[HN Gopher] When Technology Follows Art
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When Technology Follows Art
Author : benbreen
Score : 48 points
Date : 2023-11-29 21:47 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (resobscura.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (resobscura.substack.com)
| jack_riminton wrote:
| As an amateur artist (oil painting), coder, and user of
| generative AI. I find people's rejection/revulsion of the use of
| generated images in art odd for several reasons:
|
| - art has always been about taking existing images and ideas and
| tweaking them to make them your own. As Grayson Perry says "I
| believe in the Chinese whispers approach to art, I see something,
| copy it and then I make it a little better"
|
| - very renowned artists such as Peter Doig use 'found images'
| i.e. a photo of people in a boat as the prime subjects in his
| paintings. Yet if I generate 100 images with my own prompts then
| that is somehow cheating?
|
| - as the article says, artists have always used whatever tools
| they can find to make better art. If a trained random number
| generator helps me produce the image I want to produce then how
| is that any different?
| mecsred wrote:
| I definitely like this perspective as a personal take, AI
| should not stop anyone from pursuing their own artistic goals.
| The problem comes from a societal scale. Peter Doig would get a
| very different response if he showed off someone else's picture
| of a boat to a crowd or tried to sell it. The inspiration and
| the painting he created are clearly two different things and
| are recieved differently.
|
| If you use AI, very few people, if any, could tell if you or an
| AI emulating you made a certain painting. I think this is a key
| source of the rejection, it's saying "Even if you can't tell,
| you can trust my paintings were made by me and not an AI, I
| stake my reputation on it."
| mkaic wrote:
| I can't speak for everyone, but the reason I personally find
| generated images completely uninteresting from an artistic
| standpoint is that they are low-effort. I appreciate art
| because a human sacrificed time and effort to make it. As a
| general rule of thumb (with exceptions, of course), the more
| time and effort an artist sacrifices to make a piece of art,
| the more I find that art interesting, especially if the artist
| is highly skilled.
|
| I don't think that AI art is fundamentally uninteresting (I am
| a machine learning researcher, so I think it's rad), or that it
| can't be used as a tool to make great art. I just think that
| the final image is not the point of art. The point is that a
| person practiced for hundreds/thousands of hours to develop a
| creative skill and then spent several more hours painstakingly
| applying that skill just to create the image. If AI is
| _incorporated_ into a high-effort, high-skill process, I don 't
| have an issue with it.
| 1auralynn wrote:
| People have varying definitions of art. Mine is more about
| communication and changing perceptions, I couldn't care less
| about time spent. I know artists from both camps.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| Also interesting is the time spent making marks vs.
| thinking about it
|
| I know Matisse kept several works in his studio for many
| many years pondering and struggling with what to do with
| them and the actual mark-making was very rapid e.g. The Red
| Studio painting
| mkaic wrote:
| And this is why I began my comment with "I can't speak for
| everyone!" Art is so subjective that it would be rather
| silly of me to try to make a bold, authoritative statement
| about its nature. I definitely understand your perspective
| to some degree, and wish you the best :)
| jack_riminton wrote:
| I suppose that's the crux of it, I'm a formalist
| (https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/f/formalism) whereas a
| lot of other people appreciate the back story or narrative
| more
| gilleain wrote:
| The problem I have with the 'effort' theory of value - which
| I also used to use! - is that you can take it to absurd
| conclusions.
|
| For example, a beginner painter will take much longer to make
| the same painting as a master; so judged on effort, it should
| be better? Or if I make a minature cathedral out of
| matchsticks, then it might take me decades - is that
| therefore more interesting artistic output than a sketch that
| Picasso (say) made in one smooth line that took minutes?
|
| Of course, a reasonable answer is that it is some combination
| of effort, aesthetics, personal choice, and fashion. Maybe
| it's like a recipe where the balance of these ingredients has
| to be right.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| There's also the aspect of the time it takes to learn to
| draw/paint well, sometimes the simplest-looking things take
| the longest to learn
|
| "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a
| lifetime to paint like a child" - Picasso
| webmaven wrote:
| To a certain extent, your argument is mitigated by
| considering the _cumulative_ effort of learning to produce
| art, AKA "knowing where to hammer", AKA "it took a lot of
| hard work to make this look easy".
