But real art is not being sold for plebs with the promise of sticking it to “millionaire” artists that are all “full of themselves”.
“From a distance, Portrait of Edmond de Belamy, which has just sold at Christie’s in New York for $432,000 (£337,000), looks almost plausible. Up close, however, the paintwork becomes a grid of mechanical-looking dots, the man’s face a golden blur with black holes for eyes. Look into those eyes. They show no sign of feeling or life. Did a computer make this? The answer is yes. The first artwork generated by AI to be sold at Christie’s, its impressive price would seem to suggest that in future we will get computers to make art for us. Robot van Gogh will harmlessly cut its ear off and robot Picasso will be a genius, minus the misogyny. Is this the future AI art visionaries such as the French collective Obvious, which programmed this “painter” by getting it to compare its own work with 15,000 pre-20th century portraits, have in mind? Or are they just, God forbid, making a fast buck from gullible art collectors? Because believing the algorithm that knocked this up to be in any meaningful way an “artist” is like thinking your voice-interaction programme is out to get you. Dream on. Computers would need to replicate human consciousness before they could replicate the funny thing humans do called “art”. Art is a way in which human consciousness expresses itself, and is equally true of the earliest cave art, Rembrandt’s portraits and Duchamp’s urinal. And that is what is missing from Portrait of Edmond Bellamy. Art is a way humans communicate ideas, perceptions and feelings to each other. It has no existence outside the human passion to communicate. So in what meaningful sense can an AI replica of certain physical traits of old master paintings be called art? For a robot to really make art, it would need an autonomous mind that was emotional as well as rational. No AI developer has yet claimed to be anywhere near achieving that and if they ever do, their creation will probably have better things to do than paint portraits – like destroy humanity. Maybe afterwards robots will invent their own kind of art, but it won’t be some poor pastiche of human genius. It will be beyond anything we organics could imagine."
I suspect this was made with the whole “Art collection as tax avoidance scheme” thing in mind.
why don’t we cut the middle man and just deal in prompts?
Cutting people is illegal
ok can we cut them out instead
No, cutting people without their consent is illegal, cuz boy, I did done cut quite a kinky bitch back in the day, as did I enjoy getting my dinky shredded like it was a manatee in a boat propeller. Fuck, it was so weird masturbating for the next half a year…Jesus…getting a left-leaning boner just thinking about it…
I’m sure this is meant as a joke. But, really, prompts are the only part of AI art that is actually creative. Especially if someone has been trying to fine tune what they want for a while, the prompt might actually have something interesting in it.
Even though memes are shared as images, it’s often the text that’s the important and funny bit. The meme image is just context for the words.
I’m not saying I’m actually interested in reading people’s AI prompts. But, there might be an interesting idea in that prompt that the person could express in a way that’s not boring and soulless like GenAI tends to be.
This came up back on Reddit in the “what’s that book?” sub. Someone posted asking about a book; they had 6 lines of preamble about why they wanted to reread this, and 55 lines that were an excerpt from the book. This is normally a slam dunk–it’s pretty trivial to search for literal text. But nobody could find it. Discussion with the user led to the revelation that they’d asked AI about a book and described a scene they remembered, and the AI had responded with a title and “excerpt” matching what the user described. But then the user still couldn’t find the book, so they posted the “excerpt” to the subreddit. I.e., they were asking for a book containing an AI hallucination, rather than just describing the book to us the way they had to the AI. In fact the story they were searching for was “Harrison Bergeron,” one of the most commonly asked-about things on the subreddit, but nobody recognized it until we understood that the excerpt was slop made up in response to a scene they misremembered as part of the story.
It’s a frustrating time to be a human on the internet.
Man, that sucks. It’s really annoying how sycophantic these companies have made their chatbots, which makes this worse.
But, I think by the very nature of how chatbots work, you can’t fix that problem. Chatbots simulate what text is likely to follow other text.
If someone online has definitely read a book that really exists, and they describe a scene they remember from that book, the clear pattern online is that someone will say “Oh yeah, that’s the book X by author Y”. Some people might say “I’ve never heard of that book”, but it’s likely they might just not say anything. If we’re looking at a kind of forum with upvotes and downvotes, the person who found the real book will be the most upvoted.
