Some of the newspaper opinion pieces about the evils of photography or the cold inhumanity of listening to a record instead of a live performance would fit right in to the discourse today with nary a noun change.
Pretty funny. I just did a search for "Mozart Faucet" and found a lot of bathroom fixtures. The poor old composer must be spinning in his grave!
If this is the thesis we're looking at, then AI is only the latest straw on the pile. We've been killing our sense of awe for well over a century, through all of the generations of mass media. Anything with even the slightest amount of salience has been commoditized. We are a consumer culture with an insatiable appetite for novelty.
I read an older story to my kids recently, and the plot hinged upon a kid getting a stomachache from eating cucumbers and milk at the same time. And that seemed surprising (since my kids do that all the time), so of course I googled for it, and ended up in a morass of blogspam garbage… they really have turned to shit.
Sure they can! They are doing it now. There’s an app that shows me where to go, what the rules are, what they have to offer, whether it’s for medical or not, and I can even order ahead.
Mushrooms are natural, are they not? OF course the feelings and percepetions induced by psychedelics are not real in the sense of being actual physical phenomena, but if you think of them as transiting a chemical space/dimension then they're certainly natural.
That is, unfortunately, not always the case. Long exposure photography used in photos of nature often lend an unrealistic view of (enter beautiful place here). Basically, photoshop for nature.
You wind up with folks visiting the grand canyon and feeling let down because it was nowhere near as beautiful as the photos.
It doesn't mean the travel isn't worth it or that you didn't have a nice trip, but it wasn't really what one hoped for.
I did feel let down by the Grand Canyon, but not because of photos. You visit a bunch of stop along the rim, but since it’s so wide, the view from each stop looks pretty similar. It’s beautiful, but when you go to the third or fourth place, it does become somewhat familiar.
This doesn’t hold for walking down into the canyon, though—that was amazing.
It does. But it's also the case that people often witness very weak examples of aurora borealis during their short vacations north and then assume it's always like that and all the photos are long exposure or otherwise enhanced. This is a mistaken impression, sometimes aurora borealis really is very bright and vivid. But for those occasions to coincide with your vacation requires a fair bit of luck.
Only if you rely on screens for your awe. If you can get away from light pollution, going outside on a clear night is one good way to experience awe. Substitute your favorite way to experience nature in person...
I do wonder how future advances in VR will impact this. On occasions VR has given me a true sense of awe, even in it's current, technologically-limited form.
If you can conjour up any vista and see it around you at true scale, running your hands through alien grass and smelling the alien breeze - will that make the claims in this article harder to refute?
However I can't help but feel it's a bit like arguing one should never see too much beauty in life because one doesn't want to become bored of beauty. I'm not sure where this argument leads other than "ration your dopamine"
Ultimately though, even if you were able to recreate every sensory element of an experience, you know that what you’re experiencing isn’t reality. You put on the VR glasses, you’re aware that you’re not ACTUALLY sitting outside experiencing a cloudless night
I think most people who see a painting or movie are aware that they’re not actually in the painting or in the movie. I’m not saying they don’t produce real emotions from people, but there’s certainly a difference.
What makes art impressive - what invokes awe - is the understanding that the artist is immensely talented and created something that is unique to them; no one else could have created that exact same thing.
Pressing a button and getting a technically impressive image will simply never invoke awe in the way that a human artist can; at least not after you've experienced it for the first time.
That's one thing that can invoke awe. I wouldn't say it's the only thing. In fact, I unfortunately don't think most art observers think too much about the details of the artist, their craft, or how they created the work.
But more importantly, unless I am misunderstanding I think your description just ruled out photography as being able to invoke awe.
Plenty of work goes into photography. But plenty of work goes into actually using AI image generators also (as opposed to just feeding them one prompt and letting them spit out some result, which is the "doodle a stick figure" level of mastery in the tool space).
Exactly. AI is a tool that can help people express themselves. People can use AI to create art just like with any other tool. These tools just happen to be the most advanced, which makes sense considering they're the newest thing. Collage is art. Sampling is art. Photoshop can be used to create art. Etc.
As someone who created over 500.000 images last time i checked 6 months ago, i don't know where that notion comes from, that A.I. images need no work.
Key here is that the artist wants to express an idea, an emotion something like that. When said purpose requires no work that's fine. When said purpose requires some work, that's fine as well. A.I. generated images in my opinion require a human in the loop for sure, using Photoshop or Automatic1111 or whatever.
A good channel to be educated about the amount of work, an artist puts into creating images, is Olivio Sarikas on YT.
> Pressing a button and getting a technically impressive image will simply never invoke awe in the way that a human artist can
This is the original claim. It is intended to be aimed at generative ai, but clearly it is ironically applicable to photography.
I agree with you (as I mentioned about photography and art). The comment of OP either applies to both generative AI and photography or to neither IMO.
Creating images with ai is also not just clicking a button: choosing the prompt, choosing negative prompts, choosing loras and models, controlnet, retouching and iterating, and deciding what looks good at each step.
> but clearly it is ironically applicable to photography.
It's a gradient. I will readily admit that while I consider photography to be art, I have more appreciation for a truly remarkable sculpture or painting. These are the pinnacle, for me.
At the other end you have AI art - sure, "pressing a button" is a bit reductionist, but I'm not sure that it's far off. And I'd also argue that after a certain amount of time spent creating a piece of AI art, it is no longer even AI art.
Looking at it from another angle: is anyone going to pay millions of dollars for AI art, aside from possibly a one-off situation built on hype? I seriously doubt it.
We can agree to disagree, but for the sake of the argument, since I enjoy the discussion, and you make good points.
> "pressing a button" is a bit reductionist, but I'm not sure that it's far off
I agree. And my tldr is: I think either it is not far off for both photography and AI or it is false for both.
> Looking at it from another angle: is anyone going to pay millions of dollars for AI art, aside from possibly a one-off situation built on hype? I seriously doubt it.
Duchamp's urinal only input from the artist is choosing the (ready-made) object and signing it. A DJ is basically choosing the songs, the order, and the speed, low/high/frequencies, etc. A photographer is choosing the film, size of sensor, exposure, angle, location, what is out of frame, what is on focus. Somebody using AI is choosing the topic, the prompt, the base image, the negative prompts, iterations, etc.
