[keiferski]

Some random predictions about what AI image generation tools will do/are doing to art:

1. The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important. The most successful artists are ones that craft a story around their life and art, and don't just create stuff and stop. This will become even more important.

2. Originality matters more than ever. By design, these tools can only copy and mix things that already exist. But they aren't alive, they don't live in the world and have experiences, and they can't create something truly new.

3. Those that bother to learn the actual art skills, and not merely prompting, will increasingly be miles ahead of everyone else. People are lazy, and bothering to put in the time to actually learn stuff will stand out more and more. (Ditto for writing essays and other writing people are doing with AI.)

4. Taste continues to be the single most important thing. The vast, vast majority of AI art out there is...not very good. It's not going to get better, because the lack of taste isn't a technical problem.

5. Art with physical materials will become increasingly popular. That is, stuff that can't be digitized very well: sculpture, installation art, etc. Above all, AI art is uncool, which means it has no real future as a leading art form. This uncoolness will push people away from the screen and towards things that are more material.

[avmich]

I mostly disagree.

> 1... The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important.

When I watch a movie, I don't care about the artist's life. I care about character life, that's very different.

> 2... Originality matters more than ever. By design, these tools can only copy and mix things that already exist.

It's like you assigning to humans divine capabilities :) . Hyperbolizing a little, humans also only copy and mix - where do you think originality comes from? Granted, AI isn't at the level of humans yet, but they improve here.

> 4... It's not going to get better, because the lack of taste isn't a technical problem.

Engineers are in business of converting non-technical problems into technical ones. Just like AI now is way more capable than it was 20 years ago, and able to write interesting texts and make interesting pictures - something which at the time wasn't considered a technical problem - with time what we perceive as "taste" may likely improve.

> 5... Above all, AI art is uncool, which means it has no real future as a leading art form.

AI critics are for a long time mistaking the level with trend. Or, giving a comparison with SpaceX achievements, "you're currently here" - when there was a list of "first, get to the orbit, then we'll talk", "first, start regular payload deliveries to orbit, then we'll talk", "first, land the stage... send crewed capsule... do that in numbers..." and then, currently "first, send the Starship to orbit". "You're currently here" is the always existing point which isn't achieved at the moment and which gives to critics something to point to and mount the objection to the process as a whole, because, see, this particular thing isn't achieved yet.

You assume AI won't be able to make cool art with time. AI critics were shown time and time again to be underestimating the possibilities. Some people find it hard to learn in some particular topics.

[javier123454321]

> It's like you assigning to humans divine capabilities :)

I can't tell if you're being facetious. But being an embodied consciousness with the ability to create is as divine as it gets. We'd do well to remember.

[ACCount37]

It's kind of like the difference between something being enjoyable for you, and something being widely popular?

In a hypothetical world of "AI can produce a lot of extremely high quality art", you can easily find (or commission) AI art you would absolutely love. But it probably wouldn't be something that anyone else would find a lot of value in?

There will be no AI-generated Titanic. There will be many AI-generated movies that are as good as Titanic, but none will become as popular as Titanic did.

Because when AI has won art on quality and quantity both, and the quality of the work itself is no longer a differentiator against the sea of other high quality works? The "narrative/life of the artist" is a fallback path to popularity. You will need something that's not just "it's damn good art" - an external factor - to make it impactful, make it stick in the culture field.

Already a thing in many areas where the supply of art outpaces demand. Pop music, for example, is often as much about making sound as it is about manufacturing narratives around the artists. K-pop being an extreme version of the latter lean.

[CryptoBanker]

> When I watch a movie, I don't care about the artist's life. I care about character life, that's very different.

I’m fairly certain the original comment was referring to instances where the artist is the character/primary subject.

[CWuestefeld]

I agree with everything you said, except that #1 is clearly wrong. I can prove it with one word: autotune.

At least in popular, mainstream culture, the viewer is heavily invested in the identity of the artist. The quality of the "art" is secondary. That's how we get music engineered by committee. And it's how we get paparazzi, People Magazine, and so forth.

On the other hand, this isn't anything new at all. We've had this kind of thing for decades. Real art still manages to survive at the margins.

[oliyoung]

> When I watch a movie, I don't care about the artist's life.

