I created A.I. Art! But is it *really* art?

in Alien Art Hive2 years ago

Recently I have been bombarded with ads on Instagram and such about apps creating AI-based art. The concept in and of itself is super interesting and obviously somewhat controversial, so naturally I had to investigate further.

I didn't want to give certain dodgy apps the clicks so I simply went to the play store and found 'StarryAI'. The most famous one going viral often at the moment is Dall-E by OpenAI, but it put me on a waiting list to join so I figured I'd come back to that later. I've since activated that account but I've yet to fully explore it.

I get the initial impression that Dall-E is a lot more... tangible? While StarryAI is a lot more abstract. It has a lot of cool options, including two different AI setups, and even a list of styles from various real and historical artists to base the art being rendered on. To me, the outcome from this app seems much cooler, but I guess we'll see next time.

Here are the Prompts I gave to StarryAI, selecting random artists as I went:

1. 1,000 bears

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2. Real artists' revenue being stolen by AI while musicians watch on in support

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3. War of the colourful ants

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4. Balrog Dog

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5. Dreamy dystopian lack of freedom (here I uploaded an initial image of a street sign indicating 'no dogs'

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My personal favourite... the weird statue of liberty and American flag really put the cherry on top here

6. Galactic Nightmare

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The reason I find these so special and profound compared to Dall-E is precisely because it is a more imperfect rendition of the things I describe. Here's a few of my favourite aspects:

The not-quite ants

And the War of the Colourful ants, as well as 1,000 bears, real artists' and balrog dog, the abstraction and distortion of the main figures is so strange, incorrect and yet so familiar, it boggles the mind.

The humans in Real Artists are... just not quite humans, and yet we can still distinguish the fact they are meant to be so, even though we can't necessarily even tell if they are one or multiple humans.

Likewise, you can clearly see the ants are meant to be ants. You can identify the wings on the flying ant, the thorax and abdomen, mandibles, legs and head are all somewhat distinguishable, and the ensuing village fire from the terrible war, even though it's not... quite... a village, and the fire is just not quite a fire at any given point, even though we obviously know it's a fire in principle.

The bears are a much clearer example of this. They are clearly not bears, but somehow, if given to an unknowing human, the chances are quite high they would identify them as 'some kinda weird bears'

It's this kind of abstraction and warping of reality that I think would be extremely difficult if not impossible for a regular human to do, as we are all imprisoned in our own realities. All our personal abstractions are all based on warping very real phenomena and experience in our lives, whereas AI doesn't have such a mental roadblock.

It's not art!!

My friend who came up with the 'real artists' prompt was very quick to assert his opinion that this is just another way AI is destroying human careers, taking away our jobs, so to speak, and reducing 'real' art to computer technology with no heart or soul to speak of.

An ex student of mine had a similar rant about it on my social media, insisting that it is the years of toiling and struggling over a paintbrush, a lifetime of servitude to the art itself which makes it a real art form. Now I can just click a button with no cost and come up with this disgusting replacement with no meaning. Art will, as he says, gradually die.

Personally, I heavily disagree with both points.

AI is stealing our jobs

Well, in many ways this is obviously true. Robots of many kinds have been doing that for generations, from car manufacturing to bomb disposal.

But it is not the fault of the AI so much as it is humanity's incapacity to continue to innovate for themselves. For example, when a coal mine shuts down, one of two things can happen: A coal miner can lose his job and become a jobless, homeless bum, or he can be re-trained in the field that was set to replace his old job such as solar panel installation, wind farm engineering, maintenance and so forth. These jobs are currently in plentiful supply, but society has done a poor job of providing people those opportunities on the whole (many industries do in fact do a fair job at this).

Well what happens when those jobs die off? This is why we require human innovation. Our generation for the most part knows little about the very concept of being a coal miner. Most in the West cannot even fathom such a dangerous, horrible and low-paying career. Well what are these whiners doing now instead? more often than not, it turns out, the programming required to make the AI that replaces them in other fields!

The new frontiers created by the previous technological advancements have no end in the foreseeable future, as long as we continue aiming to become a multi-planet species, however there is still a LOT to work on here on Earth for perhaps several generations at least.

