Philosophy Now Forum

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Mon Jul 07, 2025 6:22 am

accelafine wrote: ↑Sun Jul 06, 2025 11:42 pm

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Sun Jul 06, 2025 10:55 pm

Right, and that tool is a computer and some computer peripherals. That's why I wanted to clarify what you meant by "humans who make 'computer art'".

I didn't know how it worked. And you called it an 'AI image generator' in the title. Is that guy using AI?

No it's not ai. You said "I also don't think that humans who make 'computer art' are artists either".

I clearly didn't know what you meant by 'computer art', which is why my first response to that is 'What do you class as "computer art"?'

So you were using computer art as a synonym for ai generated images? That wasn't clear.

An image on a screen isn't what I would call art. Actual paintings can be touched, smelt. Someone has sweated and got dirty creating them. They exist in the real world.

accelafine wrote: ↑Mon Jul 07, 2025 7:30 am
An image on a screen isn't what I would call art. Actual paintings can be touched, smelt. Someone has sweated and got dirty creating them. They exist in the real world.

Ah right, so all those things I linked to aren't art you think. No matter how beautiful, meaningful, or emotionally deep an image is, if it's digital it's not possibly art for you, right?

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Mon Jul 07, 2025 7:39 am

accelafine wrote: ↑Mon Jul 07, 2025 7:30 am
An image on a screen isn't what I would call art. Actual paintings can be touched, smelt. Someone has sweated and got dirty creating them. They exist in the real world.

Ah right, so all those things I linked to aren't art you think. No matter how beautiful, meaningful, or emotionally deep an image is, if it's digital it's not possibly art for you, right?

Correct. It's an imitation of art done by weirdo nerds who don't want to leave their basements or get off their fat arses to buy paint and materials.

accelafine wrote: ↑Mon Jul 07, 2025 8:07 am

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Mon Jul 07, 2025 7:39 am

accelafine wrote: ↑Mon Jul 07, 2025 7:30 am
An image on a screen isn't what I would call art. Actual paintings can be touched, smelt. Someone has sweated and got dirty creating them. They exist in the real world.

Ah right, so all those things I linked to aren't art you think. No matter how beautiful, meaningful, or emotionally deep an image is, if it's digital it's not possibly art for you, right?

Correct. It's an imitation of art done by weirdo nerds who don't want to leave their basements or get off their fat arses to buy paint and materials.

Is digital photography not art as well? Because it's not rendered onto a physical piece of film, it's taken on a camera and translated into digital pixels?

I really don't care. Call yourself an 'artist' if it makes you feel good

accelafine wrote: ↑Mon Jul 07, 2025 8:13 am I really don't care. Call yourself an 'artist' if it makes you feel good

You seem to care. I mean you have a pretty strong opinion about what can't be art. I'm just wondering how far that extends.

Many years ago, most of the art community would have agreed that digital images can't be art. I think it's reversed now, and most artists, including most traditional artists, do consider digital art to be art. They may not hold it to the same esteem but they at least think some digital artists are making "real art"

AI, of course, is a different question.

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Sun Jul 06, 2025 12:49 pm So now there's a big tension within art communities right now, with the following questions becoming central:

• Can AI make art?
• If it does, is the person who prompted it the artist?
• What minimum amount of involvement does it take for an AI user to call himself "the artist" of an image
• What kinds of ethical considerations need to be made in regards to this technology displacing the jobs of human beings who would otherwise have been employed doing this work?

1. It can prepare commissioned illustrations in various styles, there's no AI that I know of with an artistic vision as such. There's some sort of art/craft boundary to move around there as well as a division between the creator and the tool.

2. If the AI is both paintbrush and painter (which is the whole problem really) then the person providing the prompt would be something like the commissioning editor for an illustration, or the patron for a "work of art".

3. It depends on your conception, if you see the AI as just like somebody else doing the art, then it is the artist and the user just isn't the artist. If you treat AI as a medium by which people can make new types of art not yet seen, then I would direct your attention to Dave McKean in the 90s when he was creating the cover art for Sandman comics using photocopiers. He produced art that nobody else could, using a machine to do all the work. If Dave McKean uses midjourney today, he'll probably make it do something cool you never thought of.

4. Sorry, we've never really done anything about it the countless times in the past when a new machine has made old ways of work redundant. Midjourney makes a shitty type of illustration super cheap as long as you can handle the random hands everywhere. If you can't handle having your artwork subtly ruined by weird physiologically impossible then for a small fee you will probably be able soon to hire a self-employed artist who can remediate using AI software and a Wacom pen to point at bad bits and fix them.

