that's a pretty useless definition, since it encompasses any and all physical, reasonably solid* objects

*solid enough not to spontaneously vacate the pedestal it's put on

Absolutely not. Be this a conservative opinion, i dont care. In my humble opinion art MUST be human.

I think it's more of a tool than art in itself, though I lack the words to properly explain why I feel this way. I don't mind it existing per se, and actually find it very cool that it suddenly makes art much more accessible to people who might never had the chance or time to learn. With this said, I also fully understand and sympathize with people who suddenly feel like skills they have invested a good deal of their lives to perfecting might suddenly become obsolete.

All of that taken into consideration, I don't think that AI will fully displace human art, merely because people will still want to express themselves in a myriad other ways. It's crazy that this needs to be said, but yeah. Also, as someone who has worked alongside visual artists, there's an entire aspect to creative processes which is dependent on the exchange of ideas with another person, something you simply don't have with these technologies, and in that sense they are indeed a poor replacement for people. Sure, you can just sit in front of the computer and make the same input a thousand times until you get it exactly right, but I wager that you could actually do that much faster and in a much more engaging way with a fellow artist who you simply happen to vibe similarly to.

Honestly, I think art is anything made with a genuine intent, whatever that intent may be (to pass a message, to be interpreted differently, to express emotions, to be aesthetically pleasant or visually uncomfortable, etc). And the AI is a tool like anything else, the way it works is similar to photomanipulation, collage and editing (which can result in some really cool stuff that I am super into), however due to the ease of use, AI generated artwork can be made with the sole purpose of being a cashgrab and in some less than marvelous examples blatant plagiarism, which can get messy, since more often than not, the person messing around with the AI tools will not be aware of it, which wouldn't happen with collage, photomanipulation or editing, since in those cases the person behind them knows about the sources, as they went after those by themselves, so you can't get extremely similar stuff by accident.

I think it's completely fine to use these AI tools, they can be fun and helpful, but I don't believe they will ever replace traditional artists, as I mentioned at the beginning, art is made with intent, and the existence of AI generated artwork won't conflict with human desire to use their skills and creativity to do whatever they want. The only reason there's a rather controversial aura surrounding this is due to the fact that during these recent few months a considerable amount of people wanted to charge for AI generated artwork as if it was made by them, with the flimsy excuse that it takes time and effort to get the results you want by using the right tags. There was a lot of sensationalism made regarding these tools, with lots of talks about how artists no longer will have careers, or how they're no longer necessary or whatever, usual bombastic statements full of bullshit. Essentially, these fairly minor (but loud and hard to ignore due to the buzz surrounding them) occurrences, coupled with a few people being condescending to regular artists, the attempts of a few people try to use it as a get rick quick scheme and the still fresh (and still ongoing, although less prominent) NFT crap that started a few years ago, basically rubbed a lot of people the wrong way and gave them a negative impression of the whole idea.

But when this stuff started to surface, before it had such a big exposure, before all these controversies, people thought it was pretty neat. It was mostly used for silly shitposts and very inconsequential things. You had people who were just playing around with it, or using it to create personal use things that they couldn't due to their lack of artistic ability. And I believe once these controversies die out (they're kinda dying slowly already), things will return more or less to this same state. These AI tools are indeed pretty fun to mess around with, pretty fascinating from a technological standpoint, and also quite useful for a lot of situations. In an example that is relatable to this site, if you have a musical project (or any personal project for that matter) and you need some kind of art, you can get nice image for a cover art, or whatever else. It's just so hand, but it's a complementary thing, it will never replace human art, it will never make it obsolete.

I don't think it's about replacement, these tools are just an alternative. I am also using AI tools for cover art and lyrics. There are also some advantages, you can generate a cover in a second and it's free. Not to say that these tools are better than most of the humans today and will get even better.
By definition, "art" is a human activity, so in this sense, it's hard to say it's an art. But who cares? Or maybe we should change the definition.

This seems topical for this thread... recently we've noticed an uptick in clearly AI-generated cover art for new releases/bands on MA, so I decided to start a list: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13pr ... sp=sharing

Feel free to single out purdy/ugly/dumb/weird stuff, discuss or add new instances you might come across on the site.