Regarding the AI making Art, well, I think you can see there is still a LONG way to go. In music, when it comes to making music for a movie, directors have two choices. They can peruse a vast, vast library of pre-made compositions that happen to fit their project with a bit of fine-tuning. This can cost them basically $1, and most low budget projects do this exclusively, from my experience. Commercials, video Intros and so forth.

Well, Humans are the ones who innovated the concept of these royalty-free sound libraries and humans are the ones profiting from it.

But higher budget projects might want compositions that are specifically catered to their movies or shows. This is where AI is a long, long way from replacing. You would have a hard time making AI create a soundtrack which exactly depicts the emotions and timing which the director desires at any given moment. It fails to be able to take in feedback from the director to brush up, scrap, swap out and re-orchestrate every moment of music to match what's happening on screen.

If a director doesn't much care about this element of their movie, they are a bad director and should just stick to the cheap ready-made libraries. For now, AI is unknown decades away from this kind of accomplishment.

I believe the same applies to art. I'm unaware of any artists who thinks they can simply describe what they want the outcome to look like in words which an AI could perfectly render. I mean, when I asked for 1,000 bears, I wanted 1,000 bears, not 30-ish brown blobs that kinda look like weird bear-rock things'.

If an artist wants such a vague piece of art because it looks cool, then perhaps it is they who are the problem.

Art, for the most part, is not simply something you put up in a gallery, either. Most art these days has a corporate function, and corporate function of art typically takes billions of dollars worth of Research and development, analyzing and studying human emotional response, colour connotation, blending & matching according to the current status quo of a given culture (red has different meanings in China compared to USA, for example), how to catch an eye and how to make it sell.

In this sense, AI is totally useless and there is no progress to even suggest it will even attempt this kind of endeavour for decades or more.

When it inevitably does, it won't even matter anyway because we rarely simply find passion in a random piece of art. We tend to follow the art for the artists we respect, admire, empathize with or idolize. The drugs and the degeneracy, the depression or demographic that the artists' soul is inherently built from, is reason to follow, in the same way we buy a music album from a musician before we have even heard it, because their last one got you hooked.

You loved that one Dream Theater album so you looked them up, attended their concerts and bought their merchandise and eagerly awaited their new album now that their drummer has been replaced, so you can furiously debate which is better, old vs new in online forums.

AI, no matter how human-like its art becomes, lacks the very canvas of life that we are drawn towards to begin with: the human.

No effort therefore no art

I just think this is a naïve statement. Nobody said art requires effort to become defined as art. As I'm a musician I'll use musical analogies once more. John Cage infamously created 4'33", a piece of music in which the performers play no notes, make no sound, and simply sit there for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. However, the music can be performed at any length, with many versions performed 7, 9, 12 minutes or beyond.

There are death metal band covers of this 'music' and decades of controversy, making the piece extraordinarily famous in the music world to begin with. The piece screams the question 'what is music'?

You'll tend to find the more one tries to define music, the more difficult it becomes to deny that 4'33 is indeed also music. 'Organised sound', perhaps? Well, 4'33 is organised, written down. It even has 3 movements.

A car engine is organised sound.

The dictionary definition of music is 'Vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) combined in such a way as to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion.'

Well, I can think of a lot of music that lacks form, harmony or expression of emotion so that's trash. Just take a look at many serialist pieces for a lack of form. Gregorian chants for a lack of harmony, and commercial corporate music for a lack of emotion. Not only this, but the dictionary requires 'beauty', which is strongly disagreeable at its core.

Nowhere does music - or art - require effort, time and experience. It is the outcome that matters. One artist might throw some paint on a canvas randomly for 20 seconds and sell it as a political message for millions. Others might do the same as a way to get around tax burdens. Or, one might spend her whole life struggling with a single concept before concluding the best way to express it is to throw random paint on a canvas and sell it for $20 at a charity store.

Who is to say one is more legit than the other?

So, when an AI comes along, who was created by humans, and uses human prompts to create art which is based off of a human-made database of human-made images, who is to delegitimize the outcome simply because it only took 15 seconds to render?

Seems legit to me. If I see it as art, it is therefore, demonstrably, art.

I'm sure many disagree with every word i've said, though.

