A good article. Increasingly I see writers and artist gripped by a sense of AI-induced futility, similar to what Sufjan Stevens once expressed about the album as a creative vehicle back in 2009. Of course, this despondency led to Sufjan's career highlight Age of Adz and he further went on to create several highly praised and well-loved albums, such as the heart-wrenching Carrie and Lowell. May we all be heartened to push on with our work, even in the face of futility. And may we all get a lot of pussy in the process.
It's easy enough to say "you didn't make that" when we're talking about the output of a simple prompt, but that's really only the tip of the iceberg of what's possible with these tools. I can generate hundreds of images and, if I have a modicum of taste and discernment, pick out the best one for further refinement. Or maybe my process might be to generate something, tweak the prompt, generate again, tweak the prompt again, and so on and so on.
I can then take that image and use it as an input image with a different prompt, then change individual parts of the image with still more prompts (possibly combined with my own manual edits in Photoshop), then generate another image, paste it in, and use AI to blend the new element in with the overall composition, then use that as the start frame for a generated video, then generate additional videos, then chop them all up and rearrange the parts. I could also create a drawing, or take a photo, and use that as the basis for a generated image, and then do all of the above.
I think that at a certain point in these processes, I get to claim authorship of the result. 99.9% of AI users are not doing this, but this is where the interesting work done with AI is and will come from and it won't be any less authored than something made with any other tool.
Yes, I think at a certain point authorship does materialize. I think of it as something like collage as an art form, you don't need to create every individual element yourself, but you do need to add something that is irreplaceable.
Curation by itself is not enough though. If you generate a thousand images from prompts and show me the best one, you are at best an editor, not an artist.
You only think this because you already don't think AI prompting is “doing art”. If I painted a thousand miniatures and showed you the best one, I would be an artist and an editor. There's no mutual exclusivity about the two roles and even the greats did this: there are always fragments and failed versions of the works of the Old Masters. So you still have to go back and explain why AI prompting isn't doing art.
I would ask: what else is it? Of course it's doing art. It's doing art in a lazy and low-skill way that at least 99.999% of the time produces worthless slop, but honestly I could say similar about the median paper-and-paint artist. Have you seen how bad most amateur art is? Do you have a crunchy aunt who “found herself” in her 50s by painting the worst art you've ever seen? Most art ever created is slop or derivative or both, but it's still art, just sloppy derivative art, and the people involved in making it are still sloppy derivative artists.
The notion prompt-engineers can't or won't get pussy from their fake art is completely laughable. That’s obviously just a question of charisma there and cads have gotten by on way less. You make a similar mistake I see everyone making: often people respond to this stuff "as a creative". If you really are one then you can't really claim any problem with AI: it's just doing what you do. Music is the easiest example because it is made out of a smaller number of parts than writing or images.
Every melody you have ever liked more than likely consisted of only 7 distinct notes, and physically it cannot consist of more than twelve. Making a melody is not just choosing notes at random, but we also don't actually have any system that really explains how to make a good one or an effective one, so there is an element of chaos and randomness to it. Speaking in terms of what is strictly possible, you can easily make a computer pick these notes for you. Will it make a good melody? By all accounts, yes, it's possible for this process to randomly produce something excellent. Though we would be just as clueless as to how IT managed that as we are when a person does it, again, the process to get directly to good and effective material is completely unknown.
The second major argument that's common which I don’t like is when you say it will devlaue art. This is just scratching the surface, art has been raped and filmed over 9999 hours of throw up porn, it is completely trashed and devalued and worthless literal community bicycle at this exact moment; it began being devalued from a craft-based experience into a modular one before AI came around, and there is NO point of reckoning here, this is standard practice and adding a few more punches and kicks and spit in the face of the lady known as art will not amount to paradigm-shifting activity, she is literally a pure dirt filth whore and we can’t make her any more worthless than she already is right now. What some musicians are doing where they dowbload packs and presets and even sometimes entire musical expressions and dragging and dropping them...or some musicians use "chord progression generators"...is the same school of thought behind AI where it is believed we can access greater creativiry through empowering the masses with new means of production (this is a much longer term meta communistic revolution in the arts). The issue behind this is in fact no effort could ever really cause certain minds to produce anything good at a reasonable rate, the chaos / randomness of finding GOOD material is always a personal intuition and most people prefer not to exercise personal intuition in their "creativity" but rather want to follow formal rules for what is good and make something that looks professional and fits into the trends of our time, though maybe they also just lack this sense entirely, who knows. The empowerment of the masses with artist production-means doodads is momentary and low-engagement conformist impulses turning inwards on themselves, hence why a big AI video makes a splash but does not maintain as serious art. What it functions as is a social media novelty, it's prole-oriented all the way but you have problem here in the fact it gets views, there are no doubt better and more artistic AI things we didn't see, the literally never ending never letting up for a second in my life campaign of empowering the average person's "creativity" is the problem behind all these things. Though I am of course the only who sees this right and everyone hates when I talk about it. C'est la vie you niggers get what you deserve.
