Tweeted RJ Palmer, a digital artist, quoted in "An A.I.-Generated Picture Won an Art Prize. Artists Aren’t Happy. 'I won, and I didn’t break any rules,' the artwork’s creator says" (NYT).
Who cares about art contests? And really, who cares about the security of the careers of artists? What really matters is the quality of the viewers' experience.
And yet, the viewers' experience may be degraded if we know this just came out of a computer. Maybe we'll look at fantastically great images but we won't care, because there's no human consciousness behind it. That's similar to the question whether we will enjoy having sex enclosed in a virtual reality sex-sarcophagus.
Also, there's the question of time. The computer works fast and — depending on the technique and the scale of their images — artists take a long time. If you want something human-made, you'll have to pay more. But maybe you don't want something human-made that much.
My big question is why isn't art a whole lot better? Why aren't we seeing great things every day? It's hard to bemoan the loss of human art when we had already diverted nearly all of our attention to photographic images.
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Art sucks because art now has to toe the political line, tow it too, for that matter. Artists are not raised up to public prominence for their talents, but for their politics. It's all in that book 'Hookng. Up" by Tom Wolfe if you want to read more by somebody who has put in the time to really make the argument.
My son in law is a sculptor and is doing fine. Maybe AI is not much of a threat to sculptors. His wife, my daughter, worked in an art gallery in Venice CA which was very high end and the paintings there looked to me like crap.
His work is not to my taste but many others seem to want it Here is some of his work. Not my thing but they are doing very well.
Some guy taped a banana to a wall and was trying to sell it for $250,000. Then, someone stole the banana and was tracked down, arrested, and the banana was returned and taped back on the wall. It promptly was relisted for sale for $1 million.
This just happened too, like 2-3 years ago if I recall. What do I think about artists?
minisucleviolin.jpeg
#imperceptibleviolinmusic
@notsostarvingartists
"My big question is why isn't art a whole lot better?"
Well, why isn't sugar a whole lot sweeter? Maybe the human capacity to enjoy art is limited, and will be satiated by whatever is on offer. What would it feel like, to be exposed to "better" art? Would you become addicted, needing ever more of it? Would your need for art be completely satisfied, once and for all?
"Who cares about art contests? And really, who cares about the security of the careers of artists?"
Says a non-artist.
"That's similar to the question whether we will enjoy having sex enclosed in a virtual reality sex-sarcophagus."
You say that like it's a bad thing : )
"My big question is why isn't art a whole lot better?"
Now this is the 64-thousand dollar question.
Is Thomas Kinkade the best we can do?
Every time I fly I wonder why the planes I'm in go the exact same speed as the planes in 1960s, except the service and food are worse.
Exactly. But why start with art AI is much more useful in replacing lawyers.
In 1979 I programmed an idle PDP11/34 coomputer with a color graphics display to constantly build new art of various kinds over the existing screen, a pixel at a time in place so it took a minute to get the new object up. The guards spent all the off time they could manage sitting in the darked room watching the thing.
Started with Mondrian-type and graduated to lots of things with lots of textures from various mathematical objects like castrophes, swallowtail catastrophes in particular.
It was visually very relaxing and fascinating. Would have been good in bars, was suggested.
Not a new screen on an existing screen, but a new object on the existing screen over whatever was "in back" of it.
The winning image in the article is stunning, like a flawlessly brutal AI chess game. I am waiting for luminous AI holograms that you can walk around in.
He won the Digital Arts/Digitally-Manipulated category. I could see complaining if he won an oil paint category where a robot painted it or something, but his digital manipulation is just more advanced than the others.
'Maybe AI is not much of a threat to sculptors.'
Cough, 3D printers, cough...
'In 1979 I programmed an idle PDP11/34 coomputer with a color graphics display...'
Pre-Macintosh I remember programming (crudely as I'm not a programer) a computer to print out a circle and a square of different colors.
The first job I had as a designer was taking a rough draft from a Macintosh and recreating it using specced type from a type house and pasting it up with graphics onto a board to make camera-ready art.
The Mac at that time wasn't capable of outputting the necessary quality...
He got a prize at the Colorado state fair. Champion of the sheep show has more prestige. On the other hand, I can see why a lot of graphics artists are nervous. That's good book cover art, or ad copy for the right product. And companies paid for that level of detail/ intricacy. If that part of the job is now automated....
AI chess games aren't AI. It's just a computer. Beginning computer programming classes ask you to write a perfect tic-tac-toe player. Nothing's actually happening, thinking-wise. Adventurous students will play out all possible games and drudge students will put in a few rules about if this then that. Chess gets more of the drudge solutions.