So, that’s the pattern the LLM trains on. It knows that when someone posts a question like that, the best answer is one where someone names the book and types out the passage in the book.
It would be nice if the chatbot would instead say “I don’t know that book” or “That book doesn’t exist”.
But, it can’t do that, because it doesn’t “know” anything. Everything the chatbots put out is a hallucination. It’s just that some hallucinations are more useful. It has been trained millions of times on patterns when the passage someone remembers is “It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times”, so when it hallucinates about that sequence of words, its hallucination is bound to be more helpful. But, if what someone remembers doesn’t exist, or is obscure enough that it’s not in the training data, things break. Then it follows the general pattern used for every other book, and comes up with a “useful” answer that doesn’t match any actual book.
It’s definitely in the nature of the current-gen systems. It’s possible to imagine other ways to train chatbots that wouldn’t favor bullshitting in the same way, though. The way they currently are isn’t a way they necessarily have to be.
Anyway, it’s very clearly a case where it would have been better to cut out the middleman and just share the prompt, which was my point in sharing it.
I would actually like to read people’s AI prompts.
Yeah, one of the things that I WILL say there’s an art to… is trying to get Genmoji to generate emojis of copyrighted things without triggering its programming. All creativity goes into basically doing everything you can to walk around the obvious
I think I’d rather read someone’s prompt instead of having them paste me the output. I can always run it myself if I want, but a lot of the time I’d rather cut out the AI
I think most of the time that’s true. But, not always.
For example, I’ve seen people put up funny “remixes” of the “distracted boyfriend” meme. A lot of time they take historical figures, or celebrities, or characters from movies, or something that’s in the news. Now, I prefer the lo-fi versions of those memes where someone just spends 2 minutes in Paint and slaps a few photos together. I’ve also seen GenAI versions, and occasionally they’re good, even if I have an aversion to GenAI stuff.
Now, if the GenAI prompt were just something like “Distracted boyfriend meme but the boyfriend is Trump, the girlfriend is Lindsay Graham and the other girl is Putin”, that might be funny, and you can just know in your head what it looks like. That’s even a good lo-fi way to do it when everybody knows the meme well and can just imagine it. But, if you have a specific idea in mind that’s hard to convey, it can be different.
Sometimes the prompt is hundreds of words long and has to describe the various people’s clothing, their poses, their expressions, then other details like the background, foreground, lighting, etc. Sometimes in that case the result looks really good, and it’s really hard to parse that all in your head.
There’s an art and a skill to doing the kind of creative writing necessary to generate a good AI image. Sometimes you need to know obscure things like specific hairstyle names, car models, types of furniture, lighting techniques, facial expression details, names of articles of men’s and women’s clothing, how to describe poses and posture, etc. But, while that might generate an image that’s exactly how you imagined, it was never designed for a human to understand, and can be really painful and/or tedious to read.
well engineered prompts are like a dive into the “psychology” of whatever AI tool you are using. I like the ones that go like “whatever you do, don’t put an elephant in the picture”
And then an elephant appears because “elephant” is a word in the prompt.
It’s interesting because in some ways it’s as if the AI models have a “peekaboo” level of understanding of the world.
If your prompt says something like “a man’s face is hidden behind his hands”, the model goes “aha, I see the word face, I better draw a face”, so you have to get tricky and say “a man’s hands are held up covering up the frontal area of his head”.
Funny thing is it doesn’t happen in LLMs, even if you use couple generations old and in “low effort” settings (which makes mistakes much more often). I don’t know if they have multiple layers of LLMs reconciling the output with the prompt (like how DeepSeek filters certain…ahem…“topics”)
Makes you wonder if it is an architectural thing. It still used a place holder to refer to the elephant in both cases so maybe the AI generating images just use their best version of “that”, don’t know.
A a series fb post from an elderly lady attempting to prompt facebook into simulating her deceased child.
“Keep it realistic. don’t make make them sound too kind.”
Like fiction books?
yeah if gen AI progression keeps going with the same speed and hardware costs manage to decrease "turn this book into a graphical novel/computer game"s will be on the horizon.
prompts are specific to the detailed version of the AI software, while images are a much more universal form of communication, so they remain intelligible even when the AI software updates and uses a different prompt format.