| gsk22 wrote:
| If we incorporate cumulative effort, then the original
| assertion that AI art is low-effort falls flat.
|
| In fact, since AI is trained on a much bigger data set
| than humans, AI art is in fact higher-effort than human-
| made art (and therefore, according to the GP, more
| interesting).
| JohnFen wrote:
| That seems like a pretty huge stretch to me. I don't
| think it's valid to count the effort in developing and
| training AI as part of the effort to produce the art.
| krisoft wrote:
| > I don't think it's valid to count the effort in
| developing and training AI as part of the effort to
| produce the art.
|
| But that is what webmaven was proposing. "your argument
| is mitigated by considering the cumulative effort of
| learning to produce art"
|
| So do you count the training and practice a human and the
| AI took in order to be able to produce the art, or do you
| not count either of them?
| JohnFen wrote:
| Counting the development of AI software as part of the
| effort to produce art would be like counting the the
| process of growing up as part of the human effort to
| produce art. I don't think either of those count because
| they're not art-specific. They're both the baseline
| "effort" needed in order to just function.
| krisoft wrote:
| Sure. Just a few questions so that I understand you.
|
| Do you subscribe to the view that effort is what makes
| art valuable?
|
| A master painter paints an amazing portrait with a few
| brush strokes in 10 minutes. A teenager creates a
| matchstick cathedral by working extremely diligently for
| 2 years. Do you think that the matchstick cathedral is
| more artistic than the portrait?
|
| If you say yes to the first, and no to the second then
| there is a seeming contradiction. Because clearly more
| effort went into the years to cut matchsticks than the
| minutes to draw the portrait. To resolve this seeming
| contradiction webmaven proposed that we should count the
| hours spent acquiring the skill. The master spent a
| lifetime drawing and painting until he got good enough to
| capture the essence of someone with a few brush strokes.
| Are you agreeing with that argument? If yes, why does it
| not apply to an AI? If not how do you resolve the
| contradiction?
|
| > I don't think either of those count because they're not
| art-specific.
|
| The training of a neural network is very art specific. It
| looks at art. It creates, gets criticised, creates again
| on repeat.
|
| Don't get me wrong. I don't think the AI is more artistic
| just because it encapsulates more effort. I think the
| mistake is that effort is not what makes art valuable. It
| is not a pineapple pooping competition. Emotional impact
| is what makes art art in my opinion. (Which is a
| different question from what makes art have monetary
| value.)
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Do you subscribe to the view that effort is what makes
| art valuable?
|
| Not as a hard rule, no, although there is absolutely art
| where the effort to produce it is an inherent part of the
| value of it.
|
| > Do you think that the matchstick cathedral is more
| artistic than the portrait?
|
| No, not because of effort involved, anyway. If both
| things are trying to convey something about the human
| experience, they're both equally "artistic".
|
| I subscribe to the view that what makes art valuable is
| that it communicates something human that can't be
| communicated well otherwise[1].
|
| This is why if there existed an AI that produced art all
| by itself, I would consider the work produced to be
| pretty pictures, not art. An artist using AI as a tool to
| produce human communication, though? Totally art.
|
| > (Which is a different question from what makes art have
| monetary value.)
|
| I agree. The price tag of a thing says nothing about its
| artistic value. It only speaks to commercial value.
|
| [1] This is also why I don't think there is any such
| thing as "bad art". Art can be successful or
| unsuccessful, but "bad" and "good" are subjective
| aesthetic judgements. When people say art is "bad", what
| they mean is it's art they dislike.
| GTP wrote:
| I'll repeat what I wrote in another comment: the problem
| might just be that usually the "AI artist" isn't the one
| that built and trained the model. What the artist does in
| this case is spending some time in finding a good prompt.
| Which could be seen as a form of art itself, but if we're
| talking about time spent, this amounts to much less.
|
| Edit: I decided to add my two cents about using time
| spent as a measure of effort. I think this can be
| misleading and I have a counterexample, although
| admittedly it isn't from art: think about an athlete
| running 100 meters. This doesn't require effort just in
| the training before, but also in the act itself. And the
| less time the athele takes to run 100 meters, the more is
| the effort required.
|
| As for my own opinion about art, I think that anything
| could be art: what counts is the idea behind it. How this
| translates to this specific problem of AI generated
| images I'm unsure though, as it would, at least in part,
| depend on how much of your idea you can convey through a
| ML model.
