What a great thing this didn't exist in the past. We likely wouldn't have had any of the amazing artworks that we have now. Imagine an AI generated Mona Lisa, Nightwatch or Sistine Chapel ceiling because prompting would have been so much cheaper than paying Leonardo, Rembrandt or Michelangelo...
Now extrapolate to all other artforms. Sculpture seems safe, for now, but only barely so.
I hear this often and it's such a strange view of art, like the only thing that matters is scale and speed. It's a perspective so colored by mechanization that it fails to account for other philosophies in art. Think of what, say the Arts and Crafts movement was all about!
That is unlike any artist that I know and I know quite a lot of them. They love their work and the process but they also need to eat. And that included those mentioned above.
There is a tremendous amount of "art" that is produced for purely commercial reasons. It employs many thousands of people. These roles are definitely threatened by image generators.
Agree that if you are Artist this is not going to be a big concern to you.
Also, many (I would even venture to say most) of the great artists most people know of earned their bread with intermittent commercial contracts, even rote advertising commissions in the 19th/20th century.
Art is about creating something from scratch. This isn't creating anything but cobbling together elements of scraped/stolen content to generate an imitation of prior work.
I think this is a fundamentally adverserial mindset and so you should be prepared for others to treat you in kind (i.e. to attack you and minimize the value of your work)
Why am I getting the impression that it's your ego that got hurt?
If you like art, then you don't necessarily care about the process, you just want it to keep being produced. Artists obviously want to engage in their profession, because they have the passion to pursue the creation of art. Said passion is now twisted into gatekeeping.
When you take a look around the internet, you can see an incredible amount of beautiful art being made through manual processes by artists and they voluntarily publish a lot of their work for free. The cost and personal enrichment argument is pretty weak here. If anything, the causality could even go in the opposite direction: Artists might want to earn money to pursue their passion.
Let's be honest for a second here. It's legitimate to feel that human created art is expensive and cost prohibitive for your particular needs. Art for professional or personal purposes is usually commissioned, aka made to order, hence it cannot be a mass market commodity.
These manual processes are also inherently limited due to the fact that the entire scene (character, outfit, pose, lighting, perspective) is baked in. If there is a process that doesn't have this limitation that's great, but if the lifting of limitations in one area isn't enough to counteract the loss in quality in other areas that the manual process didn't use to run into? Suddenly that is gate keeping even though the issue at hand is that the quality isn't good enough yet?
There's also an obvious parallel to frameworks and libraries in software development. If the software ecosystem lacks flexibility and customizability or has the wrong abstraction for the problem at hand, you will need to drop down a layer and do things the old fashioned way. A manual artist can produce a character template, a set of clothes or a background design from scratch and combine it with the higher level tools. An AI-only artist is inherently limited in that regard and yet that's supposed to be the future?
I think you are agreeing with me since my point was that AI is a force multiplier and will enable manual artists to create (and iterate) faster and on much bigger projects.
Prices will go down, not because people can directly generate art, but because you could hire an artist to complete the same scope of work for 1/10th the cost.
The artists I know didn't make money from art to begin with. One is a part time baker who illustrates his life in his journal, thousands upon thousands of sketches and paintings documenting his entire life. That's the person I commission when I want to make a nice personalised presents. Of course I could ask chatgpt to shit me out the blandest drawing humanity as laid eyes upon for free but that's not the point.
It seems like what people like you want to build is a matrix style "life in a pod" world, the most optimal way to spend life: as cheap as possible, as easy as possible, as bland as possible, no struggle, no hardships, no efforts, nothing matters as long as it's cheap and "better" (while not being able to define "better")
Modernism wasn't about "pushing limits of what's possible" either. It was first and foremost a period style itself. That style included experimentation and "pushing some limits" but art in general wasn't that, then, before or after (which is also why those limits went right back, and literature for example returned to far more classical forms after modernism's era passed - it didn't kept pushing at limits).
An aspect of art is this pursuit of pushing boundaries within the confines of what is considered good. Would an artist with an infinite image generator be interested in pushing said boundaries? Maybe but they will definitely miss out on getting stuck on an idea and coming up something completely new
AI isn't a tool for creating art in the same way as a paintbrush or clay. AI is describing a painting you want, then having someone else creating the artwork for you. You aren't doing art in the same way hiring a sculptor isn't doing sculpting.
