I'm just checking out the r/dalle2 after seeing it mentioned in the New York Magazine article, "Will DALL-E the AI Artist Take My Job? I was unnerved by how well DALL-E 2 mimics a human photo editor. So I put my AI competition to the test."
I like the elephant paintings, but part of what I'm liking is badness, and I feel liberated from knowing there's no delusional artist behind it... though I am a longtime fan of the subreddit r/delusionalartists.
But, of course, I want the human artist to win. I think! The author of the NY Magazine article, Megan Paetzhold, does win in this competition that she controlled against the AI in its current form:
[M]y job as photo editor is to find or produce the visual elements that accompany New York Magazine articles. The mechanics of how DALL-E and I do our work are pretty similar. We both receive textual “prompts” — DALL-E from its users, mine from editors. We then synthesize that information to produce visuals that are (hopefully) compelling and accurate to the ideas in play. My toolkit includes a corporate Getty subscription, countless hours of Photoshop experience, and an art degree that cost me an offensive amount of money. DALL-E’s toolkit is the millions of visual data points that it’s been trained on, and the algorithms that allow it to link those concepts together to create images.... DALL-E 2 cannot work with photos of real people (including public figures)....
That last limitation makes DALL-E incapable of doing assignments from prompts like Curtis Sliwa has 16 cats. So the artists must, at all costs, keep DALL-E from getting its robot hands on a corporate Getty subscription. But it's more than just what you can cut and paste and manipulate into your creation. There's some human spark of creativity, isn't there? And yet, the computer can have its own spark, and who's to say it won't be more enchanting to us viewers? We shall see, and I maintain that it is the viewers' experience that matters. Art isn't a jobs program for folks who fancy themselves artists.
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I see a Spanish guitar, a Telecaster type, a nice semi-hollow body plus what looks like an acoustic steel string. Missed the cigars.
I've always thought money could be made with oil-on-velvet paintings of Elvis playing poker with dogs, but since the program can't use real people I guess that's out.
And I'm too old to go to Bad Art School myself. More an idea guy.
Is anyone else a fan of museumofbadart.org? It's a great collection.
'I like the elephant paintings, but part of what I'm liking is badness'
Like Narr, 'Dogs Playing Poker' comes to mind.
Or Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, and James Dean hanging out in a diner.
I had a friend in high school (from Central America) whose family had a velvet painting of a bare-breasted Mayan princess on the living room wall...
Midjourney is a similar system to Dalle.
I though this was pretty impressive...
The last painting seems to have the elephant use its trunk on the fretboard, which is brilliant. A third appendage has such possibilities as a movable capo.
As a software developer I always think that it is interesting that no one see the art in the AI itself. The computer didn't build itself and it is only doing what programmers told it to do. So the algorithm to create the art is the true art in this case and the artwork is just the output.
Yeah, it's a transition period. We did this with chess in my youth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Levy_(chess_player)#Computer_chess_bet
By now there is no contest at all.
That's how AI advancement works.
Good art in our era has nothing to do with the visuals, what our eyes see, it has to do with the story of the artist. We are inundated with visuals, accurate representations of anything we'd ever want to see from all over the world, our portraits of the rich and famous people pasted like kitsch on supermarket checkout stands.
The computer can make art, but it doesn't have a compelling story or pseudo philosophical card telling us the motivations and intent that went into an elephant playing a guitar. Now, if we were a cooperative society, that would be an invitation to make our own story, build our own meaning, what modern art supposedly was intending to do. But we're not, we're competitive and consumeristic, and the computer, in effect, robbed the pulpit from human artists who yearn to command the stage of societal prophet.
Maybe that's the art, not the art of either the human or the computer, but the story here, the emotions, the interplay of attention, reminding us that the medium is now not the message, the message is disintegrated from the medium, but human artists are stuck between their true intent and how they have been trained to manipulate language to couch their egos within their chosen oeuvre.
Reminding one too of the conflict in women's sports. Who is a woman? The one who presents as such, winning the contest, not a woman in reality except as a posture of self-asserted representation. Or the ones whose physicality shaped them from birth, a biological encounter with the world in physical and social ways to compete among those with similar shared experiences of integrated physical and psychological identity.
Maybe the elephant playing the guitar is itself the conclusion in the room that we all want to ignore. It can play guitar in a generated way, an object of creation by a non-biological algorithm, but it is not real. Neither in life as elephants can't play guitar. Nor as art, since art is being defined as the expression of biologically human creativity, not just as something mimicking for the sake of competition.
We are trained to see it as something with depth, but the depth is an illusion, and maybe points to the reality that all art in our era is likewise an illusion, a trans-itory, going into nowhere, lacking integrated substance, and wondering why we feel so parched.
A real elephant would play guitar with the tip of its trunk.
"and wondering why we feel so parched."
Drink!
The porn business is quite excited about these new possibilities.
Althouse notes...
"Art isn't a jobs program for folks who fancy themselves artists."
Perhaps not today, but it certainly was under the WPA in the 1930s. The Federal Art Project from 1935-1943 "established more than 100 community art centers throughout the country, researched and documented American design, commissioned a significant body of public art without restriction to content or subject matter, and sustained some 10,000 artists and craft workers during the Great Depression," according to Wikipedia.
I read the article and followed the link to the DALL-E site. It was interesting seeing the variations on a theme that the AI would create given a set of instructions. Steampunk mad scientist teddy bears!
I thought of a poker picture, too, but it was the Republican Presidents Playing Poker and the Democratic Presidents Playing Poker paintings -- our century's version of dogs playing poker.
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