Nowadays there are artists with a team that literally execute nothing, other than directing the team like a CEO would do.
Can AI be mindless execution? yes. Can it be art? yes. And IMO the same applies to photography. Sometimes a photo is just clicking a button. It depends. I only ask to evaluate them with the same parameters.
As for the paying customer. Performance art has sold limited copies of videos of the performance, Joseph Beuys sold fat on chairs that have to be kept at a certain temperature. Art has been made about making a contract to shoot the artist consensually and recording it. Shredded banksys sold for a good amount. Urinals. The world of contemporary art will have no problem assimilating generative AI.
I personally am looking forward to see what art can be created with AI that could not be before. Like any new medium first it copies the previous ones, before it finds its own voice. (Photography, for example, used to not cut things out of frame ,like in most traditional paintings. Early movies used to resemble theater plays, etc)
In photography you have to go to the place and position yourself and wait for the right moment. It's much closer to fishing than clicking a button on the computer.
This is contradicted by AI art winning competitions for traditional art. People could not tell it is AI art, they felt what they felt. Only later must they convince themselves that it could not have been that good after all, because a machine made it.
That was one contest at the very beginning of the gen ai craze and even that was highly controversial. It's pretty bad form to pollute spaces meant for human output with ai bullshit. Clarke's World had to shut down submissions for a while because of the tide of auto-generated bullshit.
I feel like people like you who think things like "what's the problem?" don't actually understand what the effect of this technology has been on these creative communities. We still want to hone these skills and produce good work. Flooding online spaces with that stuff makes it harder to curate the signal to noise. Sharing art and getting feedback is how humans improve, and the glut of hacks who now think they're an artist is harming these communities. It's not necessarily about the final product, but the effect of the technology on these communities. AI companies steal the labor then people who were never part of the community come in and flood the space with low effort work. Then people like you dismiss it as gatekeeping. It's a super frustrating conversation to have.
This is an unpopular opinion now, and one that I completely agree with.
I have always been very bad at all things art, which I think has only increased my appreciation for all of the incredibly talented artists in the world.
I often feel sad for those losing their livelihood and passion.
I can see the problems with it, just like I can see problems with other forms of automation. The point I am making though is that your presupposition is wrong. You are falling for some type of labor-theory-of-value fallacy. AI art can inspire awe, a primal sensation, desite the fact that no human toiled away on it. Of course that can be disheartening to some artists, but that does not make it any less true.
I'm in awe when I see what computers can generate. I'm in awe when I read arXiv and come to understand what's going on underneath. There's plenty to be in awe of.
If you're not in awe are you even paying attention?
Well written and enjoyable. But this is not really new or related to AI. As mentioned in the article, this is more about aging.
I take a different stance where the author claims AI manipulated imagery is less "real" than photography that is produced with focus stacking and HDR shadows. Those are no less false than AI, particularly at the degree used in his examples.
The awe-drop towards photography that he describes I experienced during the rise of Instagram over a decade ago. I couldn't understand why people compromised otherwise good photography with something so obviously manipulated. It felt like people being proud of an exam they cheated on. But the world became accustomed to that and moved on.
> the world became accustomed to that and moved on
I used to have a similar opinion, but some young kids made me aware of an entirely different perspective. The young world seems to be waiting. There are those who jump on every hype to kill boredom or to compensate, those we all see and, I'll be honest here, who we all pity. But then there are those who couldn't get inspired and stimulated in that rather short window between the birth of awareness and that infinite moment when the dark patterns of big tech and the marketing industry hit them like a 2 mile-long freight-train. They can't move on; they are paralyzed. And society acts like they need reeducation.
Some people call it the "enshittification" of the internet and culture itself, which makes it worse because the term just creates another hype. The underlying issue are obedient engineers just doing their job instead of _simply_ (because they are damn good) being the better and much brighter competition. Rationalism and game theory have fooled the smartest into conformity.
Not every art movement in history has been motivated by awe. There’s a toilet in a gallery somewhere. Important to remember that these tools are extensions of humans and their expressions through time, and generative AI is still subject to humans’ tastes: from the beginning of the prompt to the choice of sharing or deleting the result.
“If everything is extraordinary then everything becomes ordinary.”
We've become so accustomed to amazing things, some real, some synthetic, and every mixture in between, that these just seem less than "awful", to use the original sense of the word, to me. Even though they're probably objectively (heh) among the best micrographs ever taken.
Those images are great, but they are also highly processed and I wouldn't be surprised if we've all learned to ignore hyper-saturated images as stock imagery for advertising campaigns.
I find them amazing, but. I also have significant experience in macro photography, and knowing just how difficult it is to get a focus stack properly processed, etc plays in to my appreciation of the imagery. I can also see how these wouldn't look any different than any other random saturated oddity that is so pervasive on the tubes.
Is post-scarcity of cute kittens really such a bad thing?
I think it's better to take a somewhat stoic view of things, you can't control the world and what happens, technology will always advance, but you can decide how you will react to it. There is nobody except yourself that's stopping yourself from enjoying collecting kittens, AI or non-AI ones.
I also don't have to toil the earth for sustenance. I'm sure there are a lot of valuable aspects to a life of living off the earth with the effort of your two hands, and those things are lost when society grows so advanced that I can now sit in front of a computer and do mathematics instead of toiling the earth. But does that mean that producing an abundance of food is a bad thing?
Surely people can change behavior, but nonetheless is it also true that AI strips the meaning and value out of some parts of life. This is not a new phenomenon, but a result of technology and change itself.
If scarcity is the point of collecting, post-scarcity destroys the point. You may find a new one, but it is not the same.
AI can only strip meaning and value out of those parts of your life if you let it. If you made the meaning you derive from life very conditional upon factors outside your control, you were always sailing in rocky waters to begin with.
I disagree on both counts. For the first, to deny that the world has changed is delusional. For the second, I think a life of such Stoicism or Lucretianism is not one to be desired. It precludes valuing anything outside yourself. Lucretius himself said one should not love other people for the very reasons you state, they might die or leave you.
