LogFAQs > #979532964

ParanoidObsessive posted...

If they are creating art, they are, by literal definition, an artist.

You could argue to which degree they influence the act of creation, but that's one mother of a slippery slope because every artist uses tools. There is a significant difference between someone who fingerpaints on a cave wall using self-crafted pigments and someone who draws on a computer tablet or manipulates a photograph in Photoshop, but they're all still artists.

Someone creating AI art still needs to have the skills necessary to tell it to create the image they're looking for, and to at least some degree they're still impressing their intentions and mental expectations onto the work. One could argue that there's a difference between someone who is micromanaging descriptions and commands versus someone who just types out a single short sentence, but there's also a difference between someone who spends months painting a masterpiece and someone who doodles on a napkin for 30 seconds.

People get hung up on the idea of the tool, but ultimately we're liking going to reach a point as the tech improves where the end product becomes almost indistinguishable from anything a human could create. Which can actually open doors for people to become more creative (like, say, someone who has ideas for a comic but lacks the skill to draw it, who can now potentially use the new tools to provide art - in exactly the same way most sprite-art comics allowed people who couldn't draw to still tell stories).

There are already AI that can write and perform songs you'd never realize wasn't composed by a human. The limiting factor isn't "technology bad, no human soul", the limiting factor is the tech is still in its infancy, and WILL improve. The future is coming whether people want it to or not.

For fun, go back and look at CGI animation in the early 90s and tell me if you think it had "soul" or would ever be anything other than a computer-generated abomination. Then think about the fact that nearly every cartoon today is animated via computer and hand-drawn cel-based animation is almost a dead art. Shit evolves.

By that logic, if I tell somebody to paint me something, I'm an artist.

The core concept behind AI art is functionally no different than an editor commissioning art. You make a request, you ask for amendments to the art, but by definition you are NOT the artist, you are merely the person having the art made for them. And the instructions for telling a real person to create art and for a machine to create art are very much the same thing. The AI is replacing the person who'd make the art. And, by the way, even THAT isn't a unique concept. Prior to AI, you'd have services that took commissions for art then subcontracted that work out to people paid pennies for their work.

adjl posted...

AI, however, does all the creation for you. Conceptually, it's identical to commissioning an artist to create something for you: You come up with an idea of what you want, you take that idea to somebody that has the skills needed to express that idea, and you work with what they've given you to fine-tune it to your needs/desires. The only real difference is that you don't have to pay for the commission because it's not a person doing it for you.

...damnit, I should've scrolled a bit further so I could see adjl beat me to it.

However, I would note that a lot of generative AI does have fees attached to the service, so you're often still paying something. But usually it's closer to the rates for the subcontracted work rather than the contracted work.

JOExHIGASHI posted...

I don't know how AI learning art works. Does it steal images or parts of images to create art?

Technically, it can do both. Because generative AI doesn't necessarily recognize elements, it can figures from a piece of artwork and put them as-is into another artwork (ie, no change to the figure itself).

In theory, it's creating new composition. In some cases, that involves recreating existing material and in other cases it might reuse it. However, there's so much content out there that it's tough to determine what belonged to what, outside of famous works.