Something ive noticed about AI art is it enables people who see themselves as “idea guys” to pump out every thought they have, call it good enough, and display it proudly like they worked hard at it.
When you make art you take an idea and that idea is shaped by external factors. Your skill level, your medium, how you collaborate if you are, all of these things influence what you make and that influence in turn changes your ideas. You may have an idea of what you want to paint, and during the process of painting come to appreciate the beauty of texture, and the next painting seeks to explore not just your idea but what you can do with the medium. Artists usually seek to push themselves to learn and explore and have their art change them as much as they seek to create the art.
But an idea guy only has interest in the idea. He doesnt want to do the process, he has no desire to be changed by his work. He has an idea and he wants an end product, and AI allows him to bypass that pesky learning to draw/paint/create business. It removes limitations in medium and skill level and spits out something close enough to his idea that its serviceable.
And I think that, to me, really signifies how much the idea guy values ideas over everything else. It takes all the work out of creation, and the lack of craftsmanship in the ideas is very telling in the final product.
There is also art without any idea, where the artist simply went with the flow. And there is commission work where the idea isn’t the artist’s. Also I think “idea” might sell short what someone has: an idea can be super highlevel leaving a lot of freedom to how it is represented, or that person can have a very detailed result in their mind they would like to bring onto paper or into sound or whatever.
On top it’s not like AI gives you an exact result. Quite the contrary; throw the same prompt at it a few times and you get different results. Potentially vastly different. So if you want an AI built representation of your idea, you still have to iterate and steer a lot until you get something that somewhat resembles what you had in mind. Besides having an idea, you also have to curate. But anyway, the process also shapes the result here; the constraints are different ones than for “real art”.
It’s autotune for business majors.
This guy understands art.
Mostly agreed, but you’re putting the person who creates an AI image into a box.
I may make an AI image for personal reasons and because I can’t do anything more than rudimentary Photoshop, and even then I have to have a starting image.
My art lies elsewhere. We could spend two hours while I show you around my house, show you all the things I’ve created.
People who make one kind of art can undervalue another kind.
Yep, it’s been real disappointing seeing musicians and writers use AI album/book covers
I get your Point but even as someone whos like you in that Aspect (not good at Images) that just Sounds a bit lazy
humans can come up with
Let me stop you right there. This is almost too absurd to be a Onion article…
AI art also helps keep starving artists unfed
Making it as an artist was always difficult, because the way artists are paid under capitalism favors giving all the money to a few big artists, who ironically aren’t necessarily even that good.
I hate Matisse but apparently just because they use his trash to money laund he’s some sort of genius.
Yeah, like the Renaissance before capitalism! Let me check my notes, oh, uh, looks like “all the money to a few big artists” was the thing then as well.
this_engine_is_a_capitalist.jpg
My goal all through junior high and high school was to become a comic book artist. I’m still sad I never made it because I missed out on the opportunity to help Stan Lee achieve a net worth of $70 million.
More like, it favors giving the money all the people who make a living off of what the artist produces.
Its like a factory. The artists are the workers at the bottom who actually produce and make the art work. Then there are the managers who promote the art and their bosses who sit at the top, running the factory. It is always those who benefit off of other people’s hard work who get to enjoy the fruits of other people’s labor.
Artists are why publishing houses exist and the reason why editors have a job in the first place, but it is the editors who drive nice cars and live in nice houses while the artists who draw and write the very books the publishers sell, get to enjoy getting paid so little that they can’t make a living off of it.
If you look in places like the animation industry, you can point to any of the big animators who helped make Disney big in the 90s and you will see that none of them can get work. None. New animators have no chance. Artists who have been in the business for 20 or 30 years, who are responsible for the movies that defined a generation are jobless and if they get a job, it is the kind of entry level gig that you’d normally only give to a recent graduate.
Illustration had been fucked for decades. They are getting paid the same as in the 80s, but not adjusted for inflation. More often than npt they get offered jobs for exposure and when they land gigs that pays, it will be two months work for one week’s pay. Asking for more money is not an option. There are no unions. All they can do is work faster to maybe make the low pay worth it. Meanwhile their editors live in gleaming mansions.