Maybe AI is not much of a threat to sculptors.
Give it time. 3-D printing and advanced CNC capabilities mean that it will eventually come.
I broke my "never follow a link to the NYT" rule just to get an idea, and that's what I got for the brief second I was allowed access.
In an interesting piece of synchronicity, van Creveld has a post at "As I Please" about the art forger van Meeregen that raises some of the same questions this does.
For my part, I wonder how "the artwork's creator" differs from "the artist."
There are all sorts of problems with what's the computer's work. I used to try to compress the word list from Webster's II unabridged dictionary, using Huffman coding and probabilities for the alphabetized list, and got it smaller and smaller, eventually under 8 bits per word; but at that point there were so many ad-hoc rules that I'd put in that the program was tailored to the word list rather than doing compression. You could say that the size of the program has to be added to the size of the compressed word list. Anyway there might be all sorts of artistic encoding by humans in this program, things done to make the program "work."
"Who cares about art contests? And really, who cares about the security of the careers of artists? What really matters is the quality of the viewers' experience."
You got me thinking that I want to go see one of those weightlifting contests where men dress up as women crush the competition. For my money, that would be a good show. Maybe not as good as Andy Kaufman wrestling the ladies, but still pretty good. Good thing computers aren't getting a big T rush from their victories in these art contests. I don't guess. Maybe they do. "You may be a STROOOONG artist, but I got the trophy. Yeeaahh." --AI Heather Swanson.
I guess one might care about art contests if one were interested in competition and human excellence. I'd call computer produced art a "print" I think. Maybe you could have mixed competitions. Who knows. We all just be brains in a vat someday if we are very lucky.
"Started with Mondrian-type and graduated to lots of things with lots of textures from various mathematical objects like castrophes, swallowtail catastrophes in particular."
I recall in 8th grade, learning that there is a mathematical expression to describe any imaginable surface. It occurred to me that this would necessarily apply to the surfaces that my female classmates applied to their seats. After considerable thought, I concluded that regarding such an expression would not have the same effect as regarding the object it represented. And yet, that effect is due to the projection of an image onto the retina, which is then encoded as a pattern of neuron excitations in various parts of the brain. Perhaps if my powers of mathematical visualization were sufficiently enhanced ...
"AI is much more useful in replacing lawyers."
True. That's because what is commonly called AI is actually more like artificial stupidity. Artificial intelligence is the kind of intelligence that concludes Bob is more likely to buy a pair of shoes today than Ed, because Bob bought three pairs of shoes yesterday, and Ed hasn't bought any shoes all year.
With today’s technology, you could program a few robotic arms to paint on canvas. It could mix its own colors on a pallet using hardware store paint analysis. It could even clean its own brushes. Real time hd camera Convolutional neural net feature reduction could provide feedback on color streaking and brush loading. Probably been done already.
I want to plaster my basement wall and have a robot paint the last supper on the wet plaster, including patina.
They could learn to code.
MichaelK,
Those were awesome!
For Michael K re: sculpture - I saw this recently: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/22/elgin-marbles-british-museum-greece/
While it isn't AI creating art, it is computers reproducing anything that can be scanned. Probably not a great leap to merge AI with the stone carving machine.
My computer's ever changing wallpaper is courtesy of a digital artist who, tho' no longer active, seems to have had a lot of fun with it. Website's still active: https://visualparadox.com/
Michael K,
I saw an article where a computer had mapped some of the Elgin Marbles, and was used to create an exact replica of a horse head, using a robot to sculpt the marble. It doesn't seem too far fetched to see the same thing for other sculptures.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11130735/A-horses-head-carved-robot-bid-make-replicas-Elgin-sculptures.html
This is the natural extension of the idea that art doesn't require "technique" or "skill". Modern art is all about "intention" or "ideas". So a person with no dance training or skill can mow the lawn and file for an NEA grant on the grounds (ha) that the lawn mowing was a modern dance performance intended to expose the idiocy of modern suburban life. If you are connected with the "in-crowd" your grant application will be approved, because you are known as a serious artist.
is it ART or PLAGIARY
Blogger Joe Smith said...
'Maybe AI is not much of a threat to sculptors.'
Cough, 3D printers, cough...
I think there is more to it, like kilns and multiple layers but I assume that anything can be duplicated. Joe Biden has shown us that.
Every time I fly I wonder why the planes I'm in go the exact same speed as the planes in 1960s....
Pssssst! Nobody tell Joe Smith about physics, okay?
