There's been a schism for some time between "Artists" (that's with a capital "A", mind you) and, oh, graphic designers, photographers… The latter are not real artists.

While I suspect the AI fracas within the art community will never go away, I suspect within a decade AI-assisted art (or whatever you want to call it) will be a non-issue for everyone else.

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TheOtherHobbes 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Photography, computer graphics, Photoshop, synthesizers, samplers, and others have all been considered "not real art."

The irony is that the kind of genre art you see at Comic-Con is mostly reproductions of commercial properties or standard tropes and formulas, with very little original vision and creativity. Being able to draw something recognisable as [genre character name goes here], even with some skill, is not that high a bar, and it lives in a tiny niche in the art world as a whole.

AI brought something fresh to art for a while, but now I think creative people are more aware of the limitations. It's in a strange mid-way place between being fascinating, and being frustratingly limited compared to what it could be.

I suspect we'll start seeing meta-art soon with a much more interesting mix of creation, original thought, and execution.

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andyfilms1 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A key difference is that each of the mediums you mentioned are deterministic and unbiased (to a certain degree.) The the work created can therefore be inferred to be a "pure" expression of the artists intent. A pro photographer and my mom will get wildly different results even with the same equipment. Not so with AI, which very much has it's own bias and is eager to inject it.

The other question is, is AI a tool or a medium? I often hear people say "Well EDM was looked down on when it first came out," but EDM is not a tool, it's a genre. I think most artists wouldn't really care about "AI" becoming a genre of art, but it's silly to think that all future art will be AI just as it would have been silly to think EDM would have replaced all future music.

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dragonwriter an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> A pro photographer and my mom will get wildly different results even with the same equipment. Not so with AI, which very much has it's own bias and is eager to inject it.

That particular AI models have their own bias and are eager to inject it is among the reasons why a skilled user and an unskilled user will have very different results, not a reason why that isn’t true.

> The other question is, is AI a tool or a medium?

Is oil paint on canvas a set of tools or a medium? In art, a tool ot set of tools often characterizes, or even defines, a medium; they are different but not orthogonal concerns. (And the cultural phenomenon of identification of a regularly-used tool or combination of tools as defining a medium generally only happens well after that tool or combination has been in significant use for a while.)

AI is a broad category of tools. Particular combinations of those (either with eachother or with other tools) may also come to be be understood as particular media.

	▲	andyfilms1 41 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		>That particular AI models have their own bias and are eager to inject it is among the reasons why a skilled user and an unskilled user will have very different results, not a reason why that isn’t true. Not quite what I mean. If you and I both take a photo of the same controlled scene with the same camera, the result will be essentially identical. If you and I both type the exact same prompt into Nano Banana, we will both get very different images. So, how is one supposed to know what parts of the AI image are intentional or incidental? If the AI image is "good," is it good because of or despite the prompter? >Is oil paint on canvas a set of tools or a medium? In art, a tool ot set of tools often characterizes, or even defines, a medium Agreed, and this is basically what I'm saying. I'm fine with siloing AI art into it's own category and I'm sure some cool work can be done there. But it's fundamentally odd to think that AI will, for some reason, replace or displace other art.

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pluralmonad an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

All due respect to your mother, but a pro photographer would certainly achieve better results. Your mom may recognize something is not right but be unable to articulate it clearly to the tool. Same problem that's always been. The bar has been lowered, not removed.

	▲	cthalupa an hour ago \| parent [-]
		He explicitly said they would get different results.

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MisterTea 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> AI brought something fresh to art for a while,

What fresh new ideas did it bring? Most of what I see is generic AI slop pictures tossed in articles I mostly ignore.

	▲	pixl97 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I mean, I find some channels like this fun https://www.youtube.com/@thearchiveinbetween/shorts While the pictures/videos are AI generated, there is a coherent multiverse that builds itself into a story over many videos.
	▲	onetokeoverthe 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Those unable to see or create the art in graphic design, photography, architecture, or writing... ...expect "tools of artifice" to help them discern between fresh and rotten. Unaware how obviously fake and bad their "assisted output" is.

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torginus 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Thing is, image generators might be better than when SD came out years ago, there's been zero progress on actually meaningfully integrating AI into artists' workflow.

The problem is AI assisted art does not yet exist the same way you can get an LLM to help you finish a project you started by hand, where you can arbitrarily decide how much control you want to exercise over the output.

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dragonwriter an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> Thing is, image generators might be better than when SD came out years ago, there's been zero progress on actually meaningfully integrating AI into artists' workflow.

That’s an interesting opinion, but I have no idea what, other than ignorance, it is based on.

> The problem is AI assisted art does not yet exist the same way you can get an LLM to help you finish a project you started by hand, where you can arbitrarily decide how much control you want to exercise over the output.

Except it exactly exists in that way, and (while the tooling was more clumsy than today) it has at least since SD1.5 was SOTA.

If you are judging image generation by the native web interfaces provided as the public face of the big hosted models, you really have no understanding of what is out there, and if you aren't doing that, I don't know where your claims could come from.

	▲	numpad0 41 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Nothing had changed on that front. No one's doing non-literal semantic deconstruction and reconstruction of art. This is perhaps due to irresponsible and thoughtless atmospheres surrounding AI image generators and its core developer circles selectively filtering out those with relevant backgrounds. Maybe some Google products are a bit of an exception, but they're default 5-10 years ahead until it stops updating 15 years before going open source, so that's besides the point. Other than that, it's all techbros making tangential changes and claiming changes were made. Changes maybe, improvements, not really happening.

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cthalupa 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> there's been zero progress on actually meaningfully integrating AI into artists' workflow.

This simply isn't true. An easy way someone who does most of their art more "traditionally" can use Krita to very much just use AI to help finish a project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly6USRwTHe0

ComfyUI was also designed from the ground up to follow the same sort of node-based workflow that many CG artists are used to with things like Houdini, Blender, Substance Designer, etc., and includes all sorts of ways you can arbitrarily control where and how much the AI is used for.

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singingbard 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

“Good” is some mix of taste and skill.

People without taste hide behind skill. They do everything technically correctly and still make something bad. This is the threat of new mediums to them — it takes away their only strength.

But at the same time, something like AI suddenly enables people with neither taste nor skill to produce. I don’t want to see AI art right now — AI art is currently a lot of noise.

The sentiment of photography not being real art hasn’t been a thing for a while now though.