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One of my favorite bands just took a bunch of AI accusations, I guess, and he wrote a somewhat-pissed Substack post. That lead singer doesn't often step into culture war stuff, but this was close enough, I think:
and goes on to say that fighting AI art in this way is fruitless:
I regret that the culture war is poking random people in a new way in the last couple of years, and I can't help but cynically laugh at it. Not to mention how short-sighted it is. In that post, the lead singer details how much of a pain it is to do graphic design for music, and videos, and other art, and he hates it. Imagine if you could get a machine to do it? Also, it actually lifts up people who do not have money and allows them to make art like the people who have money do. Look at this VEO 3 shitpost. Genuinely funny, and the production value would be insane if it was real, for a joke that probably wouldn't be worth it. But now, someone with some Gemini credits can make it. This increases the amount of people making things.
I'm not sure I have any real thesis for this post, but I haven't been very good at directing discussion for my own posts, so, reply to this anecdote in any way you see fit. I thought it was interesting, and a little sad.
And the spot that has bugged me for a while now: how much AI/digital assistance is really crossing the arbitrary line you've drawn?
Can you use AI to generate the original concept and then spend a couple hours touching up from there, so the final result is just as much your effort as anything?
Can you sketch out the basic details and then feed it to the AI and basically have it 'paint by numbers' to complete the project?
Can you have the AI spit out 50 separate images, and YOU spend the time cropping, superimposing, rotating, adjusting and compositing them all together for the end result?
Make the rule on what is 'unacceptable' AI art and the tech can run RIGHT up to that line precisely to the pixel... then stick a single tiny digital toe over it, daring your to complain.
That is what makes the tech amazing/dangerous: whatever rules you make for it, the AI itself can be used to circumvent said rules.
It's a spectrum rather than a binary, of course. Beating the game on hard mode is harder than normal mode which is harder than easy mode. It's a sliding scale, rather than a single defined cutoff point. And artists have been dealing with these questions long before Dall-E/ChatGPT.
Speaking purely about the opinions of visual artists who work with pop culture:
Generally no one had a problem with simply using digital art as a medium, as long as you actually drew it yourself. There were some ultra purists who thought all digital art was suspect and only trad art showed "real skill", but that was very much a minority opinion.
Then when you started to talk about photobashing, things got a little murkier. Photobashing is the technique, very common in commercial art, of taking a set of existing images and mashing them up in Photoshop using a variety of filters/layers/other tools to create something new. The artist may do some amount of "drawing" as is traditionally conceived, or they may do little to none. Very useful for e.g. concept art where you need to churn out a lot of throwaway images quickly. Although everyone recognized that photobashing did require technical skill, it was generally thought to be kind of lame and "soulless", and it clearly showed LESS skill than actually drawing the entire thing yourself from scratch. The term itself was often used derisively, to distinguish inferior mass-produced studio art from the work of skillful independent artisans.
And then of course once you get to actual AI prompting the reaction from artists was just apoplectic, for the many reasons that have been discussed here previously. To be a proompter is even lamer than being a photobasher. I don't think anyone would actually dispute that out of all the methods discussed so far, it requires the least artistic skill, by design. If you want you can just type in a prompt and use the resulting image as-is. Even without any actual traditional drawing, you can still exercise some control over the process through inpainting, through selecting among multiple results from the same prompt, but, yeah. We're basically in "you just asked someone else to draw it instead" territory.
People have been doing this for thousands of years when it comes to e.g. legal matters. They rarely look as clever as they think they do, because people actually are capable of holding nuanced opinions and evaluating things on a case by case basis.
However, this is a cover for an artist's album, not someone claiming to be a graphic artist, and given that artists often downright steal shit for their album covers - this one painting is the cover to more than 60 different metal bands' albums - it's not the perceived lack of effort involved here that has generated the apoplectic reaction. Furthermore, in music circles where obvious sampling is de facto considered par for the course and a valid form of expression (even when it toes close to outright plagiarism in a way that almost all AI art does not), the usage of AI is still frowned upon hugely.
The idea that generative models might be able to Chinese Room their way into producing artistic output seems to existentially disturb and enrage people, and it's quite clear that people are not evaluating this in a nuanced or remotely objective way by making evaluations that the output has been arrived at through low-effort means. People are run by vibes and this is no exception.
Sure but album cover art is already a Lindy anachronism, and this makes sense to be a place of resistance. Neither albums nor covers really exist anymore. It’s more obligatory ritual than anything else and I think someone faking a ritual is more taboo than someone participating lazily.
It’s like the difference sending a thoughtful thank you note and signing a card and having someone else sign the card for you.
Everyone can agree that the first is superior, but the autist mistakes the second and third for being equivalent.
I don't think that's an adequate comparison - in a context where people often straight-up use preexisting art for album covers, it's more like the difference between copying a stock message from the internet for a thank-you card and having someone else compose the message for you. I don't think it requires autism to believe they're both pretty much equivalent.
I can admit that it's not an adequate comparison, but the distinction I'm making is between repurposing existing art (signing a premade card) and outsourcing it to a computer (someone else signs the card for you). I don't think these are directly analagous. I'm not saying they belong in the same category, but the analogy is on the gradient down from personal touch to outsourced sentiment.
I'm not trying to make a generalized defense of lazy album covers. And I fully accept there's an argument as a soldier going on here to mask more utilitarian concern rather than an ontological one. Gun to their head, I'm sure a lot of people criticizing the AI album cover would prefer an interesting AI cover to a lazy repurposed image for a given instance, especially for a 2 bit band. But they are arguing for a moat around actually creative ablum art in general. With the repurposed picture, it can be lazy or unique, but not both.
This is analagous (but not categorically equivalent) to the moat of 'you at least have to sign the Hallmark card yourself'. OBVIOUSLY that's less meaningful than somethign unique and closer in practicality to nothing at all. But the ideosyncratic moat of 'signed card' has social signficiance that defends against a drift into nothing at all.
I would agree signing a premade card and someone else signing the card for you is not the same, and that the former is preferable. I don't believe this analogy, however, is appropriate for the situation of repurposing existing art vs outsourcing it to a computer.
In the former case, there is more effort involved in signing the card than there is in getting somebody else to sign it for you, and in addition signing a card yourself is indeed more personalised and you have more control over the output. In the latter case involving AI, it's not clear there is more effort invested when one takes preexisting art as opposed to prompt engineering so a generative model can spit out the correct output, and it's also not clear that the person taking preexisting art has exercised more personal control over the output than the AI-user. If anything, it's the opposite since the AI artist has a more fine-tuned set of controls over the output.
Again, the analogy might not be a very good one, but we’re getting hung up on technical comparisons. My analogy was supposed to focus on the social ritual nature of where dividing lines are that focus on discrete moats around the methodology, rather than comparisons of outcome quality.
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