This is just how it goes. Nothing is sacred. If you do work and charge money, then a bot that could replace you to output more work for less money means that a constrained resource becomes more available at a lower price. That's productivity gain, and it's why we have lots of doctors in the 21st century even though in the 17th century everyone worked on farms. The number of people that had to be forced out of farms, then factories by machines to create a society that could actually have a surplus of illustrators is astronomical.

AI will probably end up killing off clip art as a far more personalised product becomes available for a low price. When you want speed and accuracy and no embarrassing odd details, you'll probably be able to buy a bit of glorified clip art produced by a human with a good eye for detail and a personally trained AI top generate it according to your taste for a very good price.

FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Mon Jul 07, 2025 9:15 am

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Sun Jul 06, 2025 12:49 pm So now there's a big tension within art communities right now, with the following questions becoming central:

• Can AI make art?
• If it does, is the person who prompted it the artist?
• What minimum amount of involvement does it take for an AI user to call himself "the artist" of an image
• What kinds of ethical considerations need to be made in regards to this technology displacing the jobs of human beings who would otherwise have been employed doing this work?

1. It can prepare commissioned illustrations in various styles, there's no AI that I know of with an artistic vision as such. There's some sort of art/craft boundary to move around there as well as a division between the creator and the tool.

2. If the AI is both paintbrush and painter (which is the whole problem really) then the person providing the prompt would be something like the commissioning editor for an illustration, or the patron for a "work of art".

That's how I see it as well

3. It depends on your conception, if you see the AI as just like somebody else doing the art, then it is the artist and the user just isn't the artist. If you treat AI as a medium by which people can make new types of art not yet seen, then I would direct your attention to Dave McKean in the 90s when he was creating the cover art for Sandman comics using photocopiers. He produced art that nobody else could, using a machine to do all the work. If Dave McKean uses midjourney today, he'll probably make it do something cool you never thought of.

There's so many different work flows with ai right now. Some people are just typing in a prompt, but other people are able to lay out the full composition of the image and have fine tuned control of what the AI is giving them. Some are even custom training ai on their own images to produce a specific style. Maybe different ways of using ai deserve different consideration.

Steve McDonald is an interesting example
https://www.instagram.com/p/DKa6ubrMcuu ... pseTZ5dGJ0

He's a traditional artist who has begun using ai, and it's pretty clear that the way he uses ai isn't the same way for average "prompter" uses it.

4. Sorry, we've never really done anything about it the countless times in the past when a new machine has made old ways of work redundant.

I'm not just thinking about art here but ai displacing also many other jobs. Ai is starting to be used heavily in other fields as well.

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Mon Jul 07, 2025 9:25 am

3. It depends on your conception, if you see the AI as just like somebody else doing the art, then it is the artist and the user just isn't the artist. If you treat AI as a medium by which people can make new types of art not yet seen, then I would direct your attention to Dave McKean in the 90s when he was creating the cover art for Sandman comics using photocopiers. He produced art that nobody else could, using a machine to do all the work. If Dave McKean uses midjourney today, he'll probably make it do something cool you never thought of.

There's so many different work flows with ai right now. Some people are just typing in a prompt, but other people are able to lay out the full composition of the image and have fine tuned control of what the AI is giving them. Some are even custom training ai on their own images to produce a specific style. Maybe different ways of using ai deserve different consideration.

Steve McDonald is an interesting example
https://www.instagram.com/p/DKa6ubrMcuu ... pseTZ5dGJ0

He's a traditional artist who has begun using ai, and it's pretty clear that the way he uses ai isn't the same way for average "prompter" uses it.

That guy seems like an example of what I had in mind too, does he get the whole thing done with the AI tooling or is there some sort of paintover going on? Either way, I think Veggie would be mistaken to say it isn't art just because it doesn't have a smell.

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Mon Jul 07, 2025 9:25 am

4. Sorry, we've never really done anything about it the countless times in the past when a new machine has made old ways of work redundant.

I'm not just thinking about art here but ai displacing also many other jobs. Ai is starting to be used heavily in other fields as well.

I think the same comment I wrote there applies to every deployment of generative AI. Wherever there is a large amount of money going into a creative field of some sort, this new type of generative AI can maybe displace some of the lower paid workers, or help the higher paid ones increase output, and thus lead to greater output at lower cost.

But it does so by using massively expensive back end infrastructure, and everyone who is providing that right now is doing so at a huge up-front loss in hopes of raking it in later. Sooner or later that bubble has to burst. After the burst, will we still have an easily available art-bot service that can do what Steve McDonald uses his for, or will that prove economically unfeasible?

