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As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation

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114 points valgaze | 4 comments | 14 Aug 22 17:33 UTC | HN request time: 3.087s | source
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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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thejohnconway ◴[14 Aug 22 20:32 UTC] No.32462679[source]▶
> Digital art is not permanently interesting.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Reproducibility has virtually nothing to do with interest in my opinion. I was an admirer of plenty of artists before I'd ever seen their work in person. Perhaps I am missing the point.

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1. xor99 ◴[14 Aug 22 20:43 UTC] No.32462770[source]▶
I mean it in the sense that using digital technologies to produce art is not always going to be interesting. I don't mean that I will never find any digital art interesting though. Distilled to one point: DALL-E does not wholesale capture any rational definition of art reflecting actual art history.

I think DALL-E is a win-win by pushing digital art to some further extreme and forcing people who are open to art beyond the digital to try new things. Digital art had reached a point of maximum inertia before this imo.

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2. t_mann ◴[14 Aug 22 22:38 UTC] No.32463751[source]▶
Do you seriously want to go down the 'This is not art' path? That battle has been lost so many times for different forms of art that are much harder to 'get' for most people.

Also, since you like to emphasize the 'digital' part of these works, don't forget we're probably not much further than one Master-level project for some mechanical engineering students from having AI-generated physical paintings.

3. thejohnconway ◴[14 Aug 22 22:52 UTC] No.32463858[source]▶
Ah, I see what you mean, as in digital creation is just another in a long line of technologies used for art creation, and at some point will just be mundane? I agree completely with that.
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4. xor99 ◴[14 Aug 22 23:07 UTC] No.32464000[source]▶
Yeah and it'll evolve unexpectedly but not in a way that most artists can't adapt to or develop a practice with. I just don't agree with the idea that DALL-E is art poison. That's overly simplistic and reactionary and not realistic about the diversity of form, materials, composition in artworks.