Tog's Paradox

Tog's paradox is the main reason why I suspect that generative AI will never destroy art, it will enhance it. It allows you to create artworks within minutes that until recently required hours to create and years to master. This will cause new art to emerge that pushes these new tools to the limit, again with years of study and mastery, and they will look like nothing we've been able to produce so far.

This is exactly what happened when digital tools like Photoshop became mainstream, where you can copy-paste, recolor, adjust, stretch and transform. It didn't obsolete the manual creation of art, but instead enhanced it. It's common for artists to sketch on paper (or tablet) and later digitize and color on their computer, achieving results faster and better than what was possible in the past.

We don’t align completely with the part on mastering, at least as stated here.

That is, yes, we can make large amount of images/videos/texts with generative AI that we would never have been able to produce otherwise, because we didn’t dedicated enough time in mastering corresponding arts. But mastering an art is only marginally about the objects you can craft. The main change it brings is how we perceive objects and how we imagine that we can transform the world (well at least a tiny peace of it) through that new perspective.

Of course "mastering generative AI" can be an interesting journey of it’s own.

The same way that photography didn't kill painting. But it killed some specific forms of it.

What we have today isn't very useful. But once it gets good, gen AI will probably have a similar impact.

I agree but also don't.

I crave authenticity. I recognise the creativity and talent in digital painting, but it lacks authenticity. I hardly feel I'll like AI art more.

Not all art needs to be high art, of course. I've bought prints of digital paintings and woodblock prints. Nonetheless, /r/ArtPorn today is like going to the cinema and being shown a compilation of TV adverts. AI art is probably not going to improve that.

I totally get that, but do consider that there were probably people in the past who felt that non-analog art wasn't authentic. That it's not a real piece of art on a real piece of paper or canvas, but a mocking grid of pixels digitized to mimic the authentic but with a jagged plastic aftertaste.

Personally, I love pixel art and think it a very legitimate medium to create art in. I can understand why somebody wants art to be something physical and real, unique and non-digital, but I feel much more strongly that the advent of digital art gave more than it took.

My hopes is that the same will be true for AI art.

Fair.

However, it seems to me that most people just think they are some kind of Rick Rubin, who just need the right tools ato be finally appreciated for their taste and I don't think even a fraction of them has taste.

A.I. will not create 'art' because art is at its essence an expression of the human condition. However, it will create a lot of what is now commoditized craft that resembles certain kinds of art, like advertising, corporate design, a lot of architecture, and graphic design.

It depends on how the AI is used. If it's too high-level or abstract, it will produce "slop". Solving for AI generated content to be non-slop is probably very close to solving for AGI. But the statistical tools have proven useful in streamlining or automating what once were challenging processes. For example, generating an animated character still yields slop, but you can take a hand-crafted character and have an AI model analyze a live actor's movements and then rotoscope them onto the character. This makes life easier for the animator AND the actor: the actor can give a more natural performance without having to wear cumbersome motion capture gear; and the animator can apply those movements directly to the character without having to clean up motion capture data, let alone rotoscope the movements by hand as was done in the classic Disney animation days.