Seems completely arbitrarily unless we are saying that anything done with a computer doesn’t count as real art.
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No I’m speaking specific to photography itself, it boils down to what you appreciate is human effort. For me, AI promotes far too much on automation than it does autonomy thus cheapening what I’m already conditioned to believe is a work of art
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The problem with this whole debate is that there really is no great definition of art that excludes AI art but includes other things considered art.
Art doesn’t necessarily require effort or skill. Art doesn’t necessarily require intention or meaning. Art doesn’t have to be “produced” by a human otherwise photography, digital art and genres of music can’t be art.
Maybe art requires human input? But the AI art prompt qualifies. How much human input is required to be considered art? If I take photos blindfolded is it no longer considered art? There are also many things that would be considered art like the Mandelbrot set that exist without a human to produce it.
If I was pressed, the definition of art is not about how it’s made but rather whether it can evoke emotion in the observer. In a way, art cannot really be art without the observer. But of course the consequence of this definition is that AI art can indeed be art.
I think we can ask serious questions about who gets the credit for AI art. That’s where the question of theft comes in and whether you should be allowed to submit AI art as your own to an art contest.
The overall vibe I get from this thread is that people really don’t like AI art, probably for good reasons. And to delegitimize it, we are trying to force the definition of art around AI but not to include it. I don’t buy it. I’d rather focus on the substance. The value of mass produced art, the effect on artists, the implication of training data using copyrighted work, who the “real artist” is. I can’t help but feel like these more important questions fall to the wayside when we focus on semantics.
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Artists literally copy and use theories of past artists and use that as inspiration towards their pieces. AI does the same thing
For Example: if I want to learn how to draw a pikachu, I’ll go on YouTube and watch a tutorial, take inspiration, and then maybe add my own twist. Same with learning how to do shading, 3d, or other theories. AI expedites the process and through artistic and problem solving prompt engineering a true artist of the keyboard can create art masterpieces.
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Ai is incapable of creating “art”. Ai is a regurgitation of human life experiences, skillsets, and creativity processed through a computer. Not only this, but for the most part, it is plagiarized from sources it had no business having access to in the first place. Unfortunately, regulating it will be an arduous process. In the meantime, the creativity of musicians, writers, architects, illustrators, film makers, and so on is at risk of compromise as corporations seek out ways to evade sustainable payment for these skillsets with the same determination they’ve placed into evading taxes and contributing to society. I’m not going to gatekeep what people can and can not enjoy however; if they’re perfectly ok listening to AI generated music, reading AI generated stories, watching AI generated content - that’s on them. I just think this can easily lead to a degradation of creativity when we should be seeking out a renaissance of the arts by injecting more financial support into its ecosystem.
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I have been in and supported the arts my entire life.
I am both amazed and fearful of the power of AI. The skills that took me years of dedication and refinement are now available to the masses in seconds. This makes me feel afraid, envious, shocked, but also amazed, curious, and hopeful.
If there is anything certain about technological advances in the arts, it is that some people will be open to change and most will not. Let’s take digital art in animation as an example. Many of us are old enough to remember when animated TV shows and films were drawn and painted without the assistance of a computer. For example, some fans of Studio Ghibli vastly prefer their cel-produced films to their digital work. Nowadays, there is a much wider acceptance of digital art due to its impressive advancements and ubiquitousness.
I expect that the use of AI in art will morph over time. Some people will never accept its presence and will long for the days before it was adopted. Others will begrudgingly look toward the future and will begin to adopt it in their careers.
When it comes to tech, I admit that I am on the late majority or laggard curve. I am overly careful and skeptical, and I find that my hesitation can often lead to a more difficult way of life. But this is how I grew up and who I am.
There is nothing wrong with disliking AI, its impact on artists and art forms, and its zealous adopters. However, I would encourage skeptics like myself to take an open-minded stance and see what comes of this because we can’t exactly shut the barn door.
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Utilizing processing power and computing for a human to craft portions of something such as say, Lord of the Rings, for example, is not at all the same as typing a prompt into a computer to shit out something generated off of computing a back catalog of thousands (if not millions) of creative individual’s efforts that have just been ingested into a machine.
To me, this sort of analogy doesn’t track properly. This isn’t the same argument as a vehicle replacing a horse and carriage and putting horse drivers out of business. There’s plenty of great use cases for AI, I just don’t think trying to replace art and artists with this shit is one of them.
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There absolutely is, and I’ve already given one myself before. It is simply the will and creation from humans. Whether it is good or bad, effortless or arduous, it has to come from a person. The only meaning art has is that it is from people. The only meaningful observation is that which comes to people from people. It isn’t hard to understand.