Is such self reliance more valuable than what one stands to lose?
So what if one is sailing in rocky waters? You can still have important insights on what can be gained, lament the loss of your crew, and have opinions on the changing conditions of the sea.
I wouldn’t call it post-scarcity, since kitten pics have never been hard to find. But the idea of “someone chasing their cat to sit for a second to take a cute pic” is what warms my heart. I know, art blah blah, but without “behind the scenes feeling” there’s just emptiness. And I am saying this as a person who has absolutely zero sense of art.
Consider an old man who hates the fact that you could find kitty pictures online as easily as we have been doing for the last 15 years. He thinks that a true authentic encounter with a kitty out in nature is the only real way to experience a kitty, and that you have throw that all away in favor of pictures.
What can you say to refute such an argument without also refuting your own foothold here?
I can't refute such statement, because in my opinion encountering a real kitty in the nature is better. Not everything is black and white (like some kittens!) in this scenario. In my mind I would rank these experiences in such way:
1. Playing with cats in real life
2. Looking at real cat pics where a person took a photo
3. AI generated cat pics
It's similar to going to a concert and watching a video of the concert. You obviously won't get the same buzz from the latter.
So, if my theoretical feed consists of just the 3rd one, I am losing the enjoyment from the 2nd. I think that comparison also doesn't fit in though, as AI doesn't really replace "feelings you get from real life encounters" (for now at least) anyways. It only fights for the the spot in the digital content world.
One thing that sometimes I catch myself thinking in the past few months when I see any pic online is asking myself "is this actually real?". Even for pictures that are most likely real. I never used to do that in the past, and I'm not sure how I feel about that.
With real kitten pics, you know that somewhere out there, there are kittens. But with AI gen'd kittens, you could be potentially unaware of a worldwide kitten cleansing. Imagine a world where your grey cubicle is bearable because you know there are kittens somewhere, but the reality is it's nothing but grey cubicles the world over and all the kittens are long gone.
Stoicism is good, but as technologists we do have some some say in the matter. The people who are most willfully accelerating us toward their utopia will say things like: "A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time." [1] If we don't like the way that AI is dehumanizing us, can't we fight back, and shouldn't we?
I very much agree, but we have to fight by moving forward, not by rewinding back to olden days. The genie isn't going back into the bottle, but we can learn to live and love in a post-genie world instead.
Is the author really claiming that it's generative AI's fault that we're inured to awe-inspiring images?
The internet killed our sense of awe with aggregators and algorithms. "Sort by popularity" killed it. It became easy a long time ago to binge on awesome images and content.
So there's a larger issue here -- predating even the Internet -- which I'll call "The Machu Picchu effect." In essence, it's the way that amazing first time experiences can be debased by having constantly been exposed to scruffy, easily accessible but lesser versions of them beforehand.
I avoided this in the 1990s, before hiking Nepal's Annapurna Circuit, by refusing to watch any videos showing the trail. No, no, no. I wanted to take in the whole experience with a sense of wonder. And, yes, that's what happened. Totally unforgettable trip.
Fast forward to 2012, when I had business in Peru and a chance to visit Machu Picchu. This time I messed up. I watched the videos, flipped through the slide shows, etc. So, sadly, when I hiked up to the Sun Gate and caught the first glimpse of this restored ancient city, all I could think was: "Yep. That looks just like the pictures."
Generative AI certainly widens the ways we can inflict novelty fatigue on ourselves. But we've still got the ability to dial back on armchair experiences that will deaden our appreciation of the real thing.
This is mostly about AI generated images, not ChatGPT and alike that still put us to the ground on our expectations.
And I agree that a lot that can be generated in images with simple prompts is awesome. The problem is that is comparable or even better than the “old” awesome made by expensive artists. So, it was so awesome that old art if I can generate something even better with a short prompt?
I have 3 readings on that: AIs are standing on the shoulders of giants, most of “art” was not so much the work of genius but something more or less mechanical on remixing memes and cultural trends, and that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the watcher is as responsible for the “art” as the artist as much of the magic happens in his head, and that is independent from how the image was generated.
In any case, I think we didn’t lost our sense of awe. I can generate a thousand pictures with simple prompts and think they are amazing, even to have a healthy effect on my by watching them. But the artificial scarcity and market that used to be around images may end.
in terms of sheer spam, they might be killing the sense of awe in someone who found them awe-inspiring to begin with.
i can't speak for anyone else but i don't exactly find myself seeking out stable diffusion output because a big colourful high-contrast image of a t. rex bursting out the center of mars surrounded by rainbow mandala constellations or whatever doesn't really do anything for me. it's just blockbuster clip art. we had already been living in a broader culture that desensitises people to the impression of substance prior to dall-e or whatever; netflix originals and nolan flicks are visibly high-production-value but, generously, one out of every ten actually says anything.
even entirely hand-produced "blockbuster clip art" like that one pic of the cat with big round sunglasses with space reflecting in it that's been a fixture of 4chan wallpaper threads since time immemorial has long since served as an emblem of the easily-amused (see also any visual artifact that is a mainstay of stoners). and all it is is an original photograph by a certain андрей прохоров from a series known as "a girl and her cat", subject to a deviantart user's "10 minutes in photoshop for practice" for the reflections.
the real risk to awe is highlighted further down in the article and touched upon far too briefly relative to the firehose thing, which is the stain upon awe of suspicion. is this image from a camera or a 3d package or a generative neural network? balancing a healthy fascination with the world with a healthy suspicion of your senses is a discussion that risks veering into dangerously political, religious, not-very-hacker-news-guidelines territory, but i'll play it safe and just say an apocalyptic tone is not conducive to determining what the healthy balance is.
In your denouncement of the ostensibly trite content of "a t. rex bursting out the center of mars surrounded by rainbow mandala constellations or whatever", you fail to look past the content itself and find value in the technique. From an artist's perspective, these models are nothing short of magical in how they manage to pack in knowledge across so many styles and contexts.