I think it's yet to be seen whether prompt artists will get pussy, but I agree with the rest of this.
For me there's a big difference between a charismatic person using facile pseudo-artistic expression as a lever vs. someone with a genuine spark of creativity using new tools to gain social status. I'm not aware of any cases of prompt artists in the latter category at the moment.
Art has been dead for a while. Either it’s a money-laundering scheme for phonies getting high off their own farts or it’s truly something special but only appreciated by a small group of people. You get something similar with poetry, expect without the laundering possibility.
I honestly can’t deal with the AI crap in any format. I feel like it’s bad to consume and to produce. Even as a tool for research or revision, it’s unhealthy. Just do the work. It’s good. It makes you human.
I can sense AI creeping into entertainment and its influence is toxic. We need an organic “AI-free” label for our movies and shows. Otherwise, I’ll just have to turn my back on anything made after 2020. In many ways, I already have.
I feel that in many ways AI is just the most recent blow in an authenticity crisis that goes back decades. People have been complaining about big-budget movies being fake-looking and shallow for a long time. This will just accelerate it.
Well let's just admit that the category of "art" was a time-bound phenomenon that lasted several centuries between the Renaissance when artists began signing their work and Duchamp's Fountain, roughly from the 14th to the 20th century.
I find AI an invaluable tool in writing my own politically oriented substack. Not for writing but for research with footnotes so the original source can be read. AI by passes the biased algorithms of other search engines like google, and you can overcome the subtle but inherent biases of the AI by challenging the output. AI reduces research time but sometimes I give that advantage back by going down spme rabbit hole just because it's intetesting. AI is just a tool to be used like any other.
If bandyquantguy had the idea then he is an artist. If he had taken the time to learn to paint in the style of Van Gogh and some basic photography skills, and actually created the images himself, then everyone would, I hope, agree that it was art. But, if he, using his acquired skills, painted a copy of Sunflowers, it would be deemed excellent craft, but no art. But, then again, if the art is not in the execution but in the idea then we must agree that Le Voyage IS art or else we must deny that the Sistene Chapel is art, or at least that Michael Angelo did not create it since, as I understand it, it is agreed that most of the actual painting was done by his subordinates. If you can't agree to this then , it seems to me that you are denying that anything can be art if it does not involve hard work. An odd definition.
The trouble with that answer is that it is, or certainly appears to be, a case of circular reasoning - Effectively, you are just defining art as "the thing that AI cannot do".
(Besides which, you don't see any poor artists copying van Gogh either)
All definitions are either ultimately circular (intensional) or point at the world (extensional). That's the nature of defining words using other words.
Anyway, what makes you think I don't think AI art is art? I think it obviously is art. Any ordinary person who looked at it would call it art. If it weren't art, we'd still need a new term to describe the obviously closely related set of [human art + AI art], and actually that term may as well be art.
This is perhaps easier to understand with music. When an AI generates a Mozart-like concerto, what do you think it is that it has made other than music? It is notes organised in a row for a pleasing aesthetic melodic effect. Of course it's music. What else could it be? Likewise with art.
Lastly, millions of amateur painters copy van Gogh every year. He is one of the painters that high school art teachers are most likely to get you to imitate. Those students are doing art. It is not necessarily very creative or innovative art, but art doesn't have to be. Church artists drew derivative triptychs and madonnas for centuries, and this was still art: images organised in a space to producing a pleasing aesthetic visual effect.
A good article. Increasingly I see writers and artist gripped by a sense of AI-induced futility, similar to what Sufjan Stevens once expressed about the album as a creative vehicle back in 2009. Of course, this despondency led to Sufjan's career highlight Age of Adz and he further went on to create several highly praised and well-loved albums, such as the heart-wrenching Carrie and Lowell. May we all be heartened to push on with our work, even in the face of futility. And may we all get a lot of pussy in the process.