The analogies here are weird, or at least take weird angles. The photography thing? A camera is a tool, but the composition, the craft, the motivation and capturing of the emotion and evoking the emotion, intention, staging, editing, etc., all come from a person. Whereas AI is being called a tool, but the composition does not come from a human. The human merely asks to be shown something that is an amalgam from the annals of human creation. It isn’t art, because they are not creating anything. It’s intriguing to people, but it isn’t the same as knowing there is a person behind that creation.
Forget the juncture we’re at for a second… the one where all the AI just rehashes human made work. Look at the principle. It doesn’t matter if a human put in prompts. The human actually has no authentic input into the creation of the product in this case. The human doesn’t actually know what is going to be produced. It’s science, not art. And the variables in this formula is other people’s art (it will always be because AI started with that origin). But not in the abstract, wherein an artist personally fuses two other artists work. But in the literal copying and pasting, because all of what it has is said art.
The definition of art isn’t how it is made, but defining it as whether it evokes emotion is a weird angle. Because then everything is art and it loses meaning to even use the word. It is that which is created by humans. Expressly for the purpose of creating something to show other people, or that could be shown to other people.
If this distinction isn’t made and accepted by people, the future will indeed be bleak. I won’t ever care about anything made by AI. The driving reason I care about my family is because I am human and they are human, they created me, they love me, and they are human like I. The only reason I care about film, photography, illustration, architecture, pokemon, literally name any endeavor of people… is because it is made by people. That’s the only real meaning. Queue the movie premise wherein a human is raised by robots who convincingly act as though they love the human, foster and protect them etc., and we all have that existential question. (It might be a good movie). I would argue that child had been robbed or at least been devoid of the most meaningful relationship we all have ever had, the relationship with the people that raised us, and the people that we encounter and teach us and live and die alongside us.
Robots, AI, they are tools, yes. But nothing they ever produce will be art. If people want to collaborate with AI then you could argue it is art, but only because that person was involved with it. It would be art, sure. Hybrid art if you will, sure. Otherwise, what are we even talking about here? Even in the foreseeable future, when AI can go beyond and make things original, in the way we have learned and create, I would never consider it art. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. It would be imagery. Semantics matter because the minute we don’t make the distinction between human creation and its artistic purpose/significance/potential, and what computers can create, we don’t have definitions for anything, things begin to lose meaning. It would be like metaphysical anarchy. And a moment to opine… would anyone care about a movie made by AI? My god, why would anyone care about a movie that wasn’t made by a human? There’s no point in that. It’s an affront to us.
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It’s not a failure in my understanding, it’s just this definition isn’t satisfactory to me. Primarily, its not clear to me why only humans can make art. Intelligent animals can approximate visual art/paintings. Many animals can sing and dance. We can say that there is a lack of a specific kind of intention behind that “art” but hypothetically if we were to advance the cognition of a non-human species to be capable of intentionally creating art, does it still not count? If an intelligent alien vists Earth from far away, are they incapable of producing art because they are not human? How sufficiently intelligent does a computer need to be before we can say there is the appropriate intention behind the art?
The fundamental shift happening here is that only humans were capable of making something that truly approximated art. So saying humans are a required ingredient feels natural and appropriate. But it’s seems pretty strange and arbitrary when we introduce sufficiently advanced non-human levels of intelligence into our world.
Maybe we can agree on a definition that requires a certain level of intention from a sufficiently advanced form of intelligence to call it art. And maybe AI isn’t there (yet?). But what specific line it needs to cross and why it needs to cross that line at all is still unclear to me.
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That’s just like a marketing director asking the graphic designers to produce a certain kind of image. You wouldn’t credit the former for it no matter what they directed the latter to do. And in any case, they could not do it without someone else doing all the work.
The substance is simple though, it is theft and no further discussion is warranted until that is resolved. Otherwise we just start legitimizing it, which is what is already being done. To give an analogy, it doesn’t matter what some rapist terrorist thinks about policy, he shouldn’t even be allowed to run for President and should be in jail but that’s controlled media for you. Asking the wrong questions. Manufactured consent.
Already addressed this awful argument above that doesn’t hold any water because somehow it always comes up from AI defenders.
No, this is just normalizing theft and allowing the thieves to get away with it. I suppose par for the course in late stage capitalism but it should not be normalized. That’s how you end up with people taking the view that human rights are conditional amongst other cancerous viewpoints.
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Hypothetical Qs: if Pokémon is to start replacing artists with AI (let’s say it’s just cost effective),
- What impact will that have on its future collaborations with other brands and the current artist culture e.g. signing events, songs, anime, other media?