You might end up being one of the lucky few scammers in fine art who become rich people’s favourite, but that is a completely different world from the commercial art industry. People work themselves into early graves. There’s a reason why Berserk’s crestor died in his 50s.
Back problems, wrist problems, eye problems, weight problems. And these are passionate souls, which is why it is so easy to take advantage of them and their skills. Most people in the animation industry burn out before they’re 40. You don’t see many middle aged artists in the industry today. Some end up teaching. Most leave the industry all together when those who benefit from their hard work has sucked every bone dry.
The higher ups get fat bonuses. They live the great life. Not a creative bone in their body, but they make a living on the piles and piles of passionate souls who will be eaten up and spit out with nothing to show for it.
That is the life of the artist.
The very, very few ones who rise to the top are often those who have a rich family member or spouse to finance their artistic endeavors. Illusteators, painters, authors, animators, you name it. More often than not, the ones who do well and are successful, have no real financial problems in their lives because their loved ones got them covered.
It’s easy to make an amazing piece of art when you don’t have to worry about money.
yeah sure, even with companies, the owner of the company gets all the output that many people helped produce; but typically, a worker would get at least $5k /month as wages instead, depending on where you live of course (cost of living), but sth like that.
now, show me one small artist on the internet who makes $5k /month from commissions. meanwhile big studios make millions. my point is, income is even more unequally spread for artists than it is for factory workers.
so i don’t really think of the “art market” as especially keep-worthy to sustain the livelyhood of small artists, because that’s not really a way to make a livelyhood to begin with.
Artists are why publishing houses exist and the reason why editors have a job in the first place, but it is the editors who drive nice cars and live in nice houses
I agree with most of what you said, but I think most editors don’t make that much. It’s the corporate heads (i.e. the editor’s bosses) who get paid - the MBAs who’ve been put there to squeeze maximum profit at minimum cost.
a few big artists, who ironically aren’t necessarily even that good.
I get your point and all, but I just had to ask - how do you define and separate ‘good’ from ‘bad’ art, though?
I agree with you though, the traditional art world is no different from any other industry under capitalism. It’s filled with sharks, ass kissing and networking. Most either come from fame, and/or from a wealthy family who’s willing to support them. It’s more important to be a driven entrepreneur with good social skills and the right connections, than an artist.
Hey, that’s not all it does! It uses all the water so they remain unhydrated as well! As well as all the electricity to keep them unpowered, and ruin the sleep for everyone within a 60 km2 square radius, so they also are being kept unrested. Jeez this is the dumbest timeline. By a lot
60 km2 square radius
Dude here lives in a 6D space.
No that’d be 60km² hexagonal radius, right?
Afaics they measure the radius of the ‘area’ in km4, and I assume the ‘surface’ is one dimension lower than the total dimensionality of space.
Yeah I’m just kidding around.
Yes, my middle schooler was going to hire a team of artists to create minion memes and dogs kung-fu fighting if not for AI.
Or, you know, your middle schooler can just draw silly things like we all did growing up.
I’ll pass along your suggestion
The algorithm rejected you.
Weird way to brag that your child will not only always be a talentless hack, but won’t even try.
not trying because there’s an easier way is considered smart, actually. that’s basically how most of human civilization progressed. not keeping with tradition, but trying new ways.
Ah yes, peak human ingenuity:
Also forgetting how to think because ChatGPT does that for you.
Weird way to dunk on a child.
Yeah, it’s totally the child’s fault that they aren’t learning anything, and not the parent’s. Why would parent ever be obligated to teach their child, right?
I would ask your parents if they could explain to you what a meme is and why you would find them in a meme community.
You’re going to have a stroke if you read every meme as if it were reality. There’s no middle schooler, the cute dog or cat isn’t actually asking to has cheeseburger it is a human writing a caption on a picture and Gigachad isn’t a real person.
I’m sorry to be the person to have to tell you all this.
That joke doesn’t work, I’m not in a wheelchair and that’s the important fact about the joke.