| kijalo wrote:
| I guess the analogy in this situation would be someone
| taking a photo of a master artwork.
| GTP wrote:
| But then, that effort is rarely sustained by the "Ai
| artist" himself. It is usually someone else that builds
| and trains the model.
| aredox wrote:
| I think the problem is not for "art" artists, who will embrace
| it as they embraced everything, but more for "commissioned"
| artists, who paint or draw illustrations for money.
| gilleain wrote:
| It occurred to me the other day that there are (at least) 3
| different meanings when referring to the value of a work of
| art:
|
| * Aesthetically pleasing - often there is a traditionalist idea
| that only landscapes and portraits are 'real' art, and
| everything else is rubbish
|
| * Financially successful - the market sets the price of a work,
| and that is the value, no matter what your personal idea of it
|
| * Emotionally affecting - if the work is moving in some way, or
| you get something from it, then it has value
|
| Unfortunately, people using different definitions of value here
| will likely never agree when these values clash when
| considering a work of art.
|
| I guess this is a long-winded way of saying that I reckon some
| people have just defined generated images (or partly generated)
| as 'not Art' so will never accept them. I know I have changed
| how I think about some art/artists (such as single-colour
| painters like Rothko) from 'this is bad' to 'I don't care for
| this, I see that others do'.
| lancesells wrote:
| > * Emotionally affecting - if the work is moving in some
| way, or you get something from it, then it has value
|
| I suppose I fall into this camp and why I find most AI
| generated images nothing even close to art. Art is truth, art
| is a communication between the artist and the viewer, good
| artists do things for their personal reasons. Generative AI
| is cold and unfeeling. If anything, artists that use AI
| should embrace that and stop trying to make so many
| airbrushed, Penthouse style renderings that try to mimic so
| much that has happened before. I mean you have the power of
| Gandalf, so why are you making images that look like
| something that's been done thousands of times over? Otherwise
| it's content and illustration, which both have their place in
| the world.
|
| Looking at the spiral image thumbnails used in the article
| look like something that an artist would have done 100 years
| ago. I don't see an artist there. I see a content creator. If
| they were painted by hand I would say the same thing, but be
| slightly more impressed by the craft of it.
| kranke155 wrote:
| I find AI art interesting and also automated mass copyright
| theft.
|
| It is not settled law at all anywhere that somehow using
| copyrighted data as training data is legal. The companies doing
| this assumed it was and moved quickly as fast as possible. They
| invented novel legal theories ("it's just like a human") to
| justify what they did, then spread it all over the internet to
| shut down artists questioning the legality.
|
| If you allow AI to skirt copyright law but humans have to live
| by it, then human labour becomes meaningless except as training
| data for the next AI model, and all profit making will become
| concentrated into AI, while humans make nothing or next to
| nothing. Any innovation made by a person will be copied by the
| next model, which being closed source will profit only a small
| number of people.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >If you allow AI to skirt copyright law but humans have to
| live by it
|
| Huh? At least from the argument you're presenting you're
| attempting to create "The Right to Read" world by RMS.
| Copyright is about output, not input. If I output something
| too close to your copyrighted content, that's the violation.
| Not me getting a book and reading it and sharing it with
| every one of my friends. Not looking by your art and being
| influenced by in in my artworks.
|
| > then human labour becomes meaningless
|
| You're 150 years late for the storyline of John Henry.
|
| The problem here isn't machines can do everything and make us
| meaningless, where you're breaking is thinking that
| capitalism can even begin to work under this paradigm shift.
| kranke155 wrote:
| I don't actually think capitalism can work under this
| paradigm shift.
|
| Unfortunately for me, that is a bleeding edge understanding
| of reality that hasn't propagated to the billions of people
| who live under capitalism.
|
| That's the tragedy. AI is a dystopian technology under
| current economics.
|
| If you change the economics AI is utopian.
|
| But we're electing neoliberal governments, for the most
| part, in the West. Million $ question: what's to be done ?
| JohnFen wrote:
| It sounds like you're talking more about a specific art form,
| collage, than art generally. Regardless, I am in the camp that
| "art is what artists do".
|
| I think that a lot of the rejection about generated art comes
| from the fear that it would become the dominant artistic form
| rather than just another kind of art.
