Ai 'ART' will get WORSE not better

Timestamps
0:00 How artificial intelligence is making better art that humans
0:51 The problem with digital art
4:03 Traditional art Vs commercial art
7:44 How artists work best
10:24 What Ai art does really well
14:53 The future of Ai art
17:04 The problem with the word 'art'
22:04 What Ai art can never replace
25:59 Morality
27:15 What even is 'human' art?
28:46 A message of hope

As artists debate the ethics and controversy of artificial Intelligence creating art. I'm philosophising about what being an 'artist' means now Ai can create art . Here I argue that early Ai systems act like real artists but they won't for long. Soon Ai will become another tool used by artists. As the algorithms gets better, it will become more proficiently and less creative. Ai will stop being an artist.

[xxxxxxxxxx]

This was the denial stage of grieving.

[iamslf]

i just want to say a lot of the greats control-z’d by painting a new layer over their canvas. just because digital art gives us the ability to undo things we don’t like in seconds doesn’t mean we aren’t working through our mistakes. digital art has allowed me to explore so many ideas and emotions as an artist, because it has made experimentation more controllable. there have been many nights where i’ve worked hours on a piece, to not have it go the way i wanted, to hit pause and come back weeks or months later to work through it with fresh eyes/ideas.

[venerablepoof]

The problem I see is that people everywhere are already underpaid, exploited and living paycheck to paycheck. And corporations will never care about it, the point made about AI devalueing a HUGE part of the industry is the scary part

[ithurtsbecauseitstrue]

I think the optimistic view has a flaw or two:

no, it wont be artists that exploit this pseudo-tool. Its devastation will be vast because non-creatives will indeed replace creatives.

Secondly, comparisons to other technology are fairly inaccurate. Replacing filmstock with digital did not replace the photographer. Styluses replaced pencils, not animators. And word processing replaced typewriters, not authors.

Encyclopedias went online, and the internet itself houses tons of info. But ai will write the info. It will change and redraft the encyclopedia, history, story, and therefore culture.

Ai will replace animators, writers, storyboard artists, musicians, and DPs. If there are directors, they wont need to be the talents they are today. They will be the non-creatives above.

comparing it to chess is simply bizarre. A computer knowing everything is not the same as human competition. A machine that can flawlessly throw 3 point shots in basketball might be interesting technically. But pitting it against Steph Curry doesnt make for competition.

The human quality in art is like the competition.

Ai will replace the need for artists by making two computers play chess. The human loss will be real - but less transparent than in competition.

People also instinctively know the loss of human competition. They can see it. No one cares that the fastest person in the world cannot outrun a sports car. But people wont see the loss as readily as the artist gettinf replaced by ai.

No, ai wont take away your paints.

But it will steer our culture, as it replaces art with sim, as it writes our stories for us, and as it dehumanizes us all.

Now is the time to see it for what it is.

It is not a hammer. It is not a pen evolving into a stylus. It is not a human finding serendipity in mistakes, it is not filmstock going digital.

It is the nono particles in our “food.” It is the cricket flour replacement. It is a nuclear bomb. It is an x-ray, that might be fine once a year with a lead vest on the rest of your body… but might not be good pointed at your gonads non-stop for the foreseeable future. It is the lobotomy of our day. It is giving heroine to infants when they are teething. It is bloodletting to heal wounds. It is the infinity gauntlet, and Thanos will indeed snap.

Technology is not always used, and not always good to use, just because it exists and just because you can. But perhaps “just because” is better than as a short cut around talent.

Is it just a tool? Sure. But so was the icepick they used… to carve up your brain… the best new advancement in science to the cure anxiety in college students plagued by study, or to calm hysterical women.

I must say: this is the best video I have yet seen discussing ai. So kudos. I respect this very much - and a lot of good points and perspectives were shared.

And while ai might be here to stay. And might truly take over. In my opinion - we cannot shout enough about the ethics, about the dangers, and about the losses.

[VirtualSG]

I'm not worried by AI art.
I do worry that folks will believe computers can think. But that's a whole different can of worms.

[MrDrury]

My favorite AI-generated text (from the early days, cca 2020):


"Do not move, or your brains will be blown out."
"On the contrary, I believe I'll move."

"Do you have a cigarette?"
You roll your eyes. "Yeah." You pull one out, light it, and slide it back into the pack.

"That'll be $49.95, please"
You hand her a twenty. "Keep the change."


In a vacuum you'd almost guess it was written by some master of surreal dry humor on the level of Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams, but it was just a weak language model that wasn't firing on all cylinders trying its best to tell a serious story. Nowadays GPT can tell a joke, sure, but it can't make one.

[ShaloneCason]

"Limitation breeds creativity" a beautiful quote I will always remember. I am very grateful for the take in this video. Definitely not hyperbolic like most of the other videos. Thank you!

[FDKeroks]

I don't fully agree on that "digital artist doesn't have to work with their mistakes" staitmant. Yes, three lines and one wrongly picked color won't change your whole approach and you have more flexability overall. But you still have to move on and not redraw the same thing over and over if you want to finish it, even when you're not 100% satisfied with it. Also CTRL-Z isn't infinite. If I remember correctly, you can go 50-100 steps back. So you can go back on a imidietly notised mistakes, but if you work on it for a few hours and realize that some trees are messing your composition pure CTRL-Z isn't enough or you notice a mistake in time, but you already done some other stuff, that you done really well and you have to decide if you move on or delete the well done part. Over all I'd say, saying that digital art is lesser, cuz' of CTRL-Z is the same thing like saying that oil paint is lesser to penciles, since with oils you can cover up and touch up stuff na but with pencils that is way harder and at times impossible.