Engagement farming? I refuse to believe the top person is for real
Also Youtube feed is the videos they haven’t watched, so isn’t in their mind (yet)
Reading every single tweet you ever see through the lens of “they get paid to create engagement” really elucidates why people say the things they say.
Sad as it is, I much prefer that worldview to thinking that people really are this stupid
Top guy doesn’t even have the checkmark you need to monetise on xitter tho…
These platforms are built on the backs of chuds working for free. Someone did a study and most of the Russian propaganda is shared by ordinary people and some of them were dubbed super sharers who will share like 30+ right wing posts a day.
I actually closed my eyes and took a moment to prepare myself after reading the first sentence because I knew I was about to read the most brain-dead take imaginable.
They can’t even form basic logical opinions anymore.
Many if them couldn’t before AI, which is why it’s so crazy good un their view.
is the accumulation of one’s youtube feed truly the deepest gaze into the soul?
Yes, absolutely. If you look at my history, it shows nothing but repeated watches of the dog of wisdom.
Says a lot about me, I think.
My Youtube feed is utter shit. I watch one One Piece theory video, and that is all Youtube starts recommending. I watch one trauma video and that is all my feed shows. Youtube is so annoying nowadays, more akin to dementia addled mind with ADHD.
Yeah they are sure pushing some things really hard, while I have to reclick on videos I have already seen so that theme doesn’t vanish, like some stupid algorithm.
I browsed some music on youtube on a fresh, logged out device a few days ago and it was so refreshing to get recommendations based the video I’m currently watching. Like 15 years ago. Now, if I’m logged in, the recommendations next to the playing video are the same ones as on the landing page, utterly useless.
Pro tip for YouTube: don’t use the main feed. Instead, look at the recommendations under an interesting video for other ones that catch the eye, and save them into ‘watch later’ playlists by topic.
Also, don’t watch random videos under the main account, open an incognito tab for that. With these two approaches combined, YouTube gives me some great recs, especially for music.
The kinds of videos I always make sure to watch in a private tab are things like:
- viral videos
- videos recommended by a friend
- “how do I fix this broken toilet” videos, or something else that I need once and won’t ever look at again
With that approach, my recommended videos feed is still trash, but at least it’s vaguely on-topic trash. I don’t get recommended 500 plumbing videos because one time I needed to know how to fix my toilet. It doesn’t take the fact that I watched a video that 500 million people also watched as meaning “I want to watch all the popular videos” or “I have the same tastes as everybody else who watched this video”.
I can always tell when I screwed up and watched an off-topic video in my normal account because the recommendations go to shit for a while.
It’s also important to do the same with links from social media.
Yeah, that’s basically what I meant by viral videos or ones recommended by a friend.
You can go into your yt history and delete videos and it will fix the recommendations
I deleted my whole history last week, and within a day YouTube was recommending me anime openings for things I have not had any interest in for 10 years. I’m pretty sure it’s at least partially bullshit.
I ended up just deleting my whole Google account. I’m making do with an RSS reader and yt-dlp for now, but I’m already so fed up with that whole process that I’m making a simple QT app that does the RSS reading and yt-dlp calling for me. Akregator fucking sucks, by the way. Every time I shut down my PC without closing Akregator first, it loses its shit and does not remember any read statuses.
I just browse on incognito (without an account). The home page is blank every time.
Yeah. Fuck YouTube and everything, but it’s still possible to curate a decent feed.
Naaah. Nowadays YouTube just represents the pinnacle of enshittification. Not something I’d admit publicly to using.
It is when a person’s depth is measured in teaspoons.
It is to a smoothbrained techbro.
Around 825 AD, Persian scientist and polymath al-Khwarizmiwrote kitāb al-ḥisāb al-hindī (“Book of Indian computation”) and kitab al-jam’ wa’l-tafriq al-ḥisāb al-hindī (“Addition and subtraction in Indian arithmetic”). In the early 12th century, Latin translations of these texts involving the Hindu–Arabic numeral system and arithmetic appeared, for example Liber Alghoarismi de practica arismetrice, attributed to John of Seville, and Liber Algoritmi de numero Indorum, attributed to Adelard of Bath.[8] Here, alghoarismi or algoritmi is the Latinization of Al-Khwarizmi’s name;[9] the text starts with the phrase Dixit Algoritmi, or “Thus spoke Al-Khwarizmi”.
