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Exhibit Aims To Present AI Images as Real Art (axios.com) 72

A new art exhibition in San Francisco showcases some of the unique ways that artists have begun to incorporate Dall-E 2, GPT-3 and other AI systems into their work -- efforts that go well beyond just typing some text and seeing what pops out. From a report: The exhibit, "Artificial Imagination," comes amid a broad debate over the legal and artistic merits of AI-created art, as well as concerns that more powerful computers could take jobs away from humans. "Artificial Imagination" includes a range of work, from videos to still images and sculpture. While many of the pieces used Dall-E 2 to help generate images, others took a different approach. Alexander Reben, for example, used text generated by GPT-3 and then built his interpretation of the computer's description. The artists and curators said the exhibition, believed to be the first of its kind, is an important recognition that AI art is indeed art.
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Exhibit Aims To Present AI Images as Real Art

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  • ... just the equations are posted? /s

    This is a horrible precedent. There should be TWO categories:

    * Machine generated
    * Human generated

    The WHOLE point of art is to express creativity and demonstrate skill. Computers have ZERO creativity -- they are just following an algorithm. Having a computer using ML to replicate a technique is a disservice to ALL the programmers who wrote the algorithms, along with all the Big Data that was used for training.

    • Are artists going to have video themselves making the art to prove they made it themselves? How are we going to tell what is human created and what is AI generated? If only just an artist using an AI to generate the source material for them to then copy, is that original art?

      • by narcc ( 412956 )

        Have you see AI generated "art"? It's not going to be a problem for a while.

        • by muh_freeze_peach ( 9622152 ) on Monday October 31, 2022 @11:34AM (#63012555)
          Have you? There are lots of people using midjourney to make some genuinely amazing images.
        • Have you see AI generated "art"? It's not going to be a problem for a while.

          Two out of three portraits have fucked up hands, but I can generate and upscale nine of them in about four minutes. Landscapes take a little longer (it takes more steps to produce convincing ones) but more of them pan out. Buildings are very easy, cars take a bit of noodling but are generally feasible, animals are generally a cinch if the model is trained on a lot of them. And that is just what I can accomplish by noodling around casually on a $700 gaming PC with a $100 CPU and a $180 (shipped) used GPU, us

        • by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Monday October 31, 2022 @12:36PM (#63012731)

          Have you see AI generated "art"? It's not going to be a problem for a while.

          Given some of the utter shit defined as art these days, I'd say the larger problem for AI and anything training it, is defining what is 'art'.

          That's been a problem, for eternity.

        • by iNaya ( 1049686 )
          Yeah, AI could never beat masterpieces like "Blood Red Slots" by Gerhard Richter, or Black Fire I [wikipedia.org].
          • by narcc ( 412956 )

            That's correct. The AI in question could never have produced something like Black Fire I. Trained on representational artwork, they can neither master nor escape those boundaries. In fact, any AI will always be stuck in the past. Newman, in contrast, was inventing the future.

      • AI works in digital. Maybe at some point there will be painting robots applying brush strokes. Until then the paintings will look a bit sterile. Will VanGoghbot still cut off his ear?

    • by bugs2squash ( 1132591 ) on Monday October 31, 2022 @11:44AM (#63012599)

      Or perhaps a major point about art is to evoke some feeling in the beholder, and maybe, for some, that can be satisfied by machine generated art.

      I'm trying to think of why I care whether the statue that makes me pause for thought was created by another human

      • Or perhaps a major point about art is to evoke some feeling in the beholder, and maybe, for some, that can be satisfied by machine generated art.

        I'm trying to think of why I care whether the statue that makes me pause for thought was created by another human

        For some will it provide the same feeling? Sure.

        But for most people the human connection is a really important part of that feeling.

        Why do you think the price of artwork skyrockets after the artist dies [artsgain.com]? Some of it is straight up economic scarcity. But more fundamentally the artist's story is part of the painting's story, and the death of the artist means that story now has an ending.

        A large part of the appeal of Van Gogh's paintings is the meaning they take from his depression and mental illness. And I don

    • by PeeAitchPee ( 712652 ) on Monday October 31, 2022 @12:17PM (#63012691)

      The WHOLE point of art is to express creativity and demonstrate skill.

      For well over a century, artists such as Duchamp, Magritte, Pollock, Warhol and a host of other have had a field day trolling people with opinions like this.

      No one has a monopoly on the definition of art. And no one's making you like it.