And here we come back to the aged old "can you seperate an artist from their art" because I'd argue when you watch a movie you are watching a product of their life

[keiferski]

1. I meant artists writ large, not specifically movies. My point being that community management, PR, having a brand, etc. are becoming a key element of an individual artist’s career. Examples of this abound – see the recent Markiplier film as a case in point. That movie did well because Mark’s audience wanted to help him, not because it’s such an original genius concept for a movie.

But even then – people obviously go watch movies because they like the actor/director involved. It’s not really clear why anyone would care about an AI actor. People want to watch people, not imitations of them.

The rest of your comments seem to be summarized as “it has gotten better and therefore it will eventually solve all problems it has now.” Which may be true in a technical sense, but again this is not taste.

A technical company like Space X really has nothing to do with this conversation, and I think you missed my point about it being uncool. It’s not about critics, it’s about culture at large.

At this point I think identifying a work as AI-created makes people instantly devalue it. We are rapidly approaching the point where no one wants to admit something is AI-created, because it comes with negative perceptions.

Originality comes from humans experiencing the world and interacting with it. What AI tool is a living being interacting with the world? None, of course. Hence the constant generic slop images of Impressionism or some other already-existing art style.

Just look at the images in the link: this is the best they can do? A kangaroo at a cafe in Paris? Could anything be more devoid of good taste?

[rand_r]

> When I watch a movie, I don't care about the artist's life. I care about character life, that's very different.

It may seem like this, but up to now, you haven't been able to divorce a story from its creator because every story has an author, whether it's a novel like Harry Potter or a movie that has a writer and director. When you're experiencing the story, in the back of your mind, you always know that there is someone who created the story to tell you some kind of message. And so you can't experience something like a movie without trying to figure out what the actual message behind the movie was. It is always the implicit message behind the story that makes it valuable versus just the elements of the story.

The story has more weight because it is the distillation of somebody else's life and most likely, if it's a successful story or book, it is the most important lesson from that person's life and that's what makes it more valuable compared to the random generation of words from a computer.

The food analogy is that a cookie baked and given to you by a friend is going to taste far better than anything you buy in a store.

[jplusequalt]

>Engineers are in business of converting non-technical problems into technical ones.

Art is not a problem to be solved.

[wasabi991011]

> You assume AI won't be able to make cool art with time. AI critics were shown time and time again to be underestimating the possibilities. Some people find it hard to learn in some particular topics.

You misunderstand their point: it's not that AI can't make art that looks cool, it's that a portion of society (mostly artists but a certain amount of lay people) who consider the act of prompting AI for art to not have any cultural cache, or even to be socially distasteful.

[jacobriers]

> It's like you assigning to humans divine capabilities :) . Hyperbolizing a little, humans also only copy and mix - where do you think originality comes from? Granted, AI isn't at the level of humans yet, but they improve here.

I reckon we copy God - who is a creator - which means we're creators too - and our creations will copy us. But the created won't ever match the creator.

[michaelbuckbee]

Well, there are definitely people who care about the vision and style of movies from certain directors. It's not so much "story" like plot, but story in the sense of a "brand story" where there's recognizable elements in all the work, repeated themes, changes and decisions and evolution to how they approach things.

[imtringued]

>"You're currently here" is the always existing point which isn't achieved at the moment and which gives to critics something to point to and mount the objection to the process as a whole, because, see, this particular thing isn't achieved yet.

This is a contradiction that is so blatant I don't even know what language you're speaking. The definition of that phrase is the exact opposite of what you're saying.

"You're currently here" is the always existing point which is achieved at the moment.

>gives to critics something to point to and mount the objection to the process as a whole, because, see, this particular thing isn't achieved yet.

No it doesn't, because unless progress is reversed or undone, you can always point to your current success and say that the critics have been wrong so far. In fact, that's exactly the argument you're making here, which is why it's so weird that you're twisting it into its opposite.

If you want people to understand you, then you actually have to articulate what you're thinking instead of wrapping it in layers of euphemisms and hoping that the recipient nods along because they happen to agree for a completely irrelevant reason (e.g. "I like AI" or "I like space") to the argument presented.