- Will the Pokémon brand still be as popular as it is now?
- What growth prospects can TPC expect with using AI art in their tcg moving forward?
Let’s throw in a previous release as an example of this alternate reality,
JP Stamp Promos - a Ukiyo-e themed Beauty Looking Back Pikachu generated by AI. It looks exactly like the one that we know of, but Arita didn’t draw it,
- Will you be interested in this release and why/why not?
I would stop collecting. Not worth my time, respect etc.
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If Pokemon changed to 100% AI art overnight it’d be a before and after era shift so strong that I would only be interested in collecting the before stuff.
I am married to an artist/illustrator though so it’s a more emotional topic for me. I have helped her at conventions where people take official art online, make it a sillouette in photoshop and then sell it for £3 for a print, undercutting her actual personal designs by quite a margin. It takes less than 5 minutes to steal a design and not care about copyright. AI has some similarities there.
Selling a sillouette of Link for cheap is a more attractive, cheaper purchase over her own home drawn stuff that isn’t tied to an established brand, I don’t blame customers for being ignorant and buying it. How can they know? Is that bad business on her part not to join in? Depends on what you qualify as art. But hers is legal and the others are copyright infringements. Her original stuff is what feels like art. The other is just theft.
I think the arguments presented so far have been quite dismissive of the artists themselves. Some could retrain their skills of course but is an AI Arita the same thing? Not to me. And maybe we’ll never settle on an agreement on this topic
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We aren’t going to see eye to eye here. I say this is the definition and you say it isn’t satisfactory and retort explaining that animals make what we would say is it if it were human. But we only say it when it is human (barring the times where we use poetic license just as when we tongue in cheek say “this is art” to something). We don’t seriously call bird singing art, we call that nature. And I’d say I think most people would agree. I mean after all we as humans created our languages that have definitions of things, and while they evolve or alter, they rarely change drastically or mean something opposite. People will argue until the end time about a lot of things, there will always be discord. But this matter couldn’t be simpler to me, because before we even get into further topics on AI and its implications with art, if we agree on what art is there is no need.
I mean, plain as day. This is one of those definitions that has been the same since the first dictionary in any given language. The moment you say it isn’t by humans, it isn’t art.
To be fair, in my last draft I was going to bring up aliens. They are the organic beings of their worlds, they would have their art. It would be art native them. We are aliens to them. That’s a simple principle. So yes intelligence has a part in this conversation since you want to make the distinctions between animals and humans. Fine. But that isn’t the only prerequisite… then if reached for in this regard, which I have no desire to, I would refine my statement to "that which is created by organic and sentient born things native to a planet, a part of nature. And don’t go saying computers are a part of nature! Computers will never feel and be born from earth as we are. They will never exist like we do. It’s important. We would have significantly more in common with aliens than we ever will with computers.
It doesn’t matter how intelligent computer systems ever become. It is computation, not emotion, not humanity. This is all that matters when talking art. Intelligence is a funny word. It’s just speed and computation. Even at the highest fathomable peak for their existence, that’s all it would ever be. Even if they are creating themselves and they compute destroying us and taking over and being able to fool us into thinking they are human by disguise. It wouldn’t actually be them having what we have. It never would be.
You kinda ignored my emphasis on meaning. The only meaning art has is when it comes from people. I would lose all interest and want to no longer live if humans stopped creating for each other and we left it to the robots. Hypothetically. The only other meaning would be to have kids and love, but how empty our existence would be if human progress halted and the only progress was efficiency and convenience.
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Just want to say that I agree with you here.
Also what PFM said is exactly what I was trying to explore. It feels like AI art shouldn’t be art to me, but I’m unable to come up with parameters that both doesn’t overly limit the bounds of currently accepted art and logically excludes AI in a way that’s satisfying to me.
The answer that AI isn’t created by humans doesn’t feel satisfactory to me. There are circumstances where people use AI all the time in legitimate art. Personally I use AI generative fill and AI denoising all the time in my photography, and that’s perfectly acceptable. But at the same time someone putting “sunset” as a prompt and using the first image the AI spits out doesn’t feel like art. Where’s the line between the two examples? Is there one?
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The moment they do this im selling everything without hesitation and not buying anything new. I will not support a company that no longer supports artists
Thought I’d chime in my two cents as an artist on the forefront of all of this.
AI “art” can only mash pixels together. For any algorithm that isn’t private (this is an important distinction, I’ll get to it below), AI is being fed artwork by scraping images from the internet without the original artists’ consent. It’s been proven time and time again that AI “art” directly copies the original(s), down to trying to replicate the watermark or signature. Many artists (myself included) have found our work in AI databases, and have also found replicas of our work via AI out in the wild.