      • Yes, Jackson Pollock made a LOT of people angry with his art, lol, so much so that his critics used to call him "Jack The Dripper".

        Personally I like his work.

    • by Sloppy ( 14984 )

      Computers have ZERO creativity -- they are just following an algorithm.

      You should give the computers failing grades on your artistic Turing test. (Surely computer-generated "art" won't be able to fool someone who runs your art-verification algorithms.)

    • "The WHOLE point of art is to express creativity and demonstrate skill."

      I would frame it slightly differently: the whole point of art is to experience the world from another person's view, as they expressed it through their art. It's a first person to first person transmission.

      This AI "art" still incroporates the original art as the source, but it distorts, grinds and diffuses it through an incomprehensible algorithm to senslessness, which is why it ends up looking like not like random garbage but like a fr

    • Speaking as an actual artist, I find AI generated art fascinating in many ways. There are legal/moral issues regarding plagiarism (e.g. the systems are often trained with art harvested from the internet with no regard to the original artists' intentions) but apart from that... Art is about exploration, and a new method to make art is just that. In AI art you can get a lot of detail with little manual effort so it can "feel like cheating" but that's no different from, say, acrylic pour painting. It's a way t

      • There are legal/moral issues regarding plagiarism (e.g. the systems are often trained with art harvested from the internet with no regard to the original artists' intentions) but apart from that...

        This is an interesting claim.

        Do you think human-generated art happens devoid of input from art from other artists?

        • Human art is also generally derived from things the human in question has experienced before, but human artists either avoid making things that look obviously derivative, or acknowledge the source. Copying someone else's work without giving them credit is frowned upon. These are social norms that are difficult to implement in an AI system. The most straightforward solution is to use a training set that only includes images known to be free of copyright restrictions, but this limits the variety the system ca

    • ... people would present just random splatters of paint or pee on a canvas as art, that would be terrible. ...
      Errrm, wait a minute ...

    • There should be TWO categories: * Machine generated * Human generated

      But wait -- I identify as a MACHINE! "How Dare You" place in the wrong category.

      Actually, how about we rename the categories to "Old, Icky, and Decommissioned" vs "New and Improved"?

      (And who voted for the Oxford Comma, anyway? I don't remember that vote. Was I asleep, inattentive, or is it just Alzheimer's? No matter -- at least it's not Alzheimer's.)

  • It is shocking that anyone would argue AI generated art is not art. It would be like a robot mixing batter and flipping a pancake making it not a real pancake.

    • The complications come when someone tries to claim a copyrighted work. My opinion is that auto generated art should not be afforded copyright protections.

      Remember those fancy screen savers that drew lines in a pattern? This is like hitting print screen then trying to claim copyright on that image as a work - although I suppose if you just took a photo of your screen copyright still works because there was human involvement.
      • I believe the copyright problem isn't as dire as some people imagine: when you make AI art with the intention of popularizing it you tend to do small tweaks, adjustments, and fixes. "Oh, this hand isn't quite right, let me paint it a bit." "I don't like the overall saturation, let me make some adjustment layers." This turns AI into a tool that you use while creating a copy-written piece that you legally own.

      • by ranton ( 36917 )

        The complications come when someone tries to claim a copyrighted work. My opinion is that auto generated art should not be afforded copyright protections

        In practice in the long term, I'm not sure how you stop AI generated art from being copyrightable. Wouldn't you just need to change a pixel of the AI generated product to have a human hand in the results? And for someone legitimately trying to copyright something, what incentive do they have in admitting how little they did to generate the art. In practice how do you ever say that something had too much random or computer generated content for it to be copyrightable?

        There will be cases where some artist is

      • Why would you not assign or grant the copyright to the AI owner/operator? Someone instigated the individual AI existence. AI is their tool. You don't grant copyright to Adobe when someone uses AutoCAD to enable a complex sculpture, nor do you assign it to the AutoCAD instance used.

        • Ok, say the AI program is sold/licensed to 10 people. Each one of those people run it with the same parameters and get the same exact resulting image (pixel for pixel), who owns the copyright now? 10 people can't each have a copyright on the same work, can they?

          Now person number 11 buys the same program, creates the same image, then releases it as a copyrighted work - which of the previous 10 people can claim infringement? Or can they?
          • Excellent. Every argument against copyright for AI-generated images pleases me.

            Mind you, if random users all used the same exact parameters, that would be coincidence. More likely some variations would be used. And of nothing else, 'teach' your AI to interject some random seed etc to better ensure a unique work of art.

            Now, there are artists that