|
| I watched a YouTube video the other day that expressed a
| sentiment that I share and that may apply here as well. He was
| talking about Photoshop rather than generative art:
| (Paraphrasing despite the quote marks) "As an artist, I love
| photoshop for the power and flexibility it gives me. As an art
| appreciator, though, I would never hang photoshop art in my
| home because the aesthetic is not appealing to me."
| blargey wrote:
| "Found art" is a niche that's irrelevant to most 2d-image art,
| as a producer or consumer. And that's all text prompting /
| inpainting / etc is at this point. Vague, overbroad suggestions
| to the AI that leaves all the interesting and meaningful
| decisions and choices in the hands of latent noise.
|
| I find illustrations, amateur or professional, interesting and
| engaging because people's style heavily reflects what they
| value in the imagery they create - deliberate choices made in
| pursuit of depicting or conveying an aesthetic, a theme, a
| subject-category, an idea, a notion. Paths taken in developing
| their skill = style.
|
| Current AI image generators are too blunt of an instrument to
| be a part of that process.
|
| The communication capabilities / concept space of image-gen AI
| needs a couple more paradigm shifts before it can join the
| pantheon of tools for "making better art". That means pursuing
| what they really want to depict, not filling space on the
| canvas with the AI's vague notions of it. Right now "style" in
| AI art is just a shorthand for surface-level LORA-ripoffs of
| existing artists, and attempts to statistically blend them
| together.
| night-rider wrote:
| > art has always been about taking existing images and ideas
| and tweaking them to make them your own
|
| It's an open secret in the art world that modifying existing
| works and putting your own spin on it is a common technique.
| But blatant copies with no such 'spin' on the original need to
| be called out. Also there are places like China who do clean
| room reverse engineering of existing tech and make new tech in
| the same likeness, but the engineering is completely different
| from the original. It's how they avoid IP/copyright suits.
| qwery wrote:
| I'm not really convinced that the story of Nvidia's origin does
| have the profound meaning the author seems to think it does.
|
| > the Nvidia GPUs [...] were originally inspired by [...] the
| needs of computer graphics artists in the gaming industry.
|
| I think this passage demonstrates a misread of the quoted
| section[1] from the interview with Huang. The RIVA 128 was a 3D
| accelerator / video card for gamers, not game artists. Further,
| it was pretty clear by 1997 that 3D graphics for games was not a
| fad nor by that time was it a radical new approach -- Nvidia
| successfully entered an established market.
|
| [1] Huang liked video games and thought that there was a market
| for better graphics chips. Instead of drawing pixels by hand,
| artists were starting to assemble three-dimensional polygons out
| of shapes known as "primitives," saving time and effort but
| requiring new chips.
| evanweaver wrote:
| Yeah, this history is just wrong. What really happened is as
| so:
|
| Early 90s: SGI invented OpenGL to make realtime 3D graphics
| practical, initially for CAD/CAM and other
| scientific/engineering pursuits, and started shipping expensive
| workstations with 3d accelerated graphics. Some game artists
| used these workstations to prerender 3d graphics for game
| consoles. Note that 2D CAD/CAM accelerators had already been in
| market for nearly a decade, as had game consoles with varying
| degrees of 2D acceleration.
|
| Mid-90s: Arcades and consoles starting using SGI chips and/or
| chip designs to render 3d games in real time. 3DFx, founded by
| ex-SGI engineers, created the Voodoo accelerator to bring the
| technology down market to the PC for PC games, which was a
| rapidly growing market.
|
| Late 90s: NVIDIA entered the already existing and growing
| market for OpenGL accelerators for 3D PC gaming. This was a
| fast-follow technical play. They competed with 3DFx on
| performance and won after 3DFx fell behind and made serious
| strategy mistakes.
|
| Later 90s: NVIDIA created the "GPU" branding to draw attention
| to their addition of hardware texture and lighting support,
| which 3DFX didn't have. Really this was more of an incremental
| improvement in gaming capability.
|
| Early 00s: NVIDIA nearly lost their lead to ATI with the switch
| to the shader model and DirectX 9, and had to redesign their
| architecture. ATI is now part of AMD and continues to compete
| with NVIDIA.