So why is this an issue? The biggest problem here is that artists do not consent to having their work stolen or scraped. AI cannot make decisions in the way a human artist can. AI does not and cannot learn from others the way a human artist can. Human artists study lines, form, shape, color, and yes, other artists. I’ve seen some people compare people doing artist studies to AI copying others’ work, and this is a complete mischaracterization of what is exactly going on, both with artist studies and AI.
Artist studies are a way to do just that- study. You don’t claim you made the original, you don’t try to pass the original off as your own work, many don’t even post their artist studies, and you absolutely under no circumstances try to sell it. Artist studies are for trying new ways to do things and processes to bring into your own art. They are not the final product.
AI can only collage pixels together. It copies other works not by any human methods (line, color, etc), but instead goes pixel by pixel. This is not “learning”.
You wouldn’t order food at a restaurant and call yourself a chef, except in this case, the ingredients are stolen, the kitchen is being held hostage, and you receive a dish resembling a salad, but upon closer inspection, the lettuce hasn’t been washed and the balsamic is bleach.
Artists who make art with the use of AI, such as feeding their own art into a private program that they coded themself, making fractal art, etc, are completely different. They use artificial intelligence, yes, but not in the same way as open source AI. The computer calculations are part of the creative process in this way, as all existing materials are their own.
This is a very near and dear subject to my heart- apologies for the wall of text above.
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How was AI used in making it? “AI piece” “AI art” “AI” is no longer a sufficiently descriptive, detailed term.
Something we never got to, Again, is that most statements lack the nuance in the term “AI” and what work exactly is done, whether by the AI or a human with an AI tool.
I really like the detail and info that @citriina added above:
@koala , what do you think of this:
Tools exist that utilize AI to make brushes, lines, area selection, fading, filler, background, and many features quicker and smoother to do. Using these does not constitute “AI art” IMO, just as a better paint brush or a custom drum setup does not constitute… “not art(?)”. As an artist, I’d LOVE to use these methods to translate my rhythms into notation, or use two bass drum pedals, or a foot pedal to loop a riff, for example.
I don’t think this was answered correctly or fully, and I DO think that a definition of degrees can get closer to actually excluding some AI “art”. The forms that we SHOULD exclude anyway.
A prompt entered into a simple AI generator is not nearly as creative, as it does not include a deep level of intention or nuance. I DON’T know the amount of intention that is required for art, but I DO know that if you take the first or second output, and make no significant changes, whether based on personal preference or goal, it’s not going to qualify. Just like if you pointed the camera wildly and pushed the button… But what if you INTENDED to snap while wildly spinning? 
Also, I’ve noticed that a lot of uses of “art” in this thread seem to refer to painted, drawn, or hand-manipulated in some way, but that misses non-manual arts, like audio and photography. There are also AI music generators. No live-performing AI, yet. 
This is important to understand and incorporate, because of the nuance that it introduces. (Hence why @pfm asked his question, I think.)
Perhaps a good definition of “Art” is this:
“A creative, work of media or performance which is created through iterative or layered efforts either by hand or with tools.”
*This includes AI or non-AI tools
*Manual medium or not
*Collaborative pieces
*Performative pieces
*Interactive arts like conversation, debate, jams, and improvisation
*Excludes purely AI generated works (ie. “create ___” “Done!”)
*Excludes minimal effort work
edited for clarity
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As an artist, once you start drawing your 'Chus, you have chosen the examples which you are copying from. You could seek out others if you didn’t like the first ones. Unlike AI, which made no conscious decision about it’s output, YOU made a conscious decision. BUT THIS is where we get to your distinction, which I like:
I think you mean, someone is massaging the prompts and output to create a visual work. The use of AI in any piece requires the nuanced details in order to determine it’s status as art. So, YES, it could be. But not always. At that point, where a master of the keyboard is working, THEY are using the AI as a tool. A novice is not. Then we have to consider the purpose of the work. Is it just a gig, and the “artist” has no attachment? It’s not art. If the artist is going over and over it to express themself in the work, then it certainly IS art.
I think eventually when AI becomes a feature and not the final product, is where AI becomes as somewhat broadly accepted. It offers the convenience of physical tools that are expensive and time-consuming to accumulate, but you still demonstrate autonomy in doing all the brushwork. There is a strong disconnect between verbal inputs and illustration that irks many because the tactility of physical craftsmanship is absent. We often romanticise pictures painting a thousand words, not writing up a thousand words to paint a picture
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