It's easy enough to say "you didn't make that" when we're talking about the output of a simple prompt, but that's really only the tip of the iceberg of what's possible with these tools. I can generate hundreds of images and, if I have a modicum of taste and discernment, pick out the best one for further refinement. Or maybe my process might be to generate something, tweak the prompt, generate again, tweak the prompt again, and so on and so on.
I can then take that image and use it as an input image with a different prompt, then change individual parts of the image with still more prompts (possibly combined with my own manual edits in Photoshop), then generate another image, paste it in, and use AI to blend the new element in with the overall composition, then use that as the start frame for a generated video, then generate additional videos, then chop them all up and rearrange the parts. I could also create a drawing, or take a photo, and use that as the basis for a generated image, and then do all of the above.
I think that at a certain point in these processes, I get to claim authorship of the result. 99.9% of AI users are not doing this, but this is where the interesting work done with AI is and will come from and it won't be any less authored than something made with any other tool.
Yes, I think at a certain point authorship does materialize. I think of it as something like collage as an art form, you don't need to create every individual element yourself, but you do need to add something that is irreplaceable.
Curation by itself is not enough though. If you generate a thousand images from prompts and show me the best one, you are at best an editor, not an artist.
You only think this because you already don't think AI prompting is “doing art”. If I painted a thousand miniatures and showed you the best one, I would be an artist and an editor. There's no mutual exclusivity about the two roles and even the greats did this: there are always fragments and failed versions of the works of the Old Masters. So you still have to go back and explain why AI prompting isn't doing art.
I would ask: what else is it? Of course it's doing art. It's doing art in a lazy and low-skill way that at least 99.999% of the time produces worthless slop, but honestly I could say similar about the median paper-and-paint artist. Have you seen how bad most amateur art is? Do you have a crunchy aunt who “found herself” in her 50s by painting the worst art you've ever seen? Most art ever created is slop or derivative or both, but it's still art, just sloppy derivative art, and the people involved in making it are still sloppy derivative artists.
The notion prompt-engineers can't or won't get pussy from their fake art is completely laughable. That’s obviously just a question of charisma there and cads have gotten by on way less. You make a similar mistake I see everyone making: often people respond to this stuff "as a creative". If you really are one then you can't really claim any problem with AI: it's just doing what you do. Music is the easiest example because it is made out of a smaller number of parts than writing or images.
Every melody you have ever liked more than likely consisted of only 7 distinct notes, and physically it cannot consist of more than twelve. Making a melody is not just choosing notes at random, but we also don't actually have any system that really explains how to make a good one or an effective one, so there is an element of chaos and randomness to it. Speaking in terms of what is strictly possible, you can easily make a computer pick these notes for you. Will it make a good melody? By all accounts, yes, it's possible for this process to randomly produce something excellent. Though we would be just as clueless as to how IT managed that as we are when a person does it, again, the process to get directly to good and effective material is completely unknown.
The second major argument that's common which I don’t like is when you say it will devlaue art. This is just scratching the surface, art has been raped and filmed over 9999 hours of throw up porn, it is completely trashed and devalued and worthless literal community bicycle at this exact moment; it began being devalued from a craft-based experience into a modular one before AI came around, and there is NO point of reckoning here, this is standard practice and adding a few more punches and kicks and spit in the face of the lady known as art will not amount to paradigm-shifting activity, she is literally a pure dirt filth whore and we can’t make her any more worthless than she already is right now. What some musicians are doing where they dowbload packs and presets and even sometimes entire musical expressions and dragging and dropping them...or some musicians use "chord progression generators"...is the same school of thought behind AI where it is believed we can access greater creativiry through empowering the masses with new means of production (this is a much longer term meta communistic revolution in the arts). The issue behind this is in fact no effort could ever really cause certain minds to produce anything good at a reasonable rate, the chaos / randomness of finding GOOD material is always a personal intuition and most people prefer not to exercise personal intuition in their "creativity" but rather want to follow formal rules for what is good and make something that looks professional and fits into the trends of our time, though maybe they also just lack this sense entirely, who knows. The empowerment of the masses with artist production-means doodads is momentary and low-engagement conformist impulses turning inwards on themselves, hence why a big AI video makes a splash but does not maintain as serious art. What it functions as is a social media novelty, it's prole-oriented all the way but you have problem here in the fact it gets views, there are no doubt better and more artistic AI things we didn't see, the literally never ending never letting up for a second in my life campaign of empowering the average person's "creativity" is the problem behind all these things. Though I am of course the only who sees this right and everyone hates when I talk about it. C'est la vie you niggers get what you deserve.