Art to me is anything created solely for aesthetic purposes, period. I've followed this debate on other sites and the most common arguments against AI art seem to be that 1) it will devaluate human created art and ruin an already weak profession 2) artificial neural nets trained on large datasets are essentially making stuff out of stuff it doesn't give proper attribution to and 3) It's just not art because it's not human made. 1 and 2 are moreso problems with capitalism and its co-option of art as property, the death of which is mostly a good thing. Mostly because it'll definitely suck when AI tools inevitably replace some fields of work and moves the average wagie closer to the less creative labours, but it'll also be a good thing in the sense that it will hasten the shift of art into a practice of pure performance, ditching profit incentives and other afterthoughts that us metalheads know better than most tend to be detrimental to creative quality.

Hating it because it's passionless is really a pretty esoteric argument, and in the early stage of the AI art revolution it's not even technically true. Most of what people are complaining about, AI ripping off trademark styles etc, fails to recognise that the result of AI used in such a way will always be an amalgam. The AI didn't create anything new, it just rearranged an existing style/passion based on a prompt. Sooner or later though, we'll have ANNs trained on AI art to a point where human passions will be gone, and what remains will instead reveal the unique workings of the creator network in question, and that'll be true AI art. But we ain't there yet, and even when we are I wont mind it. I also think it's just a matter of time before natural language processing catches up and is able to generate truly non-artificial looking stuff, even with very specific prompts.


Some of these are very cool. That Count Vornok album is so obviously generated but really catches the eye nonetheless!

So does that mean songs and other creations about societal issues/war aren't art, but rather propaganda? Change the lyrics of an anti-war song to be about how colourful jelly beans are and it can become art again!

What AI art generator do you recommend?

On the question of AI-generated art: Sure, I think it's art. As has been said by many throughout this thread, the AI itself would require a creator or intelligent user; that person would play the role of artist (just as a camera operator could be an artistic photographer); anything having an artist is art.



"Solely" does seem out of place there. But I figure what's intended would be something like: Art with a social/political/etc. message is indeed art, but what makes it art is not its having the message it has; what makes it art is something else entirely, namely (firelord_ says) its "aesthetic purposes," and nothing else. A message doesn't render a work artistic any more than a picture frame renders something a picture. I think that's the idea.

But then "aesthetic purpose" probably needs to be clarified. "Art is whatever has aesthetic purpose" seems almost circular.

Some half-baked suggestions on the meaning of "aesthetic" (spoiler-tagged to reduce clutter):

Stable Diffusion. Better quality images than Dall-E and the standalone version is completely uncensored if you can wrap your head around the headache of downloading it and setting it up to run locally on your computer. I imagine it would be easier if you were a programmer, because standalone releases of these types of things are usually packaged for local running in very inconvenient ways.

Hopping in to say that I hate the new AI portrait generator app. Not only do people give up their personal pictures without reading the privacy policy, but there have been cases of art being stolen from artists and altered by the AI (the trace of the artist's signature still visible as an artifact). I understand getting a drawn portrait of oneself is fun and seems harmless (not to mention a virtually free way to stroke one's ego since most portraits are hotter than the actual person), but paying an artist to do so, while costly, is more beneficial to both the individual and the person making the commission.

Solely is indeed too restrictive, I was high on painkillers and didn't think it through properly. "Primarily for aesthetic purposes" would be a better way of putting it, even if I feel like any other purpose than pure creativity is going to risk the integrity of the artist. Good art can definitely be both art and propaganda at the same time, it's the passion behind its creation that matters

MidJourney's the best one I've found to date, since this is what it gave me when I tried to reproduce the cover to Master Of Puppets:



Cool, huh?

^ Eh that can't touch the original at all.

No big moral panic or anything on my end, but I can't really say any of this AI art looks all that impressive. There's a level of sterility.

Plus the idea that people are actually paying real money for what's essentially glorified snapchat filters is simultaneously hilarious, depressing, and downright bizarre.

One of my (computer science) students gave a talk on this today. He reckons that AI art can't replace human art because it makes too many obvious and clunky mistakes (AI = Artificial Idiot according to him), such as leaving signatures on imitated drawings, making a hand with 6 fingers, etc. But he supposed that AI art would allow artists to cut out some of their mindless and repetitive work, just as it would in other industries. For instance, instead of drawing several sketches and then filling them out after client/manager/artist has selected one, they could let AI generate a range of samples and then work on the best one. Or the artist could "correct" AI attempts to save them time in the initial stages of a drawing.

