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As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation

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114 points valgaze | 7 comments | 14 Aug 22 17:33 UTC | HN request time: 1.095s | source | bottom
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xor99 ◴[14 Aug 22 19:45 UTC] No.32462288[source]▶
Digital art is not permanently interesting. My sympathies go out to people who feel like they will lose some of their business. However, a group of developers has shown what was always true about digital art: its computational art even if you draw it because it is encoded digitally. In other words, it was always going to be reproducible and remixable.

The problem with being shocked by Dall-E, in my view, is that it shows an ignorance about the historical development of art and its incredible diversity of practice + the final productions and forms of art. OpenAI have sort of Warholised digital art in a way and that's just very standard in art history. People went crazy when Warhol productised art but in reality this was an overreaction and plenty more stuff came after that which completely different in its orientation towards art (e.g. something like Hans Haacke). Dalle-E is a system for producing digital art in the way that Warhol's practice was a system for producing visual art as a commercial product.

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1. goldenkey ◴[14 Aug 22 20:02 UTC] No.32462434[source]▶
I think you're wrong. Pretty much all human creations can be encoded digitally to a high enough fidelity that the discretization process no longer is distinguishable.

And 3D printers for paintings exist, that can replicate brush strokes and other techniques, and they will only get better over time.

So there's very little left in the human arsenal as the AI generation and AI painting techniques both improve.

https://youtu.be/j-UGcGV4zzw

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2. xor99 ◴[14 Aug 22 20:17 UTC] No.32462546[source]▶
Oke I see what you mean, but isn't that just a reproduction in physical form? They have Warholised painting with 3D printers by creating a systematic method to reproduce art using a new combination of craft. I like it but it's not a totality.

I can bring up a form of art that is not captured by this conceptual scheme. Carsten Holler's SOMA:

The exhibition Soma was installed at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin in 2010. Its main element were 12 reindeer in two pens running the length of the former railway station. Half of the reindeer were fed the fly agaric mushrooms in their food, which are part of their customary diet in the wild, and turn their urine into a hallucinogen. The reindeer urine was collected by handlers and then stored in on-site refrigerators for use. The experiment was extended to canaries, which were housed in two hanging cage pieces, to mice, and to flies. A mushroom-shaped Elevator Bed was installed in the middle of the space, and visitors could spend the night on the premise for a fee.

Do you see what I mean by this digital art vis a vis the collapse of all art being an overreaction? Carsten Holler is a real artist, the art is good, and its not reproducible in the way digi-physical stuff is. It's experiential art and presented in a gallery. Conceptually, its about as far away from DALLE-E as possible but its still art and not "captured". I think art is not over and DALL-E is not poison for artists.

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3. goldenkey ◴[14 Aug 22 20:20 UTC] No.32462572[source]▶
The kind of art you're talking about is "high art" and it's a luxury item. The majority of artists don't produce that type of art, and will instead lose out in this scenario.
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4. xor99 ◴[14 Aug 22 20:29 UTC] No.32462651{3}[source]▶
A Ferrari is a luxury item. The exhibition was free but you could pay to stay the night. The guy also designs slides and the tone of his exhibition style is not "high art".

Ultimately you are talking about art as a product and that means you think all art is captured by Warhol's system of art. Which is what all digital artists overreacting to this also think. It's not the totality of what art is. I like DALL-E. Good work, but now what else is there beyond digital art? Or by pushing digital art to some more extreme outcome?

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5. goldenkey ◴[14 Aug 22 20:59 UTC] No.32462879{4}[source]▶
Technical artists are far different from performance or exhibitionist artists. They aren't even in the same realm.

Yeah, art is vast. It includes me saying "Kerflaffle!!" while I ride a unicycle and fart out a candle in a dimly lit room. But that doesn't usually pay bills and most artists don't do this type of art. It serves a different audience/consumer. It has a different market cap. Let's not confuse oranges and grapefruit.

6. notahacker ◴[14 Aug 22 21:52 UTC] No.32463319[source]▶
Your link shows you can 3D print a "Rembrandt" if you hire a team of people to spend 18 months working on custom algorithms for it, and I doubt any art experts were as likely to actually be fooled by it as they were by a van Meergeren forgery.

Not sure the people selling paintings knocked out in an afternoon to tourists who visited their studio and chose to buy an original instead of the visually indistinguishable print for a fraction of the price have much to worry about...

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7. goldenkey ◴[15 Aug 22 00:40 UTC] No.32464572[source]▶
Everything is originally bespoke before it is mass produced. Forgeries have gotten so much better than they used to be. I know antique dealers and they often rant about the job of recognizing reproductions having become significantly more difficult.

Like others have said, the first ones have issues, but late stage is when things get problematic.