About AI art...

Some will agree on this and some don’t. :slight_smile:
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art

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Loved his take on Chief Brand Officers. Was 100% spot on
Thanks for sharing

This is a bizarre format for online discourse. The embedding of all of the text into images makes the article unsearchable, and the extremely sparse density and immense vertical scrolling make it difficult to track the flow of the arguments. Even zooming out doesn’t produce columns or put a reasonable volume of text onto the screen simultaneously. I read the article through once but find it hard to craft a comprehensive response in light of the format.

With that said, the article mostly struck me as a rehearsal of the same rhetoric we’ve heard repeated over and over and over since the A.I. art discourse began, peppered with a few of the author’s personal analogies. If you already dislike A.I. art, then the article might sound reasonable. If you don’t, then it probably won’t.

The first thing we’re invited to do is set aside the oft-entangled discourse over art careers and focus on the art itself. The author states that, for career-independent reasons, (s)he enjoys consuming A.I. art until (s)he learns that’s what it is, at which time enjoyment involuntarily morphs into being deflated, grossed out, and bored. Then it is just asserted that you (the reader) “have to admit” that you feel that disappointment too. This actually is the entire argument that about the first third of the article is in any sense objectively correct rather than a mere expression of the author’s personal preferences; no reason why one should feel this way is deemed necessary.

I certain do not have to admit such a thing. In fact, I don’t say this just as a matter of highlighting a failed burden of proof, I typically do not feel disappointment over A.I. art. I enjoy generating it. I actually appreciate even some of the explicit “A.I. slop.” My prediction is that in 10-20 years, well after the current discourse has passed, there will be a community of retro A.I. artists, as there are retro gamers, who use tools specifically designed to mimic “slop” technology in which human arms blend into wooden boards as a gradient, and similar quirks. The slop will be viewed by many as charming, like a video game character clipping into a wall.

The author analogizes A.I. art to pressing a single button to play pre-recorded songs on a Casio keyboard, but this appears to result from a poor practical understanding of prompt engineering. The only response given to the claim that A.I. art generation is a skill of its own is “It’s not. It’s about as hard as using Google.” There’s actually no elaboration here. Of course, it is possible to engage in hand drawing by moving a crayon randomly, or photography by clicking a button randomly, but in practice both these and A.I. artists prefer to invest greater amounts of time into their respective endeavors so that finished products reflect their own autonomous choices (the author shockingly implicates that A.I. artists do not make choices). A better analogy might be synthesizers and digital music media themselves rather than pre-recorded song buttons, which have historically undergone similar polarization but are now widely embraced as authentic tools for musicians.

I won’t dive into the artist career bit, as that would require a lengthier treatment, and because the article is logistically difficult to navigate. A large volume of it is devoted to insulting people (it strangely explains the difference between talent and skill at length, championing skill as the more important, while also referring to A.I. art enthusiasts as “some of the most talentless fucking people [the author has] ever met”), and making wild assertions about how A.I. art is increasingly popular yet “nobody seems to want it.” I doubt there’s anything in the article besides the specific analogies that folks tapped into the discourse haven’t come across several times already.

Ai art is dead. Long live ai art.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG3ubTFGNtQ

In this I am "Patchwolf"and also the creator of this Alliance Tribute.