[squidsoup]

> It's like you assigning to humans divine capabilities :) . Hyperbolizing a little, humans also only copy and mix - where do you think originality comes from? Granted, AI isn't at the level of humans yet, but they improve here.

Every human being is unique, both biologically and experientially. Until an AI can feel and have a lived experience, it can not create art.

[fauigerzigerk]

>It's like you assigning to humans divine capabilities :) . Hyperbolizing a little, humans also only copy and mix - where do you think originality comes from? Granted, AI isn't at the level of humans yet, but they improve here.

Humans do that a lot but it's not all we do. Go to a museum that has modern(ish) art. It's pretty incredibly how diverse the styles and ideas are. Of course it's not representative of anything. These works were collected and curated exactly because they are not average. But it's still something that humans made.

I think what people can do is have conceptual ideas and then follow the "logic" of those ideas to places they themselves have never seen or expected. Artists can observe patterns, ask how they work and why they have the effect they do and then deliberately break them.

I'm not sure current genAI models do these sorts of things.

[KPGv2]

> When I watch a movie, I don't care about the artist's life. I care about character life, that's very different.

The target audiences for art and film are not the same. The latter is far more pop culture. You can't apply them the same way, and the narrative of the artist has been extremely important for decades. People will watch slop movies. They don't pay $30K for slop art. They're paying that for historical importance or, if contemporary, artist narrative.

I'm in fandom spaces, and the prejudice against AI art is overwhelming. I also run in art collecting circles, being somewhat wealthy but not a billionaire. They also care about authenticity.

That is to say, the people who pay for original art, and participate in art spaces, are generally educated who actively hate AI. Filmgoers are probably a standard deviation lower in education, and are far more willing to part with the cost of one unit of consumption (a $10 ticket) than art buyers.

AI is a threat to graphic designers and those in their orbit.

The only way I see AI being a threat to professional artists is AI copies of their work. And AI isn't anything new there. I have a friend who gets commissioned by hotels to do one-off pieces for display all over the world. People have been making knockoff pieces of her style and selling them for at least a decade. And that's her lower margin, small pieces made for a couple thousand dollars to hang at your house, not her $100K+ pieces for hotels where they fly her out to supervise reassembly and mounting.

[screye]

> The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important

We are 50 years into post-modernism. Can't imagine it can get any more important.

I predict emergent design will be the next big thing. Czinger[1] is a great example of what it may look like. Rick Ruben-esque world, where the creator is more a guide.

[1] Czinger uses stochastic optimization to converge to designs - https://www.czinger.com/iconic-design

[CamperBob2]

Post-modernism says that the artist isn't important. Dead, in fact. Art is something that happens when we perceive it, not when the author creates it.

[selridge]

God, thank you.

Finally, someone pointing out all of this is just people announcing what has been in play for half a century.

[cpill]

Is that what putting a camera in the hands of everyone with a smartphone (basically everyone) did for photography?

Or making video editing + free, global publishing platform did for film? (see: doom scrolling).

[bjackman]

> The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important.

Less the narrative of the art's production and more the message that it's conveying.

I don't mean (necessarily) a political message or a message that can be put in to words. But the abstract sense of connecting with the human who created it some way.

This isn't just art though. An example: soon, Sora will be able to generate very convincing footage of a football match. Would any football fan watch this? No. A big part of why we watch football is that in some sense we care about the people who are playing.

Same with visual art. AI art can be cool but in the end, I just don't really give a shit. Coz enjoying art is usually about the abstract sense that a human person decided to make the thing you are looking at, and now you are looking at it... And now what?

This is why every time someone says "AI art sucks" and someone replies "oh yeah? But look at THIS AI art" I always wonder... What do you think art is _for_?

[likium]

Football anime doesn’t involve real people or stakes. AI can introduce a storyline, characters, etc. It won't necessarily be as popular as the real sport but I doubt the audience is zero.

[pixl97]

>Would any football fan watch this?

Depends what the future of VR worlds look like, and what the viewers place is in them.

[selridge]

The problem is, we have no real understanding of what people will or will not do with this technology. Will humans only be interested in “real“ activity?

We have no idea, and most people are just guessing in a way that flatters some understanding of art that they have. We also frankly have no idea what the permanent relationship of humans to art is even without AI.

