Didn’t say otherwise, cry about it.

Sorry, did you take this as me coming at you? I was genuinely interested in your take on the banana’s relevance because high conceptual contemporary art is very easy to dismiss as “not art” by the layperson which makes it an interesting touch point for the AI value debate. I very much understand and agree with what you’ve said here, and you’ve described me at two separate stages of my career.

I find it fun that you mention a 100,000 word novel because I keep going back to thinking about how “a picture is worth a thousand words” is probably seeing some major economic volatility nowadays. That adage is very much in question now. Some of these prompts are getting way up there and, personally, the results very rarely look like they’re worth the effort.

As it exists, AI isn’t even a keen new tool, yet. But I am biased as someone who routinely creates visuals from scratch and uses a lot of different tools. It’s clearly mind-blowing for the folks who don’t. It is a kinda fun gadget, but it’s really no more sophisticated than good old “content-aware” and just as fiddly and commercially not useful. The prompt engineers will have words for me, but really: this tech is laughably dumb at this stage.

But I don’t believe it ever really will be keen with this mode of operation as it’s basis - all this will ever do is force the homogenization of visual anything/everything. We’ve already seen similar thanks to Pinterest and ArtStation and any other community drawing for the same reference points. Fantastic if you don’t care about visuals but uh, hope you’re really into hyper-mainstream media because that’s all it will look like.

Because you’re right, it’s only the non-artists who think it can replace artists -because they don’t actually value art, just the benefit it grants them. Not that they value the artist either, obviously. These are people who agree with AI developers that not only can visual design be formulated, but even worse that it should be to make it easier/cheaper/whatever.

But the sad reality is that it’s here. And it’s impressive enough to convince those with resources that it is worth pursuing further down this path of development. It isn’t, but they’re definitely not going to go back to carve out protections for the creative community. So we are stuck with a few options.

-adapt - work it into your flow because you’ll have to at this rate. Sucks, but they fucked the game.

-abolish - yea, we’re not going get that far, but we might be able to maintain this copyright denial which will keep it from replacing jobs by way of being unusable content.

-compete - obviously it’s going to be impossible to do so directly as an artist versus an AI for output, but keep in mind this still just the first wave of this concept. Future iterations of the concept (I’m talking specifically not future versions of current tools) can still be about challenging the basis this technology operates on. Something ethically designed to respect and reward the human behind every element the AI interacts with. They’d love for us to think they’re too dominant to challenge, but look at how many copycats exist already. There’s tons of room for sending this wave to the obsolete pile.

Here, you’re using the world to mean something completely different. Hence why it is preferable to use analogue

No, I use the world to live on. Your entire argument is now invalid, oh shit.

I used the word analog because we’re still talking about an electronic tool vs not electronic set of things.

I just exist in observable reality, try it some time.

Yea, we’re well into DADA-ist territory to find interesting reference points for the timeless question of “what is art” in this discussion.

I’m curious: how do you feel this relates? Does the banana feel like it should or should not be art and/or copyrighted? Is it an energy/effort quality being compared to the end result? Or just the concept vs physical manifestation of the concept?

Not at all, I’ve laid out reasons for why:

1. Your suppositions are incorrect, sorry to be the messenger, but my working understanding of my career definitely does outweight your “I think” in regard to what my peers do for a living.

2. AI is not as viable as people want to believe it is (yet, at least) which happen to be the very same reasons behind the lack of copyright viability and why commercial teams are not using it. Because anyone working in the industry who has experienced these tools or put out any actual product is already laughing at how obvious it is. The courts are right, and the discussion is about how AI works and why it does not. Not “should it tho?”

You on the other hand, opened with an attempt to shut down my working experience with suppositions because I contradicted you, belittlement and attempts to claim intellectual superiority (by hilariously being wrong on both counts) then when called out, you tried to swing everything to your interpretation of how someone must feel if they’re telling you you’re wrong and dumb for thinking that was an “intellectual exploration” of the topic at hand.

I knew I was talking to a fool, but damn. This is impressive.

There is no bias to have, AI as it exists is not a viable tool for commercial use, it rightfully does not meet the requirements to be copyrighted. Your apparent interest in denying that truth seems to be the root of this projection.

My livelihood is not at risk. At worst I’ll be tasked with laying out what my team will need to populate our own in-house AI in order for them to utilize it for low priority bulk assets. The chances it would be used for anything of importance are very low because it’s just another route to a goal we can already achieve easily.

So at worst, my job is even more secure and all I have to do is spend a week getting paid for adding yet another tool to my set. None of my teams livelihoods are at risk either because we all understand the parts AI and a prompt engineer will not know could or should be described. If they did, they’d understand that writing and editing prompts out is slower than just doing the work directly.

No, you’re just talking out your ass and trying to claw back a win for yourself by pulling out grammar rules and now trying again to avoid addressing anything of substance I’ve said. Take your L and sit down.

AI as it exists is commercially useless. I speak from experience because of course we looked at it immediately. It may grow into something actually useful for production work but that will never happen so long as it’s pulling everything from the internet - no studio or art director worth their weight will accept the legal risk or the indirect volatility of AI generated art when they can just tap Derek to make the exact requested adjustment directly. The very thing that allows people to feel like they are artists for using it is exactly why it cannot become a viable tool and this article shows exactly why.

This will hold true until a tool is developed isolated from the wider internet and only fed with your studio’s original material OR the copyright laws get ratfucked by someone with more economic might than individual artists.

Now I’m just hoping some idiot out there is trying to copyright melting crayons down a blank canvas.

because I think it makes you sound more smarter 😅

Brilliant. I don’t give a damn what you’d recommend, you’re a pedant who’s clearly out of their depth.

What are analog tools? Strictly speaking, these are tools that don’t use electricity. They don’t require user manuals, and are easy to use.

Like pencils and brushes you dolt.

Any idiot can create AI art. That’s the whole point. I have yet to see anything good or interesting come out of it because you’re right, not every idiot can be an art director. AI just let’s them think they’re doing any of the work and “good” is subjective.

Speaking as an art director, and a digital artist who actually knows what they’re talking about: it is true for all working artists. Your concept only holds true for kids dabbling in technology with no background in art. They might make digital art, but they are not digital artists.

That being said, I do acknowledge that logically, there is not much difference between a digital artist and an AI artist. Neither of them could produce anything of value without their software of choice.

Uh, no. The vast majority of skills utilized by digital artists apply across any software and with analog tools as well just as we’ve used them for hundreds of years. They are quite capable of producing similar works without digital tools at all. You cannot say the same for someone refining a prompt for a piece of software that scrapes everything from other people’s creativity.

The closest analog would be an art director for a collage project. That is what an AI artist does.

Damn, I had forgotten how obnoxious that was on Reddit. Blocked all of those years ago because it was just unnecessary and a gross way to qualify otherwise unremarkable photos.