AI is well on the way to eliminating human made art since the skills to actually make art will be lost to the skill of being able to describe art. You know, since the only thing that matter is reducing costs.
AI is a productivity tool.
Instead of working on a single graphic, the artist can now work on the entire marketing campaign.
Instead of spending a year working on background special effects for a single scene, one could now personally produce full featured films.
It will be a golden age where the core differentiating factor is true talent and ideas and execution and not any gatekeeping by degrees, connections or budget.
A very large fraction of everything we collect as great art marking our history was made on commission. The GGP is showing their complete ignorance of the history of art.
>Art is about pushing limits of what's possible and AI just raises those limits
Says who?
Being an artist means different things to different people, but at the very least I believe it requires an interest in your craft, a desire for personal growth, and a yearning to express yourself.
I think of it more as that AI will destroy the profit motive in all things, not just art. What we used to think of as talent/skill/experience will no longer be scarce, because anyone will be able to make anything with a prompt. The perceived value will be in wholes built of valueless parts (gestalts).
AI is incompatible with capitalism, but the world isn't ready for that. So we'll have a prolonged period of intense aggregation where more and more value is attributed to systems of control that already have more than they could ever spend, long after the free parts could have provided for basic human needs.
In other words, the masters existed because they had benefactors and a market for their art and inventions. Today there are better artists and inventors toiling in obscurity, but they won't be remembered because they merely make rent. Which gets harder every day, so there's a kind of deification of the working class hero NPC mindset and simultaneously no bandwidth for ingenuity (what we once thought of as divine inspiration).
Terence McKenna predicted this paradox that the future's going to get weirder and weirder back in 1998:
(McKenna tangent). I like this version of that talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL0yfxDe6jE. It's about 12 minutes and animated with some hand-drawn whiteboard drawings. Good stuff.
That's true, but you forgot a key piece in this puzzle. The AI can only produce things that already exist. It can combine new things, this is why you can it for a picture of Jesus planting a flag on the Moon. But it only works because Jesus is a concrete concept that already exists in our world. If you ask for a picture of jacquesm planting a flag on the Moon the result will be nonsensical.
Nano Banana 2 has an image search tool that looks up pictures of things and uses them in the context (and arguably, an agent could eventually figure out who jacquesm is and hunt for a photo).
However, I tried "a picture of jacquesm planting a flag on the Moon" for a laugh, and I have to hand it to Google as the person was in a spacesuit, as they should be, and totally unidentifiable! :-D
I have the creativity of someone not at all creative (couldn't even come up with a good analogy) and the stuff I created with AI art tools is awful compared to what I see from "AI artists" on social media.
Just being able to generate a vision and then be able to capture it in a prompt is an art within itself.
Ironically we live in a time that, overall, is probably better for artists than the world any of those guys grew up in. People have always valued art but not the artists, and many artists through history, including the famous ones, died broke with their works only posthumously attaining value.
These days, through commissions, art is a much more viable profession than it ever was.
It was until ~2021 and it going rapidly downhill. I know some people that are really good at art and they got work on commission from publications, venues and so on. They have seen a significant drop in their bookings and the ones that they do get negotiate hardball because (1) everybody else is desperate too and (2) if they can't get to a deal then AI is now an alternative for the not-so-discerning public which was a fairly large chunk of the usecases.
So you were making book covers? Ah, so sorry. Nobody really cared that it was you.
And you can probably extend that to what's between the covers...
I'll just be extremely candid: a lot of people don't give a shit about these art pieces or art in general. It's okay if you do, there is nothing wrong with that, but it's a myopic view that the world would be worse off if we didn't have a portrait of Mona Lisa.
That's not the point, but okay. I'm simply pointing out the fact that there'd still be art, just not those pieces created by those specific people and the world would be just fine. Humanity would've fared okay if Nano Banana was created 500 years ago.
I disagree. On the one hand, yeah, On This Day... 1776 is terrible, and it is sad to compare it to Requiem for a Dream or Pi, but even in this age where AI is available, we see tons of critically successful art being made without the use of AI.
Absolutely not a chance. You see, in the past there was nothing to train it on. And that's sort of the point: the only reason that this AI image generation works at all is because it is lifting on the hard work of the people that had the skills, put the time and the effort in.
Now extrapolate to all other artforms. Sculpture seems safe, for now, but only barely so.