|
| Mid 00s: NVIDIA releases CUDA, which adapts shaders to general
| purpose computation, completing the circle in a sense and
| making NVIDIA GPUs more useful for scientific work like the
| original SGI workstations. This later enabled the crypto boom
| and now generative AI.
|
| Of course, along the way, OpenGL and GPUs have been used a lot
| for art, including art in games, but at no point did anybody
| say "hey, a lot of artists are trying to make 3D art, we should
| make graphics hardware for artists". Graphics hardware was made
| to render games faster with higher fidelity.
| benbreen wrote:
| Author here - thank you for this. I definitely don't claim to
| be an expert on the history of 3d graphics, and you clearly
| know a lot more than me about the detailed history of NVIDIA.
|
| That said, starting in the early 1990s is missing the whole
| first half of the story, no? Searching Google Books with a
| 1980-1990 date range for things like "3d graphics" "art" or
| "3d graphics" "special effects" yields a lot of primary
| sources that indicate that creative applications were driving
| demand for chips and workstations that focused on graphics.
| For instance this is from a trade journal for TV producers in
| 1987: "Perhaps the greatest dilemma facing the industrial
| producer today is what to do about digital graphics...
| because special effects, 2d painting, and 3d animation all
| rely on basically the same kind of hardware, it should be
| possible to design a 'graphics computer' that can handle
| several different kinds of functions." [https://www.google.co
| m/books/edition/E_ITV/0JRYAAAAYAAJ?hl=e...]
|
| It's not hard to find more examples like this from the
| 1985-1989 period.
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| Hi Ben,
|
| It was mostly gamers. As a gamer from that time, the
| hardware was marketed to gamers, hard. I don't doubt that
| artists had an impact, but the world had many, many more
| gamers, than artists and gamers spend money for the
| best/mostest/etc.
|
| I mainly know this from living through the
| CGA/EGA/VGA/SVGA/3D add-on card/3D era.
|
| Thank you for taking the time to delve into this. While I
| may not agree with your conclusions, I respect your work,
| and the effort put in. :)
| benbreen wrote:
| I think we agree, just define terms differently -- video
| games are art! In other words, gamers are consumers of
| artwork, and that consumer demand for a new kind of art
| drove demand for the hardware to go with it. (Naturally
| that wasn't the only source of demand - engineering and
| research applications were there from the beginning too).
|
| Edit: this discussion is interesting because I have
| always just taken it for granted that video games are a
| form of art. Clearly others don't see it that way, which
| is fair! Nevertheless, I think a strong case can be made:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_games_as_an_art_form
| evanweaver wrote:
| Games are an outlet for artistic expression but saying
| that 3D hardware was designed primarily to improve art
| production is incorrect. It was designed to improve the
| consumption experience of media that is a mix of
| programming, game mechanics (which are both math and
| psychology), and potentially various art forms including
| visual, music, and narrative. It all needs to add up to
| fun.
|
| Gamers aren't primarily spending time or money for the
| art and neither was NVIDIA.
| evanweaver wrote:
| The idea didn't spring fully formed from SGI. It was a
| natural extension of 2D graphics accelerators which were
| initially used for engineering (high value, small market)
| and later for business applications generally and games
| (lower value, large markets). 3D acceleration took the
| exact same path, but the utility for gaming was much higher
| than the general business utility.
|
| Of course graphics hardware was also used for more creative
| purposes including desktop publishing, special effects for
| TV, and digital art, so you will find some people in those
| communities vaguely wishing for something better, but
| artistic creation, even for commercial purpose, was never
| the market driver of 3D acceleration. Games were. The
| hardware was designed for gamers first, game programmers
| second, game artists a distant third, and for nobody else.
|
| The closest thing to an "art computer" around that time was
| the Amiga which targeted the design/audio/video production
| markets.
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| Gamers drove the hardware, not artists. 100% agreed.
|
| I was in IT when we started the transition from 2D cards to 2D
| cards with a additional 3D card, to the final form of 1
| graphics card.
|
| These 3D cards were NOT marketed to professionals, they were
| marketed to gamers, because gamers drove the tech.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Game creators/designers as artists - not unreasonable.
| swayvil wrote:
| One big difference between IRL art and computer art is in the
| breadth (bandwidth?) of the process.
|
| IRL art process is a subtle thing. Analog, fuzzy and mysterious.
|
| Computer art process is crass and pinhole-narrow in comparison.
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