I think it's yet to be seen whether prompt artists will get pussy, but I agree with the rest of this.
For me there's a big difference between a charismatic person using facile pseudo-artistic expression as a lever vs. someone with a genuine spark of creativity using new tools to gain social status. I'm not aware of any cases of prompt artists in the latter category at the moment.
Millions of Indian grifters are producing AI slop on X and getting enough elonbux by doing so that they can afford Indian pussy. QED.
Art has been dead for a while. Either it’s a money-laundering scheme for phonies getting high off their own farts or it’s truly something special but only appreciated by a small group of people. You get something similar with poetry, expect without the laundering possibility.
I honestly can’t deal with the AI crap in any format. I feel like it’s bad to consume and to produce. Even as a tool for research or revision, it’s unhealthy. Just do the work. It’s good. It makes you human.
I can sense AI creeping into entertainment and its influence is toxic. We need an organic “AI-free” label for our movies and shows. Otherwise, I’ll just have to turn my back on anything made after 2020. In many ways, I already have.
I feel that in many ways AI is just the most recent blow in an authenticity crisis that goes back decades. People have been complaining about big-budget movies being fake-looking and shallow for a long time. This will just accelerate it.
I already refuse to watch anything made after 2015, so luckily I am safe already.
Well let's just admit that the category of "art" was a time-bound phenomenon that lasted several centuries between the Renaissance when artists began signing their work and Duchamp's Fountain, roughly from the 14th to the 20th century.
Sad but maybe true.
I find AI an invaluable tool in writing my own politically oriented substack. Not for writing but for research with footnotes so the original source can be read. AI by passes the biased algorithms of other search engines like google, and you can overcome the subtle but inherent biases of the AI by challenging the output. AI reduces research time but sometimes I give that advantage back by going down spme rabbit hole just because it's intetesting. AI is just a tool to be used like any other.
Dick Minnis removingthecataract.substack.com
If bandyquantguy had the idea then he is an artist. If he had taken the time to learn to paint in the style of Van Gogh and some basic photography skills, and actually created the images himself, then everyone would, I hope, agree that it was art. But, if he, using his acquired skills, painted a copy of Sunflowers, it would be deemed excellent craft, but no art. But, then again, if the art is not in the execution but in the idea then we must agree that Le Voyage IS art or else we must deny that the Sistene Chapel is art, or at least that Michael Angelo did not create it since, as I understand it, it is agreed that most of the actual painting was done by his subordinates. If you can't agree to this then , it seems to me that you are denying that anything can be art if it does not involve hard work. An odd definition.
“But, if he, using his acquired skills, painted a copy of Sunflowers, it would be deemed excellent craft, but no art.”
That would be art.
Then why do you not see any artists getting rich by painting in the style of Van Gogh?
Because what is “art” and what is “art that will get you rich” are not the same thing.
The trouble with that answer is that it is, or certainly appears to be, a case of circular reasoning - Effectively, you are just defining art as "the thing that AI cannot do".
(Besides which, you don't see any poor artists copying van Gogh either)
All definitions are either ultimately circular (intensional) or point at the world (extensional). That's the nature of defining words using other words.
Anyway, what makes you think I don't think AI art is art? I think it obviously is art. Any ordinary person who looked at it would call it art. If it weren't art, we'd still need a new term to describe the obviously closely related set of [human art + AI art], and actually that term may as well be art.
This is perhaps easier to understand with music. When an AI generates a Mozart-like concerto, what do you think it is that it has made other than music? It is notes organised in a row for a pleasing aesthetic melodic effect. Of course it's music. What else could it be? Likewise with art.
Lastly, millions of amateur painters copy van Gogh every year. He is one of the painters that high school art teachers are most likely to get you to imitate. Those students are doing art. It is not necessarily very creative or innovative art, but art doesn't have to be. Church artists drew derivative triptychs and madonnas for centuries, and this was still art: images organised in a space to producing a pleasing aesthetic visual effect.