I'm not talking about the algorithm. I'm saying that the process of generating an image is the same as typing in some text to an image search engine.

Typing in a prompt isn’t “learning.”

You know that developing new skills is a good long term way to prevent dementia? Pencil and paper exercise your hand eye coordination in a way that’s healthy long term.

Get the fuck out of here with that take. The reason that piece works is because it didn't take effort.

'When explaining the purpose of his readymade sculpture, Duchamp stated they are "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice."'

It's a well known artist using his name to put these pieces into a place where you expect "high art" but they're not, which creates an discrepancy that makes you think about what it all means. It's more than just a urinal, because of the context in which it's set. If you can't understand that then I get why you can't understand what makes art interesting, and why you can't do it. It's not that you lack skill (which you do, because you need to practice it to have it) but rather you're an uninteresting person who can't ponder things that are different.

Luckily, this is also a muscle that can be exercised. Stop listening to the very stupid people who think they're clever by saying certain art isn't deserving attention. Art is anything that makes you think and has nothing to do with skill (though the ability to make you think, again, is a skill of its own). Just look at art and consider why it exists the way it exists. It's all purposeful, whether you like it or not. Flex your brain by thinking about the meaning or message, or what you can get out of it that maybe the artist didn't intend.

Edit: To give an example of how AI art could be used in art is to make it copy Picasso's (or whoever's) style, and put it in the context of real ones. Let people examine it and see how little intentionality there is in it compared to an authentic one. It'd allow it to bring more meaning out of the other pieces because the AI one is so meaningless.

Congratulations, you do not understand Duchamp in the slightest.

Effort doesn’t equate to skill, you still have to out in the physical effort of fucking trying to make something, again, especially in regards to unskilled art what is being appreciated is specifically the effort put into it. Someone tried to express something.

Prompts are not a fucking skill. AI is not a skill, it is not an artistic effort. You made nothing, you had a program procedurally generate colors. If you commission an artist you don’t get to take credit for their work, the same goes for AI color vomit. Art requires expression, intent, and effort, those aren't things you can procedurally generate nor code.

Well those artists consented to being assistants and having their works used. Not so much with these image training databases

If he and Warhol are allowed skilled assistants, why not me?

OK, two things:

1. Skilled assistants are actually skilled assistants. LLMs are not.

2. You are specifically saying that you don't want to develop skill. Once you do, then you can take on assistants and train them. You've explicitly stated you don't have the skill where an assistant would be useful. Sure, you can hire someone to make art for you, but they aren't an assistant. They're doing the work and you aren't. They're the artist, you're just paying them.

Stop complaining and just learn how to make art. No one was born with the skill or talent. They just practiced and learned. You want to skip this and act like you're still doing anything interesting or useful. You aren't. You can, you just refuse to and still want to be treated like you are.

Fuck Andy Warhol and Damien Hurst, I would definitely say the only kind of artists they were is con-artists. They ripped off talent and took credit for what others did. Fuck them.

Then why aren't you doing it?

I want food but I am not cooky, doesn't mean that ordering pizza makes you a chef.

I want to go but I am not a car person, doesn't mean that calling a uber makes you the driver.

Absolute slop background, how this won anything is beyond me. Also the AI probably lifted the theme and style from actual artists' artworks. How is this soulless bullshit "good"?

It might fool someone who wasn't familiar with the stuff that AI can generate, but how does this lead to any actual creativity and progress, and not just repeating overall patterns many artist have drawn before, over and over again until everyone gets saturated with such AI "art".

This is just an image generator that will be used to cut corpo costs and reduce work opportunities.

But the goal is to run a marathon, which I'm not sure but I have a bunch that using a motorcycle doesn't count as running, although I should triple check because who knows, the earth devs could've pushed an update where riding a motorbike increases your athleticism stats.

You say there is effort in using AI to make something good, but failed to mention what that effort is. "Giving the proper input" is just telling someone else to do what you want, which is hardly any effort and needs almost no skill.

Unless you think everything an AI creates is good?

No, I think it's just ok at best. There was no skill or effort involved, someone just told an algorithm to do something and got the result. Some of them even feel proud of "their" achievement, which makes as much sense as a boss claiming credit for their worker's work.