He also argued that artists may be able to synthesize "non-human" AI art with their own art by teaching the AI to draw by showing it only examples from their own portfolio, thus allowing the AI to draw in the style of a particular artist. (This has obviously already happened, but in his example it's a tool for the artist in question, not other imitators.) He made this comment in response to a question about whether AI art will always come up against copyright problems.

tl;dr My computer science student says that when AI works with a human creator, the resulting art is more real than randomly generated AI art. He did not particularly evaluate the question "what is art?"

I'd say that in its current state, AI art is more like a tool or medium that is approaching human art, but not quite there yet. I follow the painter Peter Mohrbacher (the guy behind Blind Guardian's The God Machine cover and two of Fallujah's covers) pretty closely, who recently has been experimenting with AI-generated images. He fed the AI his previous works so it would emulate his style, it produced some structures, figures, and color schemes that he liked, then he painted the whole thing over to correct the uncanny mistakes make it more to his liking. In this sense AI art is very much a tool to help the human artist streamline the process like other posters pointed out, but in the end it is still the artist who determines what the final result will be.

When the process is less intentional and you're just messing around with input keys, the resulting AI-generated images are art in the sense that aesthetic images are art. For me, "true" art is a means of expression where all or most of the process involves conscious, intentional decision-making that work toward that expression. People choose this specific word, chord progression, color, or movement to serve a particular purpose, convey a specific message, or evoke a certain feeling. That's not to say that everything in art is a deliberate choice and mistakes don't happen; but when artists do notice the mistake, they have the choice to correct it or keep it with whatever rationalization, turning it into a deliberate choice.

I feel like this sense of intentionality in expression is what's missing from a lot of AI art, but mostly because the AI can't demonstrate to us why it does so and so the same way a human artist can. So for now AI-generated art is a great tool for artists and can be appreciated on its own aesthetically, but it doesn't have the quality that makes it the same as human-created art for me.

Yes. AI is definitely making art.

It's funny because everyone expected AI to replace low-level workers like truckers first, but instead it's the artists that will be useless in the near future. I predict that within our lifetimes no one will use human artists for commercial work ever. Screencap this.

From the perspective of focusing on the product - yes. There is no fundamental difference between AI generated art, including how it is used and framed. A band may choose such art for their upcoming album, and it wouldn't make a difference to what the picture is.

From the perspective of the process of making it - no. The crucial thing here is that the artistic process is human-centered; coffee machines (no fundamental difference here with AI) don't make art, can't make art. It's an exclusively human faculty, and there can be no mystical transfer of it to humanity's tools (math doesn't become creative, people using it do).

The thing is that what I wrote above isn't set in stone (there is no underlying true factual assertion there obviating the possibility of change); the way we look at things can change, and it just may be that we are living through a process of such change (my view on "intelligence" in AI is that the concept of intelligence effectively underwent such a change; what didn't change is that there will be no ground for ethical dilemmas like the status of androids depicted in fiction, no matter the uncanny valley). The materials are there - the huge number of works of art already made that can be combined and recombined in different ways, and at some point AI may be recombining prior material made by other AI.

Yay, let's celebrate the commercial success of eliminating human agency. Hopefully we can streamline stuff even further, in more and more fields. No need to waste resources on low-level...things anyway.


It cannot ever "get there".

Those are really cool, I think. Nice colours, love the aesthetic.

My opinion on the topic is that AI-generated art is, in fact, "real art." I find much of the content that comes out of these experiments to be interesting and fun, sometimes quite majestic and thought-provoking.
However, the AI is the actual artist (imo), whereas the human involved just gives the basic ideas necessary for each piece to be created. As such, the humans who prompt these creations shouldn't be taking credit for the pieces of art which result.

It's kind of like comissioning a painting by a human artist, telling them what you'd like to see in the finished piece, and then taking credit for the whole thing simply because you gave the parameters.

I'm not sure if anyone prompting these pieces should be proftting off them. If it were a human artist, they'd be involved in a lawsuit probably, for taking credit for another artist's work. Or, am I wrong?

I think, since the AI is a robot, people get the idea that it's okay to claim credit, since the AI won't bother fighting over it. Once AI learns how to call a lawyer though, wach out.

As much as I absolutely love the stuff he posts, it's not actually a bot. He's a comedian that just writes that stuff. It's hilarious, but don't want anyone thinking it's actually a bot.

There's a lot of factors with this. I do feel it's perfectly valid at this time to ban them from sales at comic cons because in most cases the AI being used is taking and combining art from other artists, which can be problematic for a number of reasons. So if you take a photo that isn't yours and run in through a filter, it's not suddenly your. I don't have an issue with working off a photo for inspiration or something like that, but in general I feel if you didn't design an AI program and you're feeding it someone else's art, then you can't really claim it's now your art. If that makes sense.