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I see the burgeoning frontier of AI and generative art as just another tool for 'real artists'... however, it does give the freedom to less artistically inclined people to participate in creating. This movement is growing and developing at break-neck speed. We have some pioneers in the field here on Hive too!

If you haven't checked out Ausbit's post... he just started a bot in his discord that is free to use. You can check the post out here. I haven't had time to play around yet... but from the looks of this post, you will have fun giving it a go.

I haven't checked at all but I did just now have a brief look and i'm very intrigued... Thanks! Can't wait to check this out deeper

freedom to less artistically inclined people to participate in creating.

That's pretty much it yeah, it's increasing a certain type of freedom in the everyday lives of everyday people. Seems like nothing but inspiration to me =)

I tend to kind of see it the same way. If one is truly a good or great artist... they will continue to create with whatever tools they are inspired to use. I think AI is an accelerant for creativity and production. @ kaliyuga has been designing models to use this tech to create video games.

So, instead of having to learn graphic arts and all the time-consuming aspects of character design and environments, etc., these models could use AI to do a lot of the legwork. I see this potentially as a great benefit. How many people have video games inside their imagination but lack the technical skills to make it come to fruition? I don't want to go on too much about all this but it's fascinating.

These same kinds of operations will probably saturate into many more facets of society and life in general moving forward into the future if i had to guess. I will be curious to see how this kind of tech may be able to help in other fields besides art once it really gets rolling.

Oh yeah juliak also recommended kaliyuga, I already checked out - a little overwhelmed at the moment, maybe because I'm working at the same time, but IMPRESSED

But you're right yeah the benefits for the everyday person is immense, if anything it's more just liberating people in the way everyone is fighting for. I can imagine entire MMORPG's built on the premise of AI-generated images, each stage or zone designed conceptually from the image created. A great human art, in this sense, could be born from AI. A lot of exciting opportunities, I reckon.

Heya! I've been summoned!! I am always, always down for a good ole chat about ai art, art philosophy, and related topics. Lately I've been more active over on Twitter(@kaliyuga_ai), but Hive (specifically Alien Art Hive) is my home, and I'm trying to split my time more effectively.

Have you tried out Stable Diffusion yet? You can play around with it super easily in beta.dreamstudio.ai (you get 200 free generation credits for just participating in the beta). It looks like you may have been using Wombo to create your pieces up there. Wombo is an awesome way to dip your toes into AI art, but it uses a really outdated pipeline/model, and the field has advanced really far in the meantime :)
Additionally, like @juliakponsford and @castleberry said, I have a ton of free models available in colab notebook form on my Github.

Edit to add: I have an ai art community on Hive that's pretty defunct right now, but maybe I should put more effort into promoting it. It's C/The Latent Space :)

Hey yes I have suddenly heard so much about you haha... well I know almost nothing about art in general, let alone the deeper philosophical world of AI renderings. I'm the musician kind of artist, or fake artist, as artists like to call us.

The images were starryai, but I couldn't tell you which AI it uses. All I know is, obsolete or not, it creates by far and away my favourite images from the prompts and images I provide. I got access to Dalle and got essentially nothing that I wanted whatsoever. I tried a couple of others with pretty dull results, too.

I mean look at this freak show!

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Love it.

I'm attempting to sign up to this beta thing now! Though tbh this is all very overwhelming!

Let me know if you need any help!! I've made the official quickstart videos for DreamStudio and I've written a bunch of tutorials about various aspects of AI art :)

Work or not, it's all overwhelming to be honest. You aren't too late to the party it has just grown so fast... i haven't been able to keep up. It's a fun exploration process... when it's not too frustrating. hahaha I feel like with AI art and Blockchain tech etc that we are like in the Wild West 2.0 with a digital fronteir.
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Yeah cheers to that. I've been in the blockchain world since like 2012 or something? On Hive/Steem since 2016. I used to read all the updates and hardforks every chance I got and even now I basically don't know what the hell I'm doing.

But then again I do have the IQ of a sunflower

 last year (edited) 

I didn't get into blockchain until i joined Hive/Steem in late 2017 so it's been a fun journey ever since. I still have no idea what's going on! hahaha It was crazy though i took some time off of Steemit and came back to the whole Hive hardfork and theft drama. It took a bit of catching up on the context and i'm so glad that Hive is what Steem coulda shoulda woulda been.