It's personally mind-blowing how effective diffusion is in general (but retrospectively, it's a beautifully simple concept), but it's not just the isolated image of a t-rex on mars that it interesting. It's the speed and cost at which the image can be generated, and the ways in which the data can be modified or recontextualized in a feedback loop. Or how multimodal systems like GPTV or LLaVA allow a new form of communication which blurs the line between images and language. I could go on, but the essence is that you are doing yourself a severe disservice by generalizing these capabilities as "blockbuster clip art".
i met the subject matter on the article's terms and made it quite explicit that an image can be impressive but unsubstantial entirely orthogonal to whether or not it is the result of diffusion. obviously it's nuts that you can cook up the right markov chain to repeatedly denoise your way to something recognisable; i doubt anyone's here to take that away from you.
No one's arguing that the people using generative AI are enthralled with the methods, and I expect that people that make spin art are equally enthralled with the process and also amazed at the images they create, but I wouldn't call either art.
I feel like the comparison to spin art from before is very good. The processes (diffusion and spin art) are surprisingly similar ... You have your input (words vs. paints) and have a process that you have very little control over (the model vs. a spinning disk). Now you throw your input at the process and you receive an output image.
In both cases you can actually get better at throwing input into your process to achieve results that you like more.
I don't feel too strongly about what I am about to say but can't we find a parallel here to the following statement?
> I am not surprised people find compilers exciting, and equally enthralled with the compilation process and also amazed at the binary outputs they create, but I wouldn't call describing program flow using a higher level language programming.
If the artist/developer can describe what they see in their mind's eye using a higher level of abstraction, does that invalidate value and function of the output?
I don't think that revised statement is an equal parallel, as spin art and generative models are not dependent on each other. Although someone could, and probably will, make a generative spin art model if they haven't already done so.
Basically, I think there is a risk that someone becomes overly enamored with the generative process, and just creates something that is solely an outcome of that generative process. A good example for this is the generative tree drawing algorithms. Great, a line drawing that resembles a tree, "look what we can make tech do!" That is math and algorithms, not art.
> I think there is a risk that someone becomes overly enamored with the generative process, and just creates something that is solely an outcome of that generative process.
I agree with that entirely. That is already happening at a concerningly rapid pace with little in its way and will only speed up.
> i can't speak for anyone else but i don't exactly find myself seeking out stable diffusion output because a big colourful high-contrast image of a t. rex bursting out the center of mars surrounded by rainbow mandala constellations or whatever doesn't really do anything for me.
Oh yeah? What about... "a mesmerizingly vibrant and colossal T-Rex with an iridescent, shimmering skin that reflects all the colors of the spectrum. It stands in a fantastical, alien landscape filled with towering, luminescent mushroom-like structures and a flowing river of brilliant, neon light. In the background, an otherworldly nebula explodes with the most intense and vivid colors across the cosmic star-filled sky"!? [1]
I have nothing else to add to this serious topic, I just like drawing dinosaurs like I'm eight years old again [2]. I rented a GPU for this weekend and I've got a script using GPT4 to generate random topic-specific prompts for SDXL to test out all the parameters, schedulers, etc (5k images and counting so far). Maybe it's just the fact that I've avoided the reddit firehose but I don't know how anyone could lose their awe so fast. It's just fun and there doesn't have to be any more to it.
> I have nothing else to add to this serious topic
despite your best efforts, you've done so in the following:
> Maybe it's just the fact that I've avoided the reddit firehose
> It's just fun
these really are important variables! you have the process, you have two models playing a game of telephone, you have to hold the fact of the models' existence in your head to appreciate that page. that's so much more than just one of those images out of context popping up on a social media feed.
A friend of mine built a snowman today. It was beautiful. No photo real or generated can do it justice. The act was in the building and being there. That is the key takeaway from all this. Choose real life. Go out and build a snowman. Interact with the world and with people and materials. It doesn't matter if a master photographer or an AI generates a picture of a snowman. In the end if it motivates you to go out and build one yourself then it is good. Otherwise it is just porn.
My ggggg*1000 grandfather, a eukaryote, really knew how to live. He didn't have hands - he had to DREAM and use his MIND to make snowmen. Kids today with their "hands" are desensitized to the needed mental work of imagining how a snowman would look.
I'm not saying this argument automatically wins. But I think the two sides need to define terms. What's "real" and "authentic" for one generation was a huge stretch for another, and will be rote/boring for another. Is there a coherent dividing point? I personally don't think so; I would like to hear an attempted definition, though.
Real = Struggling to manage your horse to plow the fields so you and your family doesn't starve? Being a master horseman and ploughman? Breeding sturdier horses and selling them so you're rich, and everyone can easily plow? Replacing horses with engines+plows, with heated cabins, which activates way more land, to grow more food for the world? Running a retro amish-style farm on the weekend where you go back to using real horses to plow again?
^^^^ Where does "real/genuine" come in and then leave in that sequence? And who are you to say where other people should spend their time within it?
Agree. Another example of desensitization is the popularity (now diminishing) of Marvel movies. Relative to their visual presentation, they are empty of content. Gauging the depth of meaning in a Marvel movie takes almost no effort. I suppose their recent drop in popularity might indicate that the broader culture is finally catching on to this.
The Loki series and the Spider-Verse animations were a bit of fresh air in the superhero space. I watched The Marvels recently and it’’s just visual, nothing else.
That's true of the entire genre. I've heard of acting classes where people tried doing a dramatic reading from Star Wars. Without the special effects and music, it falls flat.
As someone who watched all the "original" marvel movies, up to a infinity war I think, I don't think anyone expected any depth from them . I wanted to watch a classical sorry full of non-subverted tropes about a hero fighting an adversary, going through a classical hero journey, and eventually prevailing (possibly sacrificing something in a process). This is a tale as old as time and I don't think there's anything wrong with it.
Of course marvel movies are devoid of any greater meaning and don't really prompt the viewer to think about anything deeper, but for me it's a feature, not a bug - when I want to think I open a technical book or start a side project.
Yeah, if you want to be awed, go outside. Visit a forest after the rain. Or climb a big hill and look around. Or use a light pollution map to find a nice dark sky to go out and see the stars (admittedly much harder than it used to be).
Nature is awesome. Most photographs don’t do it justice. You have to get out there and see it for the full sensory experience.
