As soon as Apple announced its plans to inject generative AI into the iPhone, it was as good as official: The technology is now all but unavoidable. Large language models will soon lurk on most of the world’s smartphones, generating images and text in messaging and email apps. AI has already colonized web search, appearing in Google and Bing. OpenAI, the $80 billion start-up that has partnered with Apple and Microsoft, feels ubiquitous; the auto-generated products of its ChatGPTs and DALL-Es are everywhere. And for a growing number of consumers, that’s a problem.
Rarely has a technology risen—or been forced—into prominence amid such controversy and consumer anxiety. Certainly, some Americans are excited about AI, though a majority said in a recent survey, for instance, that they are concerned AI will increase unemployment; in another, three out of four said they believe it will be abused to interfere with the upcoming presidential election. And many AI products have failed to impress. The launch of Google’s “AI Overview” was a disaster; the search giant’s new bot cheerfully told users to add glue to pizza and that potentially poisonous mushrooms were safe to eat. Meanwhile, OpenAI has been mired in scandal, incensing former employees with a controversial nondisclosure agreement and allegedly ripping off one of the world’s most famous actors for a voice-assistant product. Thus far, much of the resistance to the spread of AI has come from watchdog groups, concerned citizens, and creators worried about their livelihood. Now a consumer backlash to the technology has begun to unfold as well—so much so that a market has sprung up to capitalize on it.
Obligatory “fuck 99.9999% of all AI use-cases, the people who make them, and the techbros that push them.”
AI art can require training a model, or a LORA for a model, which requires choosing a series of samples and annotating them for the parts of you want to incorporate. After that, writing a prompt can involve several paragraphs with the definitions of what you want it to output, with a series of iterations, followed by a personal choice of the output.
How is stacking 10 buckets of sand and letting them fall in an art gallery, comparable to real art? Dunno, but they call it that: “real art”.
Art is a communication act that requires some sort of vision, intended to elicit some sort of emotional response in the receiver, and a series of steps to achieve that.
As long as there is a vision and an intent, the series of steps required to create art with AI, are comparable to any other series of steps conducting to the creation of art with any other medium.
For a rough estimate, you can compare the number and difficulty of the steps, and the effectiveness of the communication.
Let me refer you to the aforementioned sand bucket… sculpture? or the renowned orchestral piece “A minute of silence”, or paintings like “Black square”, or more performative pieces like “Banana duct taped to a wall”.
There will always be artists, and “artists”.
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I think you misunderstood: “sand bucket man” is the bar for human art.
AI art has been above that for at least a decade, maybe two. Modern AI art, is orders of magnitude farther, even with the simplest of prompts.
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Let me clarify: I’ve seen the sand bucket guy’s art featured twice on the news in the past few days, filmed at an art gallery, described as art, commented as being art. It’s not some random event, it’s the current publicly accepted definition of “art”.
My statement, not insinuation, as to why AI art is comparable to “traditional” art, comes after that.
What comes across as desperate however, is generalizing all AI output and disparaging it, without considering the quality of input from the person behind it. Reminds me of how photography used to not be art, how electric instruments couldn’t be art, or how using a computer couldn’t be art either. Tools don’t make or break an artist.