A.I. art
june 2024: my opinion on it hasn’t changed, though i feel even greater disrespect towards it.
links
- AI Art is The New Stock Image by ia.net (Jan. 17, 2024)
- AI Is Coming For Your Children by Robert Evans (Jun. 20, 2023) – about AI-generated slop in the form of children’s books
- AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it? by Molly White (Apr. 17, 2024)
- The A.I. Lie by David Palumbo (Apr. 24, 2024)
It has become standard to describe A.I. as a tool. I argue that this framing is incorrect. It does not aid in the completion of a task. It completes the task for you. A.I. is a service. You cede control and decisions to an A.I. in the way you might to an independent contractor hired to do a job that you do not want to or are unable to do.
- Why AI art will always kind of suck by Rebecca Jennings (May 23, 2024)
But if you look at art and all you see is content, or if you look at a picture of a hot girl and all you see are JPGs in the shape of a sexual object, that’s all you’ll get out of it.
- Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art by Ted Chiang (Aug. 31, 2024)
The companies promoting generative-A.I. programs claim that they will unleash creativity. In essence, they are saying that art can be all inspiration and no perspiration—but these things cannot be easily separated. I’m not saying that art has to involve tedium. What I’m saying is that art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception. It is a mistake to equate “large-scale” with “important” when it comes to the choices made when creating art; the interrelationship between the large scale and the small scale is where the artistry lies.
wrote this: december 2022
I don’t like A.I. art.
Technology-wise, it’s extremely cool. Hard to believe it exists. (I’m aware of its shortcomings re: things like hands, faces, uncanny valley type things. I’m guessing these will improve with time and will no longer be easy points of criticism.)
Artistically, creatively, though, I’m uncomfortable with it. Art is nebulous to define, but the process of creating the art with written prompts feels wrong to me. Is prompt-writing a technical skill? Writing is a skill. Learning how to use a tool is a skill, and getting a result you want from a generator right now seems quite involved, with lots of iterating required. But reading a prompt list is, lol.
The idea of putting in artists’ works into a machine at this scale is gross. Trying to copy a specific artist’s style is gross, and the way it happens (by feeding their work, without their consent, into a system) feels especially dehumanizing and gross.
There are some things in digital art that I think technology advancements would be super cool for:
- Automating the tedious parts of the process, like filling in colours
- Drawing repetitive things (patterns, many of one thing…)
- Fixing mistakes, like erasing stray lines or pixels
- File and layer management
Some things that I think are inherent to the process of art that feel uncomfortable to have done by AI:
- Drawing the actual lines
- Painting the actual brushstrokes
Maybe this is part of why I’m uncomfortable with the current popular outputs of AI art generators right now—styles that look like a person painted everything you see. To me, part of the allure of illustration is studying the details and seeing the choices an artist made. They chose to make a brushstroke there, in that texture. They chose those colours. They drew an eye in this shape. All of this is part of their individual style. The artist behind the work, making these decisions, is important.
Anyway. Not into it. Please automate other parts of the art process.