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.
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.