[olwynnsay]

I can't get any AI platform to exactly reproduce what's in my head. As an author/illustrator of picture books, I cannot see any way of getting hundreds of prompts to exactly create the lines, marks, colours, composition and dynamics that are needed to dramatise scenes effectively. It's attention to detail and the human touches that make art interesting. To be a good artist, in the traditional sense, means to understand all of the aforementioned elements but also to have something extra to stand out. I would argue producers of AI art are more art directors than artists.

[Coldbird]

not gonna lie this kinda helps my mental health. I learned that I write better in a notebook where I can make mistakes instead of the PC where I try to make sure everything is perfect which bottlenecks the process. Honestly a part of me see's ais vshumans as streaming vs physical media, I know it isn't exactly like that, it's more like TV Dinners and frozen meals vs cooking at home or ordering out, but I'm still processing it.

[steampunk]

there is merit in your points. unfortunately though, while some people explore the erratic nature of AI, other ill-intended shitheads are using it to make imitations of individual artstyles that possibly took that artist years to lapidate, and given time, it's easy to see how that will steer potential clients away from them. this is something I simply can't turn a blind eye to

[jaycee]

As an illustrator that switched to digital art (apple air 20- procreate) over a year ago I’d say there’s no going back digital art is amazing

[MrJamesC]

2:40 "artists deserve this, we've handed over the risks of creativity and mistakes for ultimate control". I don't see digital artists letting technology take away their creative work and failure. I don't see people giving up creative risk just because they have better access to references. That's an extremely undifferentiated statement. It's disgusting to tell all these people with a smile that it's not only unavoidable, but that they deserve to lose their jobs. Who is even "they"? Creative people are an extremely diverse collective. You talked about your own ego in this video to then accuse other artists of egotism. People want to live meaningfully and contribute something. To blame everything on ego is, again, absolutely simplistic.

[jaxkk]

It's a fallacy for claiming that if something has occurred frequently in the past, it'll happen again the same way, but I still learned a lot from your point of view, thank you!

[pedroslim]

my guy really compared being able to undo to typing into a machine learning algorithm with billions of already made images lmao

[hoseki]

I understand your point about artists using tools that have been pre-made for them, but the problem with AI is that it removes the last step that links us to our work, and that is... literally making it. AI is barely guided by us through a prompt made by a few words, it's more like we are commissioning the AI to make the art for us. You stop being the artist, the AI is the artist. So all that an artist becomes is an employee that does a bit of very basic data entry. We are naive if we think that it'll just be used as a reference tool, because the standard will become clients requiring an image to be produced within seconds. To be curious and want to innovate is good, but we shouldn't idolise innovation for the sake of innovating, just because we "got bored" of things not changing for a while.

[IronFreee]

This reminds me of what happened to photo reporters.

Most of them were talented people, who always tried to be present where things were happening and to put a lot of sense into their composition.

But once everyone had a camera in their pocket, the media bought their images from whoever had something to offer. They don't care about talent or meaning as long as they have something that sells.

[elk]

This argument is just.. off. You're putting down digital art as "lesser" as a way to prop up AI art and say that people are being elitist for not accepting AI art... while being elitist against digital art. Not to mention there's a big lack of understanding on how the tech works. Its not actually artificial intelligence, thats just a buzz word. Its a latent diffusion model, which basically to oversimplify it, its just a really fancy de-blur algorithm trying to de-blur noise into a recognizable image. It cannot create anything new and it cannot grow on its own. It needs artists to feed it more new data its never seen before. The ability for these "AI' art programs to create is based on the existence of artists making new and creative works

[hjups]

Very interesting perspective! Also, thank you for acknowledging the creativity that goes into the engineering fields. Most products of engineering can be "works of art", though I'm not sure they are on the same level as something created as a form of expression - perhaps similar yet different. One major difference does come down to the tolerable level of mistakes, where painting something with a flaw can become an intrinsic to the work, whereas an engineered product with a flaw can be deadly. Although, in a sense, the necessity of functionality is in itself a form of limitation (maybe that's why engineering design in small teams can be so mentally draining - the degree of required creativity per person is very high).
As for the premise that AI will get better making it less artistic, I think that's true and also false. While large AI models are going to get better at producing technically flawless outputs, they will not be the end all. And that leads to an interesting question... would it be conceivable to design and train an AI in an intentionally flawed way, to introduce those flaws directly into the outputs? Could that become an entirely new form of art (based on your initial premise), where an artists may intentionally train such a flawed generative AI?

[iamboxelz]

This is a very interesting opinion. I think I largely disagree with much of what you say, but you bring up some very valid points. I would define creation as taking chaos (or, in other words, your lived experience or the world around you) and transforming it into order. This can be done by anyone of any occupation, but I struggle to adapt that definition to fit AI. AI is being fed nothing but pictures. There is no chaos, only order. It's not making something genuinely new. It's just drawing from a dataset and transposing that into the end result. There's no problem solving. The AI doesn't just say "hmm, that's not quite right" and tries to fix it. It's effectively just throwing numbers at a wall. Nonetheless, it is an inevitability, and we will all have to adapt to a new world.