@LemonDrop
See, the difference is that when an artist uses a digital program to draw, it’s a tool. It’s part of the process.
The genAI exists to remove the process of creation. It’s not a tool, it’s a replacement of the artist.

@LemonDrop
Ok, fair point. What I disagree with though is the idea from your previous comment that computers are responsible for creating the bulk of digital art. It is a stretch at least and a misconception at most. The amounts of effort needed for editing and refining an AI-generated image and creating something from scratch are incompatible. And I’m definitely not keeping this discussion up just to farm some points for the current event

@Jewellier
You seem to think you need to know all those things to be an artist, and yet, photographers exist. Photography involves knowing what looks good scene wise, and due to the current behavior of computers some amount of knowlege of how to process images well, but back in the film days a lot of it was simply finding the right thing to take a picture of. Pushing a button can create great art if done at the right place and time, and I promise you making AI art takes more effort than taking a photo. Amount of effort does not translate to how good a piece of art is automatically, it is only a correlating factor.

Plus again, you do not seem to understand that AI art is more than just generating a single prompt. It takes a significant amount of work to make things good involving things like inpainting and often image editing itself using more traditional digital art skills. It’s pretty obvious when someone has spent a lot of time making a good piece of AI art vs the usual low effort garbage.

@LemonDrop
Naaah drawing digitally requires much more skill than generating. Prompting (and inpainting, to some extent) requires no muscle memory, no perspective, anatomy, or color theory knowledge, virtually no knowledge of materials or programs you’re ought to work with. You must only know some epitheta, have some taste and some patience. I’m speaking from the perspective of both a skilled artist and a person who fiddles with AI a lot. I turned to AI precisely because painting is hard and time consuming, while asking a machine to create tons of slop is not. You can also master prompting much faster than master drawing, I’m pretty sure that it will take an ordinary person a couple of days to figure out purplesmart, and weeks to figure out Blender. It’s fine to try and express yourself through prompting but my god never compare it to making actual art.

@Lurks-no-More
No, thinking an artist needs to place every pixel of an image “themselves” is delusion. Digital artists do no such thing, the computer is responsible for the vast majority of it with numerous algorithms they rely on, be it brushes, layers, auto smoothing, filters and more (even AI at times if using things like content aware fill). And that’s just for 2D art, things like 3D art are even further disconnected as the computer is responsible for creating the bulk of the output.

Art is about realizing concepts inside your brain via creative expression. The method which you translate these ideas into something you can communicate to others is irrelevant. Modern generative AI is simply a new way of communicating such things to the computer.

@LemonDrop
I’m saying “AI hype”, and I do know what I’m talking about. Yes, AI research goes way back, even the current LLM-based generative AI. And yes, there was a growing interest even before the crypto market went sour. But the AI hype I’m talking about really started happening after that, as companies started cramming AI into everything (just like businesses had been talking about blockchain and how it would solve everything).

Also, no - if you tell an AI to generate a story w. certain elements, you didn’t write the story. If you tell an AI to generate an image, giving it instructions what to include or to exclude, you still didn’t make the picture. Anyone saying otherwise is deluding themselves.

I’m really scared about future…
Ai works based on artworks by real artists and creators of ai almost never ask permission about it to authors. It’s just the same like stealing, tracing and copying. It never be good. The most important thing is that if there were no real artists, there would be no understandable images in ai. But some people are ridiculing artists in favor of ai now…

Sometimes strange people compares ai with…photoshop for example. But it’s not the same. In photoshop you do something yourself - choosing filters, using brushes and else. Ai absolutely all of process doing instead. You’re not learning to do it yourself.
Ai is not bad in all senses. But in art [pictures, music, else] it not good instrument. Just that if something ai reslit could be popular - it being popular ai, not your real work.
Ai could be like helper of palettes, poses for example, although trusting to this is not good too. Ai often makes the wrong pictures - bad anatomy, wrong light, and so on.

@LemonDrop
Um…no.
Writing promt to ai just like writing idea to real artist. Using ai you’re not being an artist. Not you creating picture - ai generating picture.
When you describe in detail what you want to real artist and they does it for you, you don’t become an artist yourself.
When you describe an order in a restaurant in detail, you don’t become a chef. For example if you choose all ingredients yourself in Subway - not you cooking sandwich, you’re just choose ingredients

You’re just a customer with a more specific order. You’re not a creator…

What a very prescient er’s note I left…

No, no they do not. People think they understand how it works and make uninformed comments about it on the Internet.

@Lurks-no-More
It is a coincidence because AI has been in development for much longer, and really the main growth of popularity happened before the recent crypto boom. AI has been around for decades, the first neural nets like the Perceptron were created in the 50s, they just lacked the computational power to do much with it beyond simple tasks for a long time.

The more recent resurgence in its interest came with massively parallel affordable computational devices like GPUs and stuff like Deep Learning which was in the early 2010s, see stuff like AlexNet and DeepDream. It really started catching on more though in the later 2010s which is where the first TPUs were being created and more research was going into the applications of AI. Your ignorance to what was going on in this field until it hit a mainstream popularity breakthrough does not mean such things didn’t exist. Signs of the impeding application of generative AI were even seen in the MLP community with things like 15.ai and ThisPonyDoesNotExist as early as 2020, it was only a matter of time before more detailed artistic pieces could be generated like that.

Tldr, no, you have no idea what you’re talking about.

@Its A Trap
No because ordering something at a restaurant is selecting from a pre-existing set of options. If you asked the chef to make some sort of food based on your own inspiration then yes you’d be part of the process and would be minorly a chef in the resulting work. This is also misrepresenting the process of creating AI art, because it’s not as simple as just asking for something to create actual good work.

Using AI to create an image makes you an artist, as does commissioning something to a lesser degree. Nothing will change this fact and anyone trying to do so is just trying to restrict creativity and who can become an artist.

@ABrony
100% this. It’s not a coincidence that the AI hype began to really balloon up soon after cryptocurrencies and NFTs collapsed as the New Hot Thing.

I guess the Silicon Valley grifters had to move on to bigger and worse things after cryptocurrency settled into a steady state of rug-pulls and money laundering.

Had to find some other way to woo investors while making the world awful, and of course they had to keep sucking up terrawatts of power while contributing nothing of genuine value.

So they went from artificial digital scarcity to artificial digital slop. Flooding the zone with push-button propaganda-making programs and rolling roughshod over the rights of the millions of creators whose contents they vacuumed up without permission. Not just devaluing their work by not paying for it, but putting many of them out of business as thanks for all the labor they spent. “Hey, if those artists wanted to make a living they shouldn’t have posted their artwork where people could see it, right?”