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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   38759 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Art and artists went through a similar crisis with the advent of photography -- what does it mean for technical skill when you can replicate a master's work with the click of a button. Art evolved, new categories developed and so on. The role of the artisan in art has been a bit contingent for ages, accordingly. It's not like Ai Weiwei welded all those bikes together himself, or that the interesting bit about Comedian was the subtle technique in its execution. Artists will come out the other side of this as they came out from photography -- much changed, and with new debates and reflexivity. (One interesting example is to compare paintings of water, ripples on streams etc, before and after photography revealed exactly how light played on and through the ever-changing surfaces).

I, for one am keenly anticipating the advent of the AI equivalent of photorealism -- replicating AI-generated aesthetic tells in the manual medium.

While artists will move to a different medium (or just a different job), that doesn't automatically make them safe. If an artist moves to 3d modeling, well, we're getting closer to solving various parts of modeling with AI (like NVIDIA has some cool pieces where they generate models from pictures). If an artist moves to writing stories, well, GPT-3 and Novel-AI are already relatively good. They're not as good as an actual writer at weaving a story, but they can be a lot better at prose.

I agree that people will move to new mediums. However, I expect that those mediums will be used as new areas where AI generation can advance. AI progress won't just sit still at this level of image and text generation forever. We 'just' need to throw enough compute and problem-solving skills at it.

However, I expect that those mediums will be used as new areas where AI generation can advance.

Ding ding ding.

The notable thing here is less that the AI got good at art, but more that it got good at art way quicker than most expected, and is demonstrating the ability to improve and learn 'new' skills with surprising ease.

It is near impossible to predict right now which particular fields are safe for a while vs. those which are mere months from being disrupted. Safe to say that any field or medium could be next.

Whenever someone brings up the photography analogy, I always think they're completely missing the point. It's almost like you're Seeing as a State -- artists exist now, revolution happens, artists exist after.

What you're neglecting to mention is that the artists that exist in the present will not be the artists of the future. We had photorealistic painters, and later we had photographers. The latter were not made of the former. People will suffer, perish, anguish, and all of this stuff is important for understanding how things play out in the near future.

We had photographers, and then later we had photorealistic painters. Photorealism is an artistic reaction to photography.

I feel we are talking past each other. "In terms of the historical narrative, some artists were inspired by photography and made a cool synthesis of traditional art && the new technology" -- okay. But were there more artists (adjusting for base rate) creating realistic looking hand-drawn art pieces before or after the proliferation of the camera? Do you agree that the answer is before? Do you grasp the standard concerns shared amongst artists that believe before is the obvious answer?

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