You don't make art then. You ask something else to make it for you, and it will be valueless. If I hire an artist online to create something for me, I don't create the piece of art. They do. How does that logic differ if that is an LLM or an artist? You aren't the one with the knowledge or skill, so you aren't an artist. You're a hack who wants to pass other's work off as their own because you're too lazy or lack the creativity to do it yourself. You're pitiable, if you weren't causing harm.

I'm going to try a different tactic here, in that I don't expect I can convince you of anything on the other side of the argument that you're engaging with, but something that might be useful to learn from is some constructive criticism of the works that the AI produces. In doing so I'm going to try to avoid what I think a lot of proponents of your style consider gatekeeping.

The piece that won this competition is technically sound, it has an aesthetic presence, we can agree here. If anything AI is kinda good at doing this because it's trained to recognize the patterns that lead to this in the data and other artwork that was used to train this.

I'll also even say that if someone spent 80 hours cumulatively taking 900 photographs of a particular scene to try to select just one that's of particular quality, that we might even say they put in artistic effort into it. It's just that that alone, the time and effort spent on curating a work, is not all there is that defines it as artistic. In this other case you keep posting about found art, a urinal that someone spent maybe 5 seconds on is also considered art.

It's also true though that when that guy described the urinal and why he thought it deserved to be considered art, that he put thought into that. He made the selections he did for a reason.

So lets go back to our award winner. It's competent, we agree, enough that a judge didn't even realize it might be AI (I'll get to that in a second). I'll even say that the fact that the winner could add in an entire head on one of the characters in the pieces and have it blend well enough with the shading and lighting of the work suggests the guy who won with this piece probably knows at least some degree of traditional art concepts.

We can also see that it's a blend of styles, the composition looks even renaissance a bit, and clearly also the person who submitted this knew enough about other art forms to recognize that. There remains one major question though: what story is this picture telling? The renaissance images that it's an homage to are generally based on the moment in some story. A picture of Napoleon on a horse isn't just Napoleon on a horse, there's usually indications that he's maybe returning from some battle. Images of Samson and Delilah focus on the moment she attempts the assassination.

That's what people are trying to get at here. The artist says that his prompt was to make a mashup of styles (victorian and space themes, which does not seem even remotely like what he ended up with), and then refined it further with the lighting and shading, positioning and elements. I can agree this takes effort, it's just also this is like saying the movie Wild Wild West should have won critically acclaimed awards for the cinematography. Even where he had intent, it seems like it was overwritten by the very tool he used, and it seems like he didn't believe enough in his own original vision that he noticed that it wasn't actually what he asked for.

So lets get to the judge then. I think there would be very real outcry if say, a judge for a oil painting competition was unable to tell the difference between an the works made in the requested medium and a photograph that was submitted for it. I could see an argument, much like for how photography was separated out from other artforms in competition, that the same should be done for AI. In addition, I think that the effort to make the AI emulate existing styles and convince people it was made with previously existing tools actually limits the possibility of what the style can create. Almost a decade ago, people were fascinated by google deep dreams because it was a machine creating a rendition of how the machine "thinks," and showing all the strange symbolism and logical connections that were programmed into it and how they had developed, in a way very different than anything a human artist might think or do. I think that's the envelope people and AI should be pushing here, I think it should be a completely different category, I think it should have it's completely own style.

I also think the current AI programs suck for a variety of ethical reasons I won't get into, but I don't rule out that there couldn't be versions made that lack those problems and aren't just an gimme to corporations looking to streamline every process on the cheap. But if you want AI to be taken seriously, if you want anything you try to make with it to be taken seriously, these are all thoughts you should probably consider.

Sure, and you'll be treated like someone who doesn't want to spend any money or put any effort into it: useless. Whatever is generated won't have any life to it because there wasn't intent with the creation processes; only a statistical algorithm.

Art isn't just a product. Sure, it can be, but how many people are making comics or memes online and aren't being paid? There's a ton. That proves it's more than just a product, because a product is made to be sold. It can be a product, but it often isn't, and even when it is that's only a part of it.

No one is going to pay for something they can just generate themselves, so AI "art" is not even a product. It's worthless, and a sink of resources to create.