Nature is full sensory experience and much more (physical effort, rewards). Also, we evolved to have it as a natural baseline, and folks in cities just vaguely lost it over few generations (or one), its still there if you actually listen to your body and mind.
The only people that I ever met that dislike nature and mountains are severely depressed people (and not all of those of course, and even those often flat out reject objectively helping things), literally everybody else heals a bit or recharges there.
If it's meaning you want from art, then DALLE-3 or SDXL plus extensions or abilities like inpainting might actually be the most effective way to achieve that.
After all, there is quite a bit of meaning in the text used to generate them. That seems like a head start if you are trying to make a statement. Not to mention the speed that the image or image elements emerge and can be iterated or integrated.
For example, take Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party (admittedly just from the top of Google search results about artistic statements). It is a series of plates that have sculptures depicting femininity in various ways at various heights. With something like a painting tool with SDXL or DALLE-3 integrated one could create an image with similar content by drawing the table and then generating/inserting or inpainting each of the individual plate contents per specification such as the size of the inpaint mask and prompt.
She clearly explained the meaning of the work and it can fit in a few long sentences.
The more I think about this, the more it seems that image generation should be very helpful for artists who want to "say" something.
CGI has killed my sense of awe 20 or 30 years ago. How can I find special effects in movies awe inspiring when I know it's all done with a computer?
It used to me that I watched Godzilla smash a building and was awestruck because each and every tile on the roof of the buildings was carefully placed by hand, the brick walls crumbling like real brick walls showed me how much work and care went into making just a few seconds of footage.
But now I can watch monsters smash entire cities and it bores me to tears. I know the buildings are copy pasted, the details are just tiled textures. It still took somebody some time to design and arrange but I know it's relatively cheap because being cheap is the whole point of doing it this way and they try to compensate by doing more of it on a wider scale, which lacks intimacy. Because even the camera itself is fake they can fly the camera around rapidly to make sure I never get a good look at any of the details, to hide the deficiency of the models, to make sure I don't notice the cut and paste jobs.
Then I watch a war movie. All the shots of the huge armies are from very far away so the men are indistinct ants. Close up shots only show me a few men at a time, it's all calculated to hide the fact that they didn't actually have thousands of men on the field and how can I be amazed when I know this? But if I watch Waterloo, 1970, I am genuinely amazed because I can clearly see thousands of men in detail. They really did have an army on the field and it's awe inspiring in a way that a movie with copy-pasted composite armies never can be.
Any awe is derived from the original awe of the art or photographs that went into the training. And no 3D or video means to me anyway that I feel like I'm looking at mediocre comic illustrations.
I would suggest that we've already been through this with the advent of the internet - if anything awe inspiring happens anywhere in the world we can all hear about it which is a massive change from only being aware of local art/events. I think the major change will be the democratising of artistic taste, it's far easier to tweak a prompt than to learn how to be an artist so we'll get to see artistic expression from a much wider variety of people that are outside of artistic cliques.
It's my view that aesthetics are entirely independent of the work/suffering put into it by the artist and I'm looking forward to more art that is created to appeal to my innate sense of aesthetics by others who share that sense.
I am pragmatic with most things in life. Clinging onto something is mostly a losing proposition. If something, for some reason, does not do work for me anymore, and there is no reason to assume that's going to change and nothing I can realistically do about it anyway, then it's probably a good idea to adjust and let it go.
In this particular and rapidly evolving part of our experience, I am sure we will discover new things about us. Maybe yeah, looking at actual photos of strange places will do less to us. Maybe that's fine because we never did care if it's real or not; maybe that part of the experience was mostly for the photographer and not the audience. Maybe for the rest of us the wonder that is somehow induced and the imagination being tickled can just as well be synthesised.
Would that be bad? Of course, too much of a thing will still be tiring and outright bad for you. Food is our most obvious nemesis in this regard. But even in a society where it's overabundant, we still value whatever good food means for us and I think it's highly unlikely that that is going to going to change.
Generative AI doesn't create art, it just creates novelty. Art requires so much more than just what you see with your eyes.
The market for AI-generated stuff exists, and I think it's a fine toolkit for exploration, drafting, democratizing and speeding up the creative process.
But nobody will experience 'awe' because that is a human emotion which requires empathy, e.g. a connection between audience and creator.
Very few people in tech will understand this, and its going to be hilarious to me when the bottom falls out of this hypecycle after the novelty wears off.
Doesn't this hold true for everything? It all started with painting. Then photography came around and took some work to produce. Photography finally reached the masses with 1-hour photo shops. Then anyone with a phone could create them. Now AI can do it. It's the price of lowering the barrier to entry.
We can go through this same exercise with a number of technological improvements.
Construction has led to the demise of awe around buildings.
Mass production has killed our sense of awe around products.
Cheap abundant food has led to a decline in awe around fancy meals.
I'm still in awe when I see certain paintings and buildings made by human hand, because it involves thousands of hours to become good at something in general. There is an emotional component to it that makes me like it more than computer generated stuff - that is just mid at best. Never been amazed by some ai art. There is some indirect grind component to be admired in it when you consider research and development, but that does not touch me like a masterpiece of some legendary artist.
There was an article on HN yesterday about the Carmalite monks in Wyoming building a Gothic monastery[1]. They couldn't afford the cost so they started using CNC machines to carve the rock themselves. Looking at the work they've completed so far, I can't tell the difference between their work hand carved stone.
Just because the barrier to entry is lower doesn't mean there is nothing awe inspiring produced. People in general aren't as impressed by the results because of saturation.
Automated entertainment generation is just getting started. The author is a "screenwriter and producer". Hollywood is terrified. The writers strike was just the beginning.
I think people who believe in "automated entertainment" don't actually understand the economics of media and how the attention economy works. People want to see high quality works and they want shared experiences. AI doesn't do that. I'd bet there's books, movies, or TV shows that you're excited to watch. I'd also bet none of them were created by AI.
143 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 213 ms ] threadIf this is the thesis we're looking at, then AI is only the latest straw on the pile. We've been killing our sense of awe for well over a century, through all of the generations of mass media. Anything with even the slightest amount of salience has been commoditized. We are a consumer culture with an insatiable appetite for novelty.