The television is less than 100 years old. There aren’t very many, but there are some people alive today who were alive before the television was created. The computer is about 80 years old. The whole idea of photography and of recorded audio is less uthan 150 years old.

We are still living in the aftershocks of industrial production of art. It is foolish to imagine that in the midst of this chaos, we can point the way forward with ease.

[muyuu]

We'll get to the point, if we're not already there, where you won't be able to tell if the artist actually did the work or just could have done it, and to which extent. Everything in the process can be essentially faked. If you put a massive emphasis on proving human work, you're essentially conceding you cannot tell without some sort of notary certification. We're in the lab diamond stage and clutching at some artificial authenticity.

[jpadkins]

> 4. Taste continues to be the single most important thing. The vast, vast majority of AI art out there is...not very good. It's not going to get better, because the lack of taste isn't a technical problem.

I agree on current AI art taste, but disagree that it can't be improved. I think art AI companies can hire skilled "taste makers" and use their feedback loop as RL for AI art models. I think this area will always be in flux, and will vary by subpopulation so it will be a job role always in demand.

Do you think taste is something that cannot be taught/learned? Are certain individuals just born with good taste; it's an immutable property?

[tlh]

AI art is certainly considered uncool today in many circles.

I do wonder though… were there other innovations that were uncool in their early years, where now nobody bats an eyelid?

Is that point just a generational/passage of time issue?

[SpaceNoodled]

Photography was considered pretty uncool; it removed what at the time was perceived as all of the skill. We now can appreciate deeper aspects of captured images such as composition, and we now see painted portraits replaced by more abstract, surreal, or imagined imagery. Generative AI is similarly revolutionary in that it moves away from realism back into the realm of the imaginary; whether or not a user's prompts can be appreciated remains to be seen.

[akarii]

Digital Photography and digital painting. Both were considered deeply offensive to a lot of artists. I have witnessed both first hand and the criticisms were verbatim the same as AI.

They said you couldn't become a good photographer if you didn't learn it with the limitation of film that forced you to make each shot count. Photoshopping a picture made it "not a real photo" and was banned from online communities and irl events, drawing in photoshop was not considered art. I find it very ironic that digital artists are repeating the exact same argument as the one used against their art

[ronnier]

Apple AirPods.

[kjeksfjes]

My prediction: KNOWLEDGE of whether something is made by AI or a human will be alpha and omega, and will eventually be regulated used in commercial contexts. You will always be able to generate something, but if you somehow get exposed presenting it as human made, the sanctions will hurt you.

[selridge]

I don’t know that this has to be the way. One thing that is really going to confound this very common idea that taste and quality and personal characteristics will win the day, is that you can use AI to represent all of these to other people.

It’s a huge practical problem to try and figure out authentic nature over the Internet. It’s already clear that people will pay for it, but it’s not at all clear that they will get it. If we imagine that the tools get better and more sophisticated than there is no reason whatsoever to assume that the tools won’t be deployed to give the impression that is needed to make money.

I don’t think any of the above survives if we allow for AI to be used as it is currently being used. It only survives if you pretend that ahead of us is some invisible gate past which this technology will not go.

[throwthrowuknow]

1. This sounds more like influencer marketing, I think people are already sick of it.

2. Yes and no. Depending on how you train the model they can output things that you’ve never seen before but the question is whether you want to look at those things. So yes a human has to judge and fine tune the output. This is why many models seem unoriginal, they’re designed to emulate specific styles and tuned based on broad appeal. If you go looking for LoRAs and merges created by “artists” you will see shit you couldn’t dream of.

everything else probably yes.

[Spacecosmonaut]

Regarding point 2: I think most people cannot destinguish between "genuine" creativity and artificial almalgamation of training data and human provided context. For one, I do not know what already exsists. Some work created by AI may be an obvious rip off of the style of a particular artist, but I wouldnt know. To me it might look awesome and fresh.

Furthermore, I think many of the more human centric thinkers will be disappointed at how many people just wont care.

[scrozier]

> Taste continues to be the single most important thing. The vast, vast majority of AI art out there is...not very good. It's not going to get better, because the lack of taste isn't a technical problem.