I don't know if I even knew that lol, so I appreciate the clarification

You just destroyed all my hopes and expectations for 2023. My day is ruined.

LMFAO! It's inevitable.
Who says that the events depicted in the Battlestar Galactica reboot didn't actually happen!!?
"All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again."

You want to see a TV series that is worth every second of your time, then this is it. Most fascinating is that the humans are poly-theists and their AI creation - the Cylon - eventually arrive at the conclusion of being mono-theists.

Lawyers will be AI in the near future. Think about it. They will have all the legal texts, all the previous cases, and there will be no mitigating factors.

Spooky! Also unlikely, I'm guessing. Lawyers using AI, sure, for the purposes you suggest. But lawyers being AI?

Rambling ahead:

The law, ideally, evolves alongside people's prevailing moral outlook. And moral reasoning can be a messy, shifty, idiosyncratic sort of business, often more an art than a science. From my (very amateurish) point of view, I doubt that AI will be able to mimic humans' moral reasoning - unless it's reduced to something like an abstract utility calculus, which is weird to think about. (Think of any "trolley problem": Do you actively cause X deaths when the only alternative is to passively allow X+20 deaths? Pretty much anyone would have deep misgivings with the first option, and many would decide against it on that account, but good luck capturing those in a logical algorithm.) (Or more mundanely, think of the police officer who casually makes a "judgment call" that it isn't worth pulling over the driver going 4 mph over the speed limit in some very light afternoon traffic. I'm not at all sure how a machine could do something like that, rather than simply register the violation and prescribe a penalty.)

I'm also put in mind of an argument I recently witnessed between a (purportedly) left-leaning lawyer and some LGBT allies: The lawyer insisted, quite "unfeelingly" IMO, that a religiously homophobic businessperson, who happened to be in the business of designing online wedding announcements, was well within her First Amendment rights in refusing to serve a same-sex couple.

The lawyer was met with all kinds of counterarguments to the effect that he was siding with the bullies rather than the bullied; that this would be a step backwards from LGBT equality, setting precedent for more sweeping denials of their rights; that analogous reasoning could equally undermine the status of interracial couples, etc. Nonetheless, "DOES NOT COMPUTE." And for all I know (next to nothing in this case), the lawyer may have had a competently reasoned case, quite consistent with Constitutional law - I'm sure his arguments would be met with approval by the "originalists" on the Supreme Court, who seem content to ignore the evolving needs and values of the larger culture and claim to "neutrally" (indeed almost mechanically) apply the law "as conceived by the Founders"; AI might be a desirable expedient from their point of view!

Anyway...even if AI somehow can mimic moral reasoning as practiced by humans, the thought of it makes me uneasy.

Sorry!

Perhaps this from last week will restore some expectations about 2023!

https://nofilmschool.com/2022/12/filmma ... some-sense

Imagine if there was software that could generate an entire song just by typing "Candlemass-influenced doom metal about being killed by a goat." I highly doubt an "artist" who released an entire album made with such software wouldn't be permitted on the archives.

Whether it's "real" art or not, it's still sad to see a lot of people celebrating the idea of artists potentially being replaced. Most artists aren't living in ivory towers like some apparently think they do. They're just regular joes trying to earn a living like the rest of us. The people who'll benefit the most are corporations, because the average person can't tell good art from crap.

It's fun to play around with, but I won't support commercial uses of it for anything beyond stuff like company logos. Doesn't help that a lot of its biggest supporters seem to be the worst kind of Musk-worshipping tech bros, which makes me even less inclined to support it despite being involved AI stuff since GPT-2.

I don't think so because it's an inclusive definition that makes allowance for things like "found objects" / "readymades". As in the example of the 'framed hammer' I posted above, the crucial aspect is that somebody declares an item art. So, yes, any object or item can potentially be art if somebody intends it to be art (a shoe or a naked body can be enjoyed for their aesthetic qualities [beautiful / ugly] but they're not automatically art), while the act of 'declaring, intending and framing' is a purely human activity and might satisfy people who are looking for that "human touch".

(The object doesn't need to be solid btw. You can also put e.g. texts or snippets of sound on a figurative pedestal or in a figurative frame, i.e., for example, when somebody says: "Listen, this is my new song" you know you're in for that ancient monster called "art".)

This is so good. Holy shit.

no