 2 years ago  

I see people recommending ausbits discord but if you want to try out some fun programs you should also look into @kaliyuga. she has created a bunch of great AI tools, I think they are in a pinned post!

Wow I just had a look and Stability looks pretty neat too! It seems I've been pretty late to this part of tech lol... jeeze I'm old. I just found a list I think ^__^

Artists are not happy with the fact that an AI-generated picture won an art prize. They argue that this is unfair because the AI did not have to put in any effort to create the artwork. They believe that if we are going to start awarding prizes for this kind of work, it should be for best use of AI technology. I have to mention the Turing test which was developed by Alan Turing as a way of determining a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from, or indistinguishable to a human being. The test has been updated to see if an AI can be mistaken for a human artist. For your reference https://www.creativebloq.com/news/ai-art-wins-competition Plus, AI is not just stealing jobs from humans, but also from other AI.

Yeah the Turing test is pretty obsolete, I hear.

I can understand an artists point of view. I mean, I gave up as a movie composer because the threat of the saturated market, AI tech, and websites of royalty-free music was more than enough for most the industry other than the big movies, rendering my job functionally obsolete bar a select few of the best of the best.

I just think there's far more to be done overall to be any form of 'replacement'

"But higher budget projects might want compositions that are specifically catered to their movies or shows. This is where AI is a long, long way from replacing. You would have a hard time making AI create a soundtrack which exactly depicts the emotions and timing which the director desires at any given moment. It fails to be able to take in feedback from the director to brush up, scrap, swap out and re-orchestrate every moment of music to match what's happening on screen."

About this argument, AI architecture is based on feedback and enhances itself.
reference:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.03715v1.pdf

Sure algorithmically, but that is a vast oversimplification. If you are proficient in AI tech then you could sit down and essentially create what you want, but that's not that different to just composing it yourself.

A movie director in this example is not a composer any more than he is an AI architect, he's a movie director. That's why they hire other people to do those jobs. It is well known composers and directors have very close relationships with a requirement of understanding and being able to communicate on the director's goals and desires without him having any technical prowess in the field. Like a CEO, he doesn't care about the process, he just wants the outcome. Some of these relationships span decades of movies for a reason.

You can't get that kind of human understanding through AI. all you can do is plug in data. This can certainly make a mimicry of something that sounds great, but you'd be a far cry from the nuance of intent that comes with a composer/director duo

This is indeed one of my problems with the modern obsession with Hans Zimmer - he has such a grand status that he can just write whatever he feels like is suitable and the directors he works with will more than likely just be like 'oh yeah awesome, hans zimmer made my music'. Rather than 'this is good but I want the oboe to express the anxiety the protagonist is feeling as he sees her from the window, but then when he looks back, the oboe should reflect the contentedness he feels around his family'.

A composer/director duo is also an enriching place of idea exchange, too, shaping the very foundations of a movie, something you can't exactly do by plugging in data in front of a computer. It could give raw musical ideas, though (like the art images above)

I was waiting for my credits charged up, Yes, I agree with your view on those prominent composers and artists, they are no longer criticized so become spoiled to make whatever they feel like. And that's exactly why people will prefer AI-generated personalised tastes for them. Also, higher chances of appropriate expressions from the scenes and circumstances than one composer/director duo's intentions from their own experiences.

I thought AI would be the last art field to be conquered, but it wasn't at all. The music and art fields seem to be conquered first. I thought that the field of art was the realm of human creativity, but it turned out that there were patterns that humans felt moved and liked.

I feel it's similar to how AI have defeated Chess. Now we can just download an app on our phone to play chess with a computer that can easily annihilate magnus carlsen, but we don't stop playing or watching chess.