"AI chess games aren't AI. It's just a computer."
OK but they are getting there, Chess games that use supervised training of Deep Neural Nets based on old games are running. This is like the game Go.
"While Deep Blue, with its capability of evaluating 200 million positions per second,[41] was the first computer to face a world chess champion in a formal match,[3] it was a then-state-of-the-art expert system, relying upon rules and variables defined and fine-tuned by chess masters and computer scientists. In contrast, current chess engines such as Leela Chess Zero typically use supervised machine learning systems that train a neural network to play, developing its own internal logic rather than relying upon rules defined by human experts." (WIKI)
This is amazing, each row of data is a complete chess game in notation, and you have thousands of historical games (rows), and the DNN or LSTM training process calculates weights used later to predict the best next move during actual games, and the modeler does not really need to know anything else.
As Heinlein said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Jupiter, I believe you would have been looking for something like these: https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/66538/how-do-i-draw-a-pair-of-buttocks
I think we have hit the limits of our ability to take in and appreciate art, whether visual, music, dramatic or whatever. In Shakespeare's day, a play was something you might see once in a month, if not once in a year or more. Now we watch two movies in an evening and then watch a rerun of Seinfeld. The result is that we feed our aesthetic needs with crap. Computer generated crap is just the next stage in our cultural rot and debasement.
Completely agree that art is (or should be) about the viewer's response/reaction. We have bought a lot of original art over the years, and there isn't any central theme or type of art. In each case, however, the piece somehow "spoke" to us, and said "take me home with you" (I know how corny that sounds, but so it goes). When we both had that reaction, we bought the piece, and sometimes more than one piece by that artist, and we've never regretted our acquisitions. You might think our collection is a hodgepodge, and maybe that's right, because we now don't have enough wall space to hang everything, and even so we bought another two pieces from Scottish artists on a recent trip. Good art won't match your sofa, and our art doesn't even fit together in any coherent pattern. However, each of the pieces brings back a (mostly) happy memory, and collectively would (if they could speak) tell you one story of our lives together, all in all a happy life. Some of our friends express confusion about the wide range of types of art displayed, which is fine; we're not trying to communicate anything to anyone other than each other.So, for us art is very personal, so much so that we don't generally share the stories around the pieces with anyone other than the kids, to the extent they're interested.
I don’t think we need art as much as we used to, for a variety of reasons (as mentioned above, the quantity of ‘art’ today is really a sensory overload, and there is a lot of crap that we don’t need). One reason I think is our own ability to make art ourselves, for our own pleasure. I’ve made metal sculptures, built barns, made wooden shelves and tables, built a car, made Viking shields, a couple of short movies. None of it is very good in the traditional ‘art’ sense, but it’s worth it - from an aesthetic reason - for myself.
There are so many tools available that one can become one’s own artist.
I also a program computers as part of my job - all programming tools are effectively free. Available to everyone. Just because you use those tools doesn’t make you a programmer (that’s why we have so many poorly written programs, today). Similarly with art. There’s a very low entry cost. Finding real art (sic) is harder, now, when everyone thinks they are an artist.
I was comparing this development to photography before Althouse's final comment, but for a very different reason. Photography has more or less already gone through this, not with AI, but with the invention and spread of digital photography. Every new development made it easier for more people to make great photos. First eliminate the need for film and developing, then digital SLRs added quality, then the quality of point and shoot cameras got better, then mirrorless bridged the gap, and phone cameras became ubiquitous, and now phone cameras rival digital SLR images for most purposes outside of commercial uses and large prints.
Professional photographers hated every step of this. Barriers to entry that existed for decades disappeared and hobbyists started selling landscape prints, did weddings for unstainable prices, and sold or even gave away photos to newspapers magazines and TV stations. FWIW, I observed this as an active hobbyist who never seriously tried to enter the field to earn cash, though I have had occasional jobs and sales.
It took a while for things to shake out but some former pros quit, many new ones started, and everyone had to figure out a new way to build a career, usually via multiple streams of income.
I expect the same to happen with hand-drawn or pseudo-hand-drawn art.
Me. AI replaces human artists because they've better at being artists. Men replace women at being women. It's all good.
Completely agree that art is (or should be) about the viewer's response/reaction.
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unless atist is doing his art unconscios or blindfolded he is first perceiver of creation >> so what about it artist ?
Michael K says: "His work is not to my taste ..."
Yeah, I see what you mean. Very well executed, but definitely aimed at a very particular set of tastebuds. H.P. Lovecraft meets H.R. Giger.
On the other hand, Giger died rich, so what do I know.
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