You wind up with folks visiting the grand canyon and feeling let down because it was nowhere near as beautiful as the photos.
It doesn't mean the travel isn't worth it or that you didn't have a nice trip, but it wasn't really what one hoped for.
This doesn’t hold for walking down into the canyon, though—that was amazing.
If you can conjour up any vista and see it around you at true scale, running your hands through alien grass and smelling the alien breeze - will that make the claims in this article harder to refute?
However I can't help but feel it's a bit like arguing one should never see too much beauty in life because one doesn't want to become bored of beauty. I'm not sure where this argument leads other than "ration your dopamine"
Pressing a button and getting a technically impressive image will simply never invoke awe in the way that a human artist can; at least not after you've experienced it for the first time.
But more importantly, unless I am misunderstanding I think your description just ruled out photography as being able to invoke awe.
Only if you start with the assumption that no work goes into photography.
Key here is that the artist wants to express an idea, an emotion something like that. When said purpose requires no work that's fine. When said purpose requires some work, that's fine as well. A.I. generated images in my opinion require a human in the loop for sure, using Photoshop or Automatic1111 or whatever.
A good channel to be educated about the amount of work, an artist puts into creating images, is Olivio Sarikas on YT.
Of course photography can be art, I agree (is this controversial in hn?)
This is the original claim. It is intended to be aimed at generative ai, but clearly it is ironically applicable to photography.
I agree with you (as I mentioned about photography and art). The comment of OP either applies to both generative AI and photography or to neither IMO.
Creating images with ai is also not just clicking a button: choosing the prompt, choosing negative prompts, choosing loras and models, controlnet, retouching and iterating, and deciding what looks good at each step.
It's a gradient. I will readily admit that while I consider photography to be art, I have more appreciation for a truly remarkable sculpture or painting. These are the pinnacle, for me.
At the other end you have AI art - sure, "pressing a button" is a bit reductionist, but I'm not sure that it's far off. And I'd also argue that after a certain amount of time spent creating a piece of AI art, it is no longer even AI art.
Looking at it from another angle: is anyone going to pay millions of dollars for AI art, aside from possibly a one-off situation built on hype? I seriously doubt it.
> "pressing a button" is a bit reductionist, but I'm not sure that it's far off
I agree. And my tldr is: I think either it is not far off for both photography and AI or it is false for both.
> Looking at it from another angle: is anyone going to pay millions of dollars for AI art, aside from possibly a one-off situation built on hype? I seriously doubt it.
Duchamp's urinal only input from the artist is choosing the (ready-made) object and signing it. A DJ is basically choosing the songs, the order, and the speed, low/high/frequencies, etc. A photographer is choosing the film, size of sensor, exposure, angle, location, what is out of frame, what is on focus. Somebody using AI is choosing the topic, the prompt, the base image, the negative prompts, iterations, etc.
Nowadays there are artists with a team that literally execute nothing, other than directing the team like a CEO would do.
Can AI be mindless execution? yes. Can it be art? yes. And IMO the same applies to photography. Sometimes a photo is just clicking a button. It depends. I only ask to evaluate them with the same parameters.
As for the paying customer. Performance art has sold limited copies of videos of the performance, Joseph Beuys sold fat on chairs that have to be kept at a certain temperature. Art has been made about making a contract to shoot the artist consensually and recording it. Shredded banksys sold for a good amount. Urinals. The world of contemporary art will have no problem assimilating generative AI.
I personally am looking forward to see what art can be created with AI that could not be before. Like any new medium first it copies the previous ones, before it finds its own voice. (Photography, for example, used to not cut things out of frame ,like in most traditional paintings. Early movies used to resemble theater plays, etc)
Although you can also take photos with light and no camera, like Man Ray.
I feel like people like you who think things like "what's the problem?" don't actually understand what the effect of this technology has been on these creative communities. We still want to hone these skills and produce good work. Flooding online spaces with that stuff makes it harder to curate the signal to noise. Sharing art and getting feedback is how humans improve, and the glut of hacks who now think they're an artist is harming these communities. It's not necessarily about the final product, but the effect of the technology on these communities. AI companies steal the labor then people who were never part of the community come in and flood the space with low effort work. Then people like you dismiss it as gatekeeping. It's a super frustrating conversation to have.
I have always been very bad at all things art, which I think has only increased my appreciation for all of the incredibly talented artists in the world.
I often feel sad for those losing their livelihood and passion.
If you're not in awe are you even paying attention?
I take a different stance where the author claims AI manipulated imagery is less "real" than photography that is produced with focus stacking and HDR shadows. Those are no less false than AI, particularly at the degree used in his examples.
The awe-drop towards photography that he describes I experienced during the rise of Instagram over a decade ago. I couldn't understand why people compromised otherwise good photography with something so obviously manipulated. It felt like people being proud of an exam they cheated on. But the world became accustomed to that and moved on.
I used to have a similar opinion, but some young kids made me aware of an entirely different perspective. The young world seems to be waiting. There are those who jump on every hype to kill boredom or to compensate, those we all see and, I'll be honest here, who we all pity. But then there are those who couldn't get inspired and stimulated in that rather short window between the birth of awareness and that infinite moment when the dark patterns of big tech and the marketing industry hit them like a 2 mile-long freight-train. They can't move on; they are paralyzed. And society acts like they need reeducation.
Some people call it the "enshittification" of the internet and culture itself, which makes it worse because the term just creates another hype. The underlying issue are obedient engineers just doing their job instead of _simply_ (because they are damn good) being the better and much brighter competition. Rationalism and game theory have fooled the smartest into conformity.
“If everything is extraordinary then everything becomes ordinary.”
The ordinary is quite awesome as well.
We've become so accustomed to amazing things, some real, some synthetic, and every mixture in between, that these just seem less than "awful", to use the original sense of the word, to me. Even though they're probably objectively (heh) among the best micrographs ever taken.
I say this without judgement one way or another.
Midjourney has made my list irrelevant. I noticed I wasnt saving these photos anymore on IG, even without making a conscious decision about it.
