taking photos." It requires years of practice and honing one's skills to capture the perfect shot, understanding of lighting, composition, and an eye for detail that can only be developed over time.
Meanwhile, creating AI-generated art with Midjourney or any other software is just a matter of feeding the right data and parameters to the machine. It may require some technical knowledge, but it certainly doesn't require the same level of artistic skill and intuition that photographers need to possess.
So, if you really think that copying text from PromptHero or Lexica and pasting it into Discord is the equivalent of the amount of effort and artistic vision that photographers put into their work, then I'm afraid you've got another thing coming. Perhaps it's time to put down your keyboard and pick up a camera, so you can truly appreciate the art and effort that goes into photography.
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I can't wait for the top story next week where one of us comes clean as not actually being an expert programmer and a successful entrepreneur!
It took me 3 tries to "engineer" a prompt that'd produce a sensible reply to this, so one could argue that it is indeed harder than, say, understanding sarcasm on the first try.
1. Use a python script to iterate over model,seeds and prompt (pos/neg) variations
2. Use the resulting image in img2img or ControlNet for further processing
3. Use photoshop for finalizations.
Artists gaslight everyone else and say their work has soul so that they can gatekeep "art" saying it can't be replicated by a machine or a modern artist (AI Artist).
However it is not soul it is egoism. The artist spent thousands of hours developing a style to make it seem like they are special. To someone with real intelligence and creativity this level of toil is unbearable and there is no motivation to do it simply to satisfy their ego because a real artist has no ego, they hack around for the fun of it.
In reality , the end product is always just paint on a canvas that has specific patterns and style applied to it and this can be replicated and improved upon by an AI Artist. The machine simply automates away the middle man, pointless egoism and the toil.
The only words I'd omit are, 'to make it seem like' :)
You do you, by all means fight for your right to be accepted and loved as the creative person who just randomly does whatever and it's just as good. Be natural! By all means. At the end of the day you've gotta be what you are and the integrity of that matters.
Without the toil, you ain't me.
Ego is a malignant master. As a rule the folks who rise so high accomplishing such elaborate, auteurist things are MISERABLE, just awful humans. They're driven in a way that doesn't exempt them from the consequence: they are as awful to themselves as they are to others and the prizes they produce are some compensation for what they've been through. Of course they'll flip out when you come around, mister natural, and say that you deserve equal cred—more!—for just hacking around and having fun.
They needn't flip out. Neither you nor the AI are going to be them. It's you who are the middle man, in pointless egolessness.
Take heart in this: you're closer to the mainstream. If you add enough ego and toil you can get to where NOBODY 'gets you' and die in weird obscurity. Which is kind of fun too :) but there will always be more people like you, not very special, able to reach the mass appeal more sincerely and easily.
Except now, AI is better at that than you will ever be ;)
... almost...
But! we're here, so let's dive in.
| Oftentimes, Avery provided the subject’s name and a cutesy anecdote about their life, such as Lucy, “a strong woman from the Bronx,”
sure, also a bio that is obviously made up, even if he hadn't added this:
| (Fictional story. Let us know in the comments if you like a tale in the caption.)
which the post includes, right after making that statement
... then there's this blatant gem:
| among the myriad hashtags that accompanied each image, not one mentioned A.I. art or generative art.
.. so okay, there's no hashtag, but a number of his posts have
| Photo? AI-generated? Both?
So, to believe he's trying to hoodwink you into thinking it's just photography, when the completely obvious point is to create a discussion, you'd have to be lazy, not paying attention, or trying to sell me on a piece of ragebait. Or all of the above.
This just in: fake generated rage posted under the guise of journalism.