Comment by kwhitefoot
3 years ago
Reading the comments it seems that everyone assumes that art is always and only presented as pixels on a screen. Whereas most of the art in my house is hand painted on canvas and wood, hand embroidered, hand knitted, hand woven, hand thrown and decorated pottery. One picture was hammered out of a sheet of pewter.
One of my favourite places is the Henie-Onstadt Art Centre sculpture park, another is Vigelands Anlegg in Oslo, no pixels in either place.
So why does everyone seem to think that art is only flat, lit, pixels on a flat surface?
I think the exact same thing, obviously because we're on hacker news where most people seem to be hoping they can spend their days prompting machines for art so they can replace "artists" and save some money.
It's actually funny when I think about it because most people wouldn't know what image to use and how to use it even when it was generated for them, there's even a skill in selecting art.
You could argue enough good photos have already been taken that all practically all photographers should have already been made redundant since the year 2000, we still have photographers.
I think if people are ignoring AI's limitations, it's more out of fear that programming is next than having something to gain. I doubt having the money/labour that's currently used creating art for something else would help me in a noticeable way:
-the money would just trickle up
-not that much money is spent on it anyway
-world becomes more depressing, nothing you look at had any effort put into it, no-one had to believe in an advert on any level, instead it's the output of a machine optimised to trick you (as one of a shrinking number of people with any agency) to spend and therefore make the machine stronger.
-artists/potential future artists decide to learn to code instead?
That reminds me of Ira Glass' quote about taste: artists know it when they see it.
Or why it's a mystery some folks prefer tabs vs spaces, or recoil from what they consider shoddy code.
Somewhere in the discipline of point, line, and perspective, in the composition of shapes and their organization, is the artifact of amalgamated neurons, to be observed by yet another consciousness.
I wonder if AI art will just help generate more gacha games. And one may wonder, of the limited time left on this planet, what really could we spend it on?
The library of every book contains no meaningful work in the search. The space of all generated art is oblivion.
Because that's what 99% of the people employed for their artistic skills are doing.
I doubt AI will have much effect on the tiny number of people who can make a living by producing art to hang up in your house. It's the people doing illustrations for magazines/websites/packaging/etc. who are fucked in the medium/long term.
People will 100% start hanging AI art on their walls. The killer feature is being to customize the artwork to exactly what you want. It's just a question of time and not a lot of it either.
If people are going to hang (cheap) AI art on their walls, they never were going to pay a few hundred (or thousand) dollars for something that someone would consider art from an artist. They could have gone to the local poster store and purchased a random poster for $15 and tacked that to the wall (and there's nothing wrong with that).
Spending more than the cost of materials and you're not shopping for AI produced images anymore.
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Otoh whole industries exist because customers prefer to be told what they want versus the mental load of figuring out that themselves. Are you really going to sit there and scratch your head coming up with some decent prompts for some wall art you don’t hate? How long is that exercise going to take before you give up and move on to other things?
>So why does everyone seem to think that art is only flat, lit, pixels on a flat surface?
Everyone doesn't think that. It just happens that digital art, both as a medium and as an industry, is the only kind of art relevant to conversations about AI, because that is the medium of artwork that AI generates, and that is the industry that is being disrupted by it.
Yes, that is interesting: so digital artists can go back to traditional methods. Like a game where you scan in crayon textures. It's a unique look. More handcrafted.
Maybe AI will bring about a sea change in how we express these traditional works in the digital context.
It's true we miss a huge chunk of art by just considering pixels. Museums are dedicated to the idea that art and expression are intertwined, and that context--both past and present--brings a unique experience to the observer.
Curators certainly aren't generating those longform descriptions next to art pieces. Someone had to think deeply, analyze, and type that out.
except that I can take an AI generated image and burn it into wood or acid etch on metal with a CNC machine, or 3d print it.
Then youd be an artist at that point.