At the other end of things are simple AIs that can run locally on a phone using an NPU for all the clever stuff. Those can process visual data for instance, and be used to do simple useful things like picking fruit, or individually and personally blasting weeds in a field. It is largely known in advance what such a machine can do, which workers it will displace and at what investment level. Thus you can rest assured that those workers will actually get displaced by that tech without the need to fire up a whole investment bubble and then search the heap of dead investments looking for survivors. Sorting the pets.coms from the amazons and so on.

We sort of need to decide at some point what we even want. There's a couple of different futures to aim for here, one where we work 10 hours a week and can afford all the stuff we really want out of life on that income. And another where we pursue maximal incomes by maintaining the 20th century mon-fri rat race so that people can continue to feel that their jobs are what make them important.

FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Mon Jul 07, 2025 11:30 am
But it does so by using massively expensive back end infrastructure, and everyone who is providing that right now is doing so at a huge up-front loss in hopes of raking it in later. Sooner or later that bubble has to burst. After the burst, will we still have an easily available art-bot service that can do what Steve McDonald uses his for, or will that prove economically unfeasible?

Actually he uses a locally running piece of software called Stable Diffusion. Even if a bubble bursts, locally running instances of stable diffusion will be available permanently into the future. It will no doubt continue to advance and get updates regardless of the financial success or failure of other non local alternatives

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Mon Jul 07, 2025 11:46 am

FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Mon Jul 07, 2025 11:30 am
But it does so by using massively expensive back end infrastructure, and everyone who is providing that right now is doing so at a huge up-front loss in hopes of raking it in later. Sooner or later that bubble has to burst. After the burst, will we still have an easily available art-bot service that can do what Steve McDonald uses his for, or will that prove economically unfeasible?

Actually he uses a locally running piece of software called Stable Diffusion. Even if a bubble bursts, locally running instances of stable diffusion will be available permanently into the future. It will no doubt continue to advance and get updates regardless of the financial success or failure of other non local alternatives

Huh, StableAI... well at least their venture capital bodies are already buried.

comfyUI

Am I the artist?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zHUs-c ... rt_radio=1

AI generates art like Pong generates tennis...

-Imp

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Mon Jul 07, 2025 6:27 am

LuckyR wrote: ↑Mon Jul 07, 2025 5:40 am

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Sun Jul 06, 2025 7:08 pm

So typing in the words "mona Lisa" into midjourney is enough to make me an artist now?

You did see my last sentence, right?

Right but that's just details. You said "the person who types in the input creates the art", which means realistically it's possible for a human to "create art", based on what you said, by typing in very few words and getting something you count as art out of the machine. Now I don't have access to your brain so I'm not attempting to guess what you count as art, that's why it's "just details" - only you know what you count as art. That's your concern, not mine. Mine here is that someone can type a few words and immediately be an artist according to you. Whether those few words are "mona Lisa" or something else.

You sound like a painter from a bygone era noting that photographers "can just push down on the shutter button and be an artist, absurd!"

LuckyR wrote: ↑Tue Jul 08, 2025 6:46 am

Flannel Jesus wrote: ↑Mon Jul 07, 2025 6:27 am

LuckyR wrote: ↑Mon Jul 07, 2025 5:40 am

You did see my last sentence, right?

Right but that's just details. You said "the person who types in the input creates the art", which means realistically it's possible for a human to "create art", based on what you said, by typing in very few words and getting something you count as art out of the machine. Now I don't have access to your brain so I'm not attempting to guess what you count as art, that's why it's "just details" - only you know what you count as art. That's your concern, not mine. Mine here is that someone can type a few words and immediately be an artist according to you. Whether those few words are "mona Lisa" or something else.

You sound like a painter from a bygone era noting that photographers "can just push down on the shutter button and be an artist, absurd!"

And maybe that's a bad position - but if it is, you gotta argue for it.

3 years ago, you could ALSO type in a few words and get a picture back. It's called, hiring someone for a commission. You'd hire some guy, say "I want an illustration of this", and he'd make it for you. Even give you rough drafts so you could change up some details before he fully renders it, if you want.

But in that scenario, NOBODY would call you the artist for sending a few words off for some other guy to illustrate.

But now, with AI, people want to be called an artist for the same thing that 3 years ago was objectively -not- being an artist. I definitely don't think it's trivial that we should consider a prompter an artist. Maybe we should, but if we should it's not a trivial, obvious truth - I don't think so.

We've established that typing in "mona lisa" doesn't make you an artist, so what would someone have to type in to be an artist? Is there a minimum amount of effort, or minimum amount of originality?

I'm going to generate a few images right now by typing in 5 words or less, I want you to tell me if it makes me an artist, okay?

https://imgur.com/a/DycaocC

Now, knowing that I did little more than type 5 words, do any of these images --make me an artist--?