This is precisely and importantly true. I just wonder if most of the world cares. I'd like to think so, but experience tells me that most of the world is satisfied with mediocre stuff. And I don't say this as a criticism; it's just a fact that artists have to come to grips with.

[SpaceNoodled]

Well, it can be both.

[cgio]

I think we fall into the trap of seeing art from a consumption point of view. “Of what use is a human vs AI piece of art to Me?” Art is residing in the productive space too, the artist is considering not his/her utility but his/her presence in the world. Maybe what you describe is the way forward for art monetisation but not for art, and we know experientially how the production of real art is not always in tandem with its appreciation.

[ane]

I am also glad the commercial niche illustration markets like Magic the Gathering are extremely hostile to AI art, though of course I would think Wizards of the Coast, the company that publishes MTG, probably see artists as a cost. Maybe.

Perhaps in the future artists will be used to train models that can output a certain style of art and the artist will receive royalties based on their influence on the trained model and its popularity.

[hi_hi]

This is a great and worthwhile discussion. People are loosing sight of what art is. The art is the idea, not the medium. And just because something is easy, doesn't mean it will be good.

I've seen some fantastic original pictures that actual artists have generated through AI. I can't wait to see what current and future artists can do with the new tools at their disposal.

[maxglute]

Everything is a remix. Humans' rarely original, creativity still built off influences. AI image generation is nothing if not good at remixing.

[JKCalhoun]

You're focused on the visual arts—I'll add that live music will become more treasured, sought after than recorded music.

Because it's real.

[WheatMillington]

>2. Originality matters more than ever. By design, these tools can only copy and mix things that already exist. But they aren't alive, they don't live in the world and have experiences, and they can't create something truly new.

How can you say this? These models can trivially create things that have never existed, and you can easily test this yourself.

[crote]

Should a randomly-shuffled deck of cards be considered art? After all, the card shuffling machine created something which statistically has never existed before. Every shuffled deck should belong in a museum, right?

On the other hand, prompting AI for "pelican riding on a bicycle" clearly shows that it has far more trouble with unique concepts, compared to prompting for something more cookie-cutter.

[testrun]

I think the most important is number 2. People are now looking for things that are made by humans. Most detest AI slop. And if they find out that you are peddling slop, you lost trust.

It seems to me that we will go through the same phases that chess went through when chess on computers became a thing. First, people thought that this will kill chess, then people start using it as a tool to play better chess. Now, chess is thriving, despite AI being used in chess. I can see a similar path with art. Using AI to generate ideas, still create art by humans.

[crote]

Crucially, chest is also thriving as a spectator sport - and what's drawing the views is not the high-level matches: people are far more interested in more fast-paced and casual content, where the personality of the streamer can shine through.

On the other hand, absolutely nobody is watching livestreams of two chess bots playing each other. They might technically be better at chess, but that doesn't mean it makes for entertaining content.

[lofaszvanitt]

It's a harrowing situation to watch simpleminded idiots in forums proclaim that artists, some even naming top talent, are going to be useless and that they can steal their handiwork just by naming them in prompts. And people actually dare to say this with such audacity. Those who create GenAI likely do not realize what lowlife impulses some of these individuals have.

No matter how good AI agents become, you still need a general understanding of what works and what doesn't. If you don't have years of experience in the field, all you will end up doing is copying what others do. It's the same dynamic you see on OnlyFans. Mindless zombie hordes copy the "pioneers" (who shove even bigger things in their back orifice for example) and push things further and further, chasing shock value because that's what once elevated someone into the top 0.1 percent.

It's the worst kind of race-to-the-bottom scenario.

[Davidzheng]

Re: But they aren't alive, they don't live in the world and have experiences, and they can't create something truly new.

Is it possible for a character in a novel to have novel experiences? Or for you to experience a novel dream? I would argue yes. You can know the rules of the environment and the starting conditions, but with a bit of randomness (or not) you can generate from that novel experiences which were unexpected - so too from the data & distribution that AIs are already trained on they can experience new experiences.

Another source of novelty is from good verifiers/recognition of a class of object which is hard to construct but easy to verify - here the AI can search and from that obtain novel solutions which were unthought of before.

N.B novelty itself is basically trivial - just generate random strings. But both of the above are mechanisms to generate novel samples inside some constraint of "meaningfulness"