So in referring to what someone’s true soul is, you can say “Thus spoke The Algorithm”
The deepest gaze into my soul is apparently that I enjoy disc golf, competitive pokemon battles and asian street food.
Seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of what AI art is.
This is what traditional art reveals. And quite well.
Couple of years ago I was at a cannabis painting event (get stoned whilst painting), with my friend. I’ve got some experience drawing and sketching, very little with painting. My friend has very little experience in anything art related, yet whilst I was struggling to figure out what to paint he manages to make a lovely blend of colours and themes, in ways I never could. I was looking at it for a good while, and it had so many lovely elements. He kept thinking his wasn’t good!
He would’ve never been able to make that with AI, it would have missed all that nuance.
If you’ve had very little experience with painting, how do you know how good you would be at it? Your friend might have a natural talent, but that doesn’t mean that you couldn’t learn how.
Natural talent is a myth, it’s like believing that you shouldn’t think about what you’re doing to paint loose.
It’s all hard work, and maybe in the end you can split up artists by talent, but until then it’s just who have learned the most.
This is true. I’ll be going to Amsterdam again soon, and I’m hoping there’s another event at the time.
That sounds like a lot of fun
It’s quite a nice event, they try to do them weekly unless something comes up. They sometimes do stoner pottery, or design your own bongs with the erm, right type of paint I would presume lol. I don’t want it to sound like advertising, so if you are planning a trip to Amsterdam send me a message and I can give the website/socials :)
I chose to believe this happened. Jaden Smith has at least one friend and they were impressed with the art their friend made.
I will carry this story in my heart and retell it at the next paint and sip I go to.
Maybe most people feel discouraged from trying art because they think it needs to be good enough to get likes and shares online. If people were more encouraging to beginner artists or people who just don’t have time then maybe the average person wouldn’t care as much about AI art
Imagine if people were going to the gym with a robot and having it lift weights for them. Then, they would post about how many reps they did. And then you said “Hey, maybe if people encouraged beginners to lift weights more, then they wouldn’t be using the weight-lifting robot!”
There’s a lot more going on here. The people using AI don’t even understand what the assignment is.
You’re comparing apples and oranges a bit here. Sure, using a robot to lift weights at the gym is analogous to using AI to create art, if your goal is to get better at being an artist.
But if you’re a person with no painting or drawing skills who uses AI as a way to express your ideas visually, it would be a little more akin to being a shitty machinist who uses Sketchup and a 3D printer to manifest their mechanical ideas in meatspace.
99% of AI “art” is absolutely a cringey slopfest, but I’m not going to lie and pretend I can’t relate at all to people who use it as a tool to supplement their own practical deficiencies. Whether art should be more about the output or the process is a whole other philosophical debate…
IMO you need to work to become an artist, seeing alone is a skill you need to work on for example, so no newbie will be helped with prompting AI images, how on earth could they?
That philosophical debate doesn’t matter here, because with AI both the process and the output are worse than useless
The only reason people think they need likes and shares online for their art to be valid is because social media companies have been carefully and intentionally crafting that obsession with online recognition and growing numbers. This isn’t a “people aren’t nice to beginner artists” issue, because trust me nobody is kinder and more welcoming than the art community to newbies. Its a corporate social media issue.
That’s fair a lot of art communities online are nice. I guess I meant more cringe culture encouraging perfectionism
If someone wants to know the weird shit people have on their minds you just have to find their social media timeline, especially Reddit, Tumblr or Fedi. Or, like, talk to them.
Given the flavour of weird shit in someone’s head most AI wouldn’t even slop anything like that. Like, I’m thinking of three shrimps having a raging threesome right now with Jim Carrey’s head in the background watching one shrimp-dick explode. The AI would probably refuse or just make Carrey sit in front of a meal.
I challenge any AI to come up with a comment like this.
Thank you for that vibrant mental image
I just wished to drop here a novel from old times…
Ooh, I forgot it was Gogol that wrote that one, thank you, it’s marvelous!
timely! you should post this to !shortstories@literature.cafe
What was 2/2?
