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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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For me art is about communication and connection. I'm often looking to understand what an artist says to me. More often than not, I like art is interesting to me on an emotional level, rather than rational or entertainment value level. I feel like I'm connecting with the artist.

Consider A Crow Looked At Me by Mount Eerie. This album deeply affects me when I listen to it. It's a visceral experience - I'm a husband and this album conveys grief and loss a husband experienced when his wife died. It reflects the personal experience of Phil Elverum. Don't get me wrong, AI could have written the same album, it probably will make an equally or more emotionally impactful album in my lifetime, but an AI haven't experienced what Phil Elverum has experienced. To me, the value of this album is not in a crystalized commodity of musical album, that AI could produce. The value resides in the personal message from Phil to everyone who has experienced loss. Each part, the lyrics, the music of this album was tortured out of him by himself. His work has some kind of unquantifiable emotional value. A statistical model can approximate these feelings and produce an average representation of grief, but a masterful artist expresses those emotions directly. AI doesn't "understand" the assignment in the same way a human does.

As another example, let's take Rothko. His pieces are banal at the first glance. Plain color on a big canvas? I mean, I could do this myself, unironically. But, regardless of how hard it was to make his various Untitleds, I still care about Rothko's intentions - like when he tried to make rich people depressed while they eat in Four Seasons restaurant.

After visiting the location of his future artwork, Rothko stated that he hoped to "ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room."

Rothko stated that “He achieved just the kind of feeling I’m after - he makes the viewers feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall."

The stated intent is funny to me, it's absurd. He miserably failed in his endeavor to make rich people depressed - they just ignored the murals, to Rothko's dismay. But those murals represent something tangible. A prompter can try to approximate the intent, but I'm not interested in a statistical approximation of what makes rich people depressed, I'm interested in what Rothko thought could make rich people depressed because it tells me something about Rothko. It's interesting to me how he approached depression, what he viewed as depressing, why did he view it like that. AI art won't tell me something about the prompter because by its nature, it's a statistical representation of what the average output to a given prompt looks like.

There's lots of art that's soulless, lots of art that exists solely to make money - and that's great! A lot of projects by good artists are financed by doing the dirty money-making work: the gaming example of it would be Josh Sawyer conceiving Pentiment in 1990s, but only being able to make it in 2022 as an ostensibly pet project. I like Josh Sawyer's other projects, but Pentiment is great in part because it's was a pet project that he cared a lot about. There's nothing like Pentiment because it's the result Josh Sawyer's passion. Lots of artists work in the advertisement industry to make ends meet and make art that they care about in their free time.

I'm afraid that if AI art makes life more difficult for the Taylor Swifts and the Marvels and the Corporate Memphisers and Ubisofts of the art sphere (the purely money focused business endeavors that result in entertainment art), artists that I care about will suffer by an extension as the field becomes less lucrative for everybody.

TL;DR:

  • There's entertainment-value-only art and thoughtful art. I don't claim that the latter is better than the former, or vice versa. I just happen to like thoughtful art more.
  • When I'm interacting with thoughtful art, I'm looking for the artist's intent and for the feelings that authors try to convey through their art.
  • Putting your feelings through generative AI is a statistical approximation of your feelings, rather than a more valuable to me direct representation of those feelings. I'm trying to connect with the author through the art and I think that this connection can't be established through an AI lens.
  • Author's intent can't be purely conveyed through AI art.
  • The part of the art industry that AI aims to colonize subsidizes the art that I care about.

I still think there are uses for AI art. If it could replace Marvel or Corporate Memphis designers or any decorative-only, illustration art, furry porn, I wouldn't shed a tear for what we've lost. But, if it happens to also choke the part of the art industry I care about, the advent of AI is unacceptable to me.

Have you actually ever downloaded a model and tried making ai art beyond the basic stuff you get on the like chat gpt?

I think a lot of people don't actually understand that there is actually a lot of real decision an expression able to be done with ai art. I've downloaded A1111 and a few models, loras and tools. Typically to make anything interesting takes generating hundreds of images off of base prompts, often including technique like giving the model a wire frame for subject body positioning as well as painting the image to have different prompts populate different parts of the image. Then once I make a good base image I'll use inpainting to have it redraw some sections using a number of nobs and dials with new crafted prompts. Sometimes I'll even take an image into M$ paint and do some crude drawings because it can get stuck on colors.

It's certainly less time consuming and difficult that personally taking pen/pencil/brush to paper but I think a lot of people are under the impression that AI art generation is actually just entering a really specific prompt and are missing out on a genuine advancement putting creative tools in the hands of people who no longer need to spend hundreds or thousands of hours practicing things not really directly related to creativity.

I'm not against these tools. I think those are actually pretty cool and useful. However, whatever Adobe does with Photoshop and the examples you give are to me the motte. When it's used as a tool, I have no qualms with it. When it makes artist's life easier without compromising the artistic vision it's amazing, it's the best outcome. The bailey in the argument against AI art is twofold:

  • It is currently most commonly used to generate slop using a single prompt. It is already a huge problem, to a point where indie search engines add an option to filter it out. The OP is asking why is there outrage against the AI, and the reason for it are not the tools that you and I agree are impressive. The problem lies in the lazy one-prompt slop, which I had in mind when writing the post.
  • The future promise of the technology is generating full blown songs, pictures, videos just by using a prompt and without compromising on quality. This future, once again, is not an ideal outcome for me because even if the future GenAI doesn't compromise on quality, the one-promptness of it will still compromise the vision.