I think it is because cute cats are now infinitely generate-able and no longer something to curate. My behavior made me sad.
I think it's better to take a somewhat stoic view of things, you can't control the world and what happens, technology will always advance, but you can decide how you will react to it. There is nobody except yourself that's stopping yourself from enjoying collecting kittens, AI or non-AI ones.
If scarcity is the point of collecting, post-scarcity destroys the point. You may find a new one, but it is not the same.
So what if one is sailing in rocky waters? You can still have important insights on what can be gained, lament the loss of your crew, and have opinions on the changing conditions of the sea.
What can you say to refute such an argument without also refuting your own foothold here?
1. Playing with cats in real life
2. Looking at real cat pics where a person took a photo
3. AI generated cat pics
It's similar to going to a concert and watching a video of the concert. You obviously won't get the same buzz from the latter.
So, if my theoretical feed consists of just the 3rd one, I am losing the enjoyment from the 2nd. I think that comparison also doesn't fit in though, as AI doesn't really replace "feelings you get from real life encounters" (for now at least) anyways. It only fights for the the spot in the digital content world.
One thing that sometimes I catch myself thinking in the past few months when I see any pic online is asking myself "is this actually real?". Even for pictures that are most likely real. I never used to do that in the past, and I'm not sure how I feel about that.
[1] https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful
The internet killed our sense of awe with aggregators and algorithms. "Sort by popularity" killed it. It became easy a long time ago to binge on awesome images and content.
I avoided this in the 1990s, before hiking Nepal's Annapurna Circuit, by refusing to watch any videos showing the trail. No, no, no. I wanted to take in the whole experience with a sense of wonder. And, yes, that's what happened. Totally unforgettable trip.
Fast forward to 2012, when I had business in Peru and a chance to visit Machu Picchu. This time I messed up. I watched the videos, flipped through the slide shows, etc. So, sadly, when I hiked up to the Sun Gate and caught the first glimpse of this restored ancient city, all I could think was: "Yep. That looks just like the pictures."
Generative AI certainly widens the ways we can inflict novelty fatigue on ourselves. But we've still got the ability to dial back on armchair experiences that will deaden our appreciation of the real thing.
https://www.andylacroce.com/2017/03/20/excerpt-delillos-whit...
I think the true feeling of awe that the author is talking about can only come from being out in the real world. Don’t look for it on your computer.
And I agree that a lot that can be generated in images with simple prompts is awesome. The problem is that is comparable or even better than the “old” awesome made by expensive artists. So, it was so awesome that old art if I can generate something even better with a short prompt?
I have 3 readings on that: AIs are standing on the shoulders of giants, most of “art” was not so much the work of genius but something more or less mechanical on remixing memes and cultural trends, and that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the watcher is as responsible for the “art” as the artist as much of the magic happens in his head, and that is independent from how the image was generated.
In any case, I think we didn’t lost our sense of awe. I can generate a thousand pictures with simple prompts and think they are amazing, even to have a healthy effect on my by watching them. But the artificial scarcity and market that used to be around images may end.
i can't speak for anyone else but i don't exactly find myself seeking out stable diffusion output because a big colourful high-contrast image of a t. rex bursting out the center of mars surrounded by rainbow mandala constellations or whatever doesn't really do anything for me. it's just blockbuster clip art. we had already been living in a broader culture that desensitises people to the impression of substance prior to dall-e or whatever; netflix originals and nolan flicks are visibly high-production-value but, generously, one out of every ten actually says anything.
even entirely hand-produced "blockbuster clip art" like that one pic of the cat with big round sunglasses with space reflecting in it that's been a fixture of 4chan wallpaper threads since time immemorial has long since served as an emblem of the easily-amused (see also any visual artifact that is a mainstay of stoners). and all it is is an original photograph by a certain андрей прохоров from a series known as "a girl and her cat", subject to a deviantart user's "10 minutes in photoshop for practice" for the reflections.
the real risk to awe is highlighted further down in the article and touched upon far too briefly relative to the firehose thing, which is the stain upon awe of suspicion. is this image from a camera or a 3d package or a generative neural network? balancing a healthy fascination with the world with a healthy suspicion of your senses is a discussion that risks veering into dangerously political, religious, not-very-hacker-news-guidelines territory, but i'll play it safe and just say an apocalyptic tone is not conducive to determining what the healthy balance is.
It's personally mind-blowing how effective diffusion is in general (but retrospectively, it's a beautifully simple concept), but it's not just the isolated image of a t-rex on mars that it interesting. It's the speed and cost at which the image can be generated, and the ways in which the data can be modified or recontextualized in a feedback loop. Or how multimodal systems like GPTV or LLaVA allow a new form of communication which blurs the line between images and language. I could go on, but the essence is that you are doing yourself a severe disservice by generalizing these capabilities as "blockbuster clip art".
In both cases you can actually get better at throwing input into your process to achieve results that you like more.
Gatekeeping lmao, art is whatever any of us want it to be. Hell, this comment is art, wanna buy the nft?
> I am not surprised people find compilers exciting, and equally enthralled with the compilation process and also amazed at the binary outputs they create, but I wouldn't call describing program flow using a higher level language programming.
If the artist/developer can describe what they see in their mind's eye using a higher level of abstraction, does that invalidate value and function of the output?
Basically, I think there is a risk that someone becomes overly enamored with the generative process, and just creates something that is solely an outcome of that generative process. A good example for this is the generative tree drawing algorithms. Great, a line drawing that resembles a tree, "look what we can make tech do!" That is math and algorithms, not art.
I agree with that entirely. That is already happening at a concerningly rapid pace with little in its way and will only speed up.
Invalidate? No.
Devalue? Yes.
Oh yeah? What about... "a mesmerizingly vibrant and colossal T-Rex with an iridescent, shimmering skin that reflects all the colors of the spectrum. It stands in a fantastical, alien landscape filled with towering, luminescent mushroom-like structures and a flowing river of brilliant, neon light. In the background, an otherworldly nebula explodes with the most intense and vivid colors across the cosmic star-filled sky"!? [1]
I have nothing else to add to this serious topic, I just like drawing dinosaurs like I'm eight years old again [2]. I rented a GPU for this weekend and I've got a script using GPT4 to generate random topic-specific prompts for SDXL to test out all the parameters, schedulers, etc (5k images and counting so far). Maybe it's just the fact that I've avoided the reddit firehose but I don't know how anyone could lose their awe so fast. It's just fun and there doesn't have to be any more to it.