It's the competition and the idolisation of champions that's really behind our love and appreciation of the game, or Tennis etc. Once A.I starts getting a personality, however, then we're in trouble haha

Love every word you have written .... although AI art is not my thing I see the beauty in it and appreciate it as part of diversity. I appreciate the way you explain how the emotions that only humans possess influence our artwork.... Excellent explanation ✌️

Thanks! Yeah I mean art is at its very core not something to be universally agreed upon. I appreciate the controversy it brings and the challenges it'll create down the line, that in itself holds some inherent value, I'm sure =D

But the philosophy behind it is a lot deeper than I'm prepared to go into!

Lol...The art theft was my favourite...Are you on @ausbitbank's discord...Cool stuff is going down there with Alien ware and toilets

No I'm not, I'm a musician not a real artist... but the above comment has me pretty curious about whats going on so let's see!

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@mobbs planning to go into some Ai art myself, I have been learning portrait for a while now and all i can say is art makes you feel from the generated to the non-generated.

you should give "mid journey" a try, it helps generate cool Ai art, so amazing.

Just checked it out. Looks impressive but can't figure out how to use it myself... I'll keep browsing. Good recommendation! The more the merrier. Look forward to seeing any results you manage to make!

I actually have a lot of results already just looking for the right times and a good write-up to back it up.

Art is as much an accidental result of a creative process as it is planned. Both elements, chance and plan, are contained in works of art that are generally regarded as meaningful. Where only pure chance prevails, without some planning (or determination) one may see only splashes of colour on a canvas.

Where only planning drives the maker, the spontaneous, the unexpected is missing and the viewer feels neither surprise nor has many questions. A work that contains only the intentional can do little to surprise and irritate, a work that sets out to express only the unintentional will not get around that very part of the intention, to let this unintentional emerge. What energetic charge is contained in a work is determined by the artist, as you also mentioned here. Where someone creates a work that does not contain the artist's soul, it will hardly be passed around and perhaps only be quite "nice" to look at or listen to.

AI art, as it is made possible, can also be both. A thoughtless mind, basically completely disinterested in art, using the spontaneous random mixing of the machine. Or someone who integrates his soul into this process and pursues an artistically interested intention.

AI-generated art seems to me to take chance into the programme, after which an artist searches but does not actually search for it meticulously. But where nothing is deliberately sought and unintentionally found, there is no artist at work, but merely an operator, a user of technology. Basically, this does not distinguish AI art from art with brushes, paints and canvas in physical form. Where the soul is missing, it will not grab the viewer.

Art is a collaborative act in which artist and viewer (audience) alike give feedback. A work of art is charged with energy by the many, the soloist is unable to achieve anything if the many do not play back the energy they felt before in the contemplation of a work of art. Soulless art will also remain unconsidered in the AI-generated approach, so the medium basically doesn't matter.

As long as there are organics that give meaning to each other, all art is organic, even the inorganic.

The meaning, that is a part known, something we can understand, because otherwise art would be uninteresting with at the same time something we cannot understand, cannot really grasp, define, analyse.

Where only planning drives the maker, the spontaneous, the unexpected is missing and the viewer feels neither surprise nor has many questions. A work that contains only the intentional can do little to surprise and irritate

This is an interesting insight. Just earlier I was watching this amazing video of a woman creating 5 pictures at the same time, drawing with both hands and both feet! You've probably seen it. But I questioned whether, at this point, it could even be considered art, instead maybe in the realm of 'craft'. She had mastered the ability to such an extent that I wonder if any creativity was left in her creations, or was it just routine, auto-pilot. And, does it even matter?

It at all seems to cycle back to this new-fangled Chat GPT which I have yet to try, but I've read about creations and I feel it's as transformative to the global society as something like smart phones and the internet, it's that terrifyingly powerful.

If we can get a bot to do what a lawyer, an author, a philosopher, a professor, a research paper, a student, can do in 3 seconds flat to a level almost indistinguishable from the person, where does that leave the human? A novelty on the planet?

At some point, we will be using AI ambassadors to engage with people, send out emails and legal documents, convictions of criminals and so forth, without any human involvement whatsoever. Students will graduate their entire course simply plugging in a dataset, and professors will upload into the AI bot for in-depth grading.

We might end up indeed trapped in a metaverse without even knowing it, where we spend our days appreciating art which was never made by a human, discussing it alongside avatars online with no human behind them while listening to music which no human had ever made or heard previously.

Is that an artistic space? Phew...

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