Hours of effort to create prompts to maneuver the models output until it looks closer to what you wanted, possibly with the addition of touch-up or addition steps at the end likely needed for certain kinds of image to clean up things the ai struggles with (like, say, hands) or to add something in particular the ai didn’t understand (like, say, a monster of your own invention or something).
It’s easy to say that doesn’t count, that the prompt engineer could have just come up with their final prompt in the first place, but then does it count when a digital painter sketches an outline a dozen times before deciding it’s where they want it? After all, the digital artist could have just drawn it the way they wanted at first blush. But I’d bet you’ll say the time the digital artist spent “counts” as time spent working on an art piece, even if you might be inclined to say the prompt engineer’s time doesn’t. I’d be interested to hear your take.
Right, so this is what I mean when I say that charitable interpretation is dead. Taking my earlier assertion that AI generated art isn’t real art, along with my assertion that providing a prompt to an AI is essentially equivalent to providing a description to a human artist for a commission, should not have read as an argument for or against AI generated art being real art. Taking those statements together, the only reasonable conclusion you can make about my position is that prompt engineers aren’t artists.
That sounds like the interpretation I’m responding to. It either doesn’t follow from your premises, or it begs the question. Yes, if ai art isn’t real art, no art produced with ai is real art, but that’s a tautology. I’m trying to get at why you believe ai inherently makes something not art. Low effort was a reason you gave, but you also said no amount of effort could change it.
Never. It’s not an artistic skill in the same way that providing a description to an actual artist is not an artistic skill
But providing a description to an “actual artist” is an artistic skill. If you have a particular vision in your head for a character, writing that out is art the same way any kind of writing can be, no? Writing something in a way that gives another artist a mental image that matches yours takes creativity and skill. Why doesn’t the work created by that creativity and skill count as art? It seems unnecessarily gatekeep-y.
Telling a machine “car, sedan, neon lights, raining, shining asphalt, night time, city lights” is not creating art. To me, it’s equivalent to commissioning art.
When art is commissioned, art is produced. If no human produced it, an ai did. If ai cannot produce art, then a human must have.
Similarly, I feel that prompt engineers can’t take any credit for the pictures that AI produces past the prompt that they provided and whatever post-processing they do.
I suppose I don’t understand why engineering a prompt can’t count as an artistic skill, nor why selecting from a number of generated outputs can’t (albeit to probably a much lower degree). At what point does a patron making a commission become a collaborator? And if ai fills the role of the painter, why wouldn’t you expect that line to move?
As for why I hate AI art, I just hate effortless slop.
I’m with you there. And I would brook no issue with completing about the massive amount of terrible, low-effort ai art currently being produced. But broadening the claim to include all art in which the most efficacious tool used was ai pushes it over the line for me.
It doesn’t matter how many hours you spend working on a piece, if you use AI, then the AI made the art.
Except that artists can use ai as a tool to make art. Sure, the ai can’t say why that pixel looks that way, but the artist can say why this is the output that was kept. They can tell you why they chose to prompt the ai the way they did, what outputs they expected and why the ones that were kept were special, let alone what changes they may have made after and why.
If Jackson Pollock can make art from randomness by flicking a brush, why can’t someone make art from randomness by promoting an ai? Is there a lone somewhere that makes it become art, in your opinion? I don’t think it would be uncharitable by interpreting the above quote to mean you don’t believe it is possible at all to use ai as a tool in the production of the art.
If ai is the only tool used, it never makes an image, let alone art, because there was never even a human using language to prompt the ai. But from that obviously ridiculous extreme there is certainly a long spectrum ranging through what I described above to something as far removed as a human generating landscapes for a storyboard before fully producing a movie that doesn’t include the air outputs in any physical way. I’m sure you would claim a line exists between there, and I’m curious where.
Do you hate all amateur art, or just when it’s made with ai tools? Does a kid’s drawing, produced in scant seconds and with no training and remarkably little skill hold negative value to you, or is it worth something?
What about art produced with hours or days of effort and a specific goal in mind, but don’t so using primarily ai with perhaps a few finishing touches?
Add to that the fact that before ai, unless you’re already pretty famous, no one cares enough to make nonconsensual porn of you. After, anyone vaguely attracted to you can snap or find a few pictures and do a decent job of it without any skill or practice.