[1] https://dalle.party/?party=cA8EVQF5
[2] https://dalle.party/?party=pXWEenFO
despite your best efforts, you've done so in the following:
> Maybe it's just the fact that I've avoided the reddit firehose
> It's just fun
these really are important variables! you have the process, you have two models playing a game of telephone, you have to hold the fact of the models' existence in your head to appreciate that page. that's so much more than just one of those images out of context popping up on a social media feed.
https://i.postimg.cc/KcHPQSmf/image.png
Well said, op
I'm not saying this argument automatically wins. But I think the two sides need to define terms. What's "real" and "authentic" for one generation was a huge stretch for another, and will be rote/boring for another. Is there a coherent dividing point? I personally don't think so; I would like to hear an attempted definition, though.
Real = Struggling to manage your horse to plow the fields so you and your family doesn't starve? Being a master horseman and ploughman? Breeding sturdier horses and selling them so you're rich, and everyone can easily plow? Replacing horses with engines+plows, with heated cabins, which activates way more land, to grow more food for the world? Running a retro amish-style farm on the weekend where you go back to using real horses to plow again?
^^^^ Where does "real/genuine" come in and then leave in that sequence? And who are you to say where other people should spend their time within it?
Of course marvel movies are devoid of any greater meaning and don't really prompt the viewer to think about anything deeper, but for me it's a feature, not a bug - when I want to think I open a technical book or start a side project.
Nature is awesome. Most photographs don’t do it justice. You have to get out there and see it for the full sensory experience.
The only people that I ever met that dislike nature and mountains are severely depressed people (and not all of those of course, and even those often flat out reject objectively helping things), literally everybody else heals a bit or recharges there.
After all, there is quite a bit of meaning in the text used to generate them. That seems like a head start if you are trying to make a statement. Not to mention the speed that the image or image elements emerge and can be iterated or integrated.
For example, take Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party (admittedly just from the top of Google search results about artistic statements). It is a series of plates that have sculptures depicting femininity in various ways at various heights. With something like a painting tool with SDXL or DALLE-3 integrated one could create an image with similar content by drawing the table and then generating/inserting or inpainting each of the individual plate contents per specification such as the size of the inpaint mask and prompt.
She clearly explained the meaning of the work and it can fit in a few long sentences.
The more I think about this, the more it seems that image generation should be very helpful for artists who want to "say" something.
It used to me that I watched Godzilla smash a building and was awestruck because each and every tile on the roof of the buildings was carefully placed by hand, the brick walls crumbling like real brick walls showed me how much work and care went into making just a few seconds of footage.
But now I can watch monsters smash entire cities and it bores me to tears. I know the buildings are copy pasted, the details are just tiled textures. It still took somebody some time to design and arrange but I know it's relatively cheap because being cheap is the whole point of doing it this way and they try to compensate by doing more of it on a wider scale, which lacks intimacy. Because even the camera itself is fake they can fly the camera around rapidly to make sure I never get a good look at any of the details, to hide the deficiency of the models, to make sure I don't notice the cut and paste jobs.
Then I watch a war movie. All the shots of the huge armies are from very far away so the men are indistinct ants. Close up shots only show me a few men at a time, it's all calculated to hide the fact that they didn't actually have thousands of men on the field and how can I be amazed when I know this? But if I watch Waterloo, 1970, I am genuinely amazed because I can clearly see thousands of men in detail. They really did have an army on the field and it's awe inspiring in a way that a movie with copy-pasted composite armies never can be.
and recorded music
and movies
and the internet
damn it, we will not find something to be wowed about ever again!
It's my view that aesthetics are entirely independent of the work/suffering put into it by the artist and I'm looking forward to more art that is created to appeal to my innate sense of aesthetics by others who share that sense.
I am pragmatic with most things in life. Clinging onto something is mostly a losing proposition. If something, for some reason, does not do work for me anymore, and there is no reason to assume that's going to change and nothing I can realistically do about it anyway, then it's probably a good idea to adjust and let it go.
In this particular and rapidly evolving part of our experience, I am sure we will discover new things about us. Maybe yeah, looking at actual photos of strange places will do less to us. Maybe that's fine because we never did care if it's real or not; maybe that part of the experience was mostly for the photographer and not the audience. Maybe for the rest of us the wonder that is somehow induced and the imagination being tickled can just as well be synthesised.
Would that be bad? Of course, too much of a thing will still be tiring and outright bad for you. Food is our most obvious nemesis in this regard. But even in a society where it's overabundant, we still value whatever good food means for us and I think it's highly unlikely that that is going to going to change.
Let's indulge yourselves until the point of collapse.
Hedonic adaptation works both ways so there will be no end to it, but we'll just get unsensitized to it.
The market for AI-generated stuff exists, and I think it's a fine toolkit for exploration, drafting, democratizing and speeding up the creative process.
But nobody will experience 'awe' because that is a human emotion which requires empathy, e.g. a connection between audience and creator.
Very few people in tech will understand this, and its going to be hilarious to me when the bottom falls out of this hypecycle after the novelty wears off.
[1] https://hackaday.com/2023/01/13/a-medieval-gothic-monastery-...
That's really the core of the art world; "Ah, but look closer".
Anything has significance to anyone if they're told to think about it.
I think people who believe in "automated entertainment" don't actually understand the economics of media and how the attention economy works. People want to see high quality works and they want shared experiences. AI doesn't do that. I'd bet there's books, movies, or TV shows that you're excited to watch. I'd also bet none of them were created by AI.
Give it three years.
AI can do this.
Images are already extremely high quality, and short form AI video has just started getting good in the last couple months.
In another 6 months we might get high quality long form video, if short form just got solved.
TikTok and Instagram may be totally on automatic in a year. Systems that learn what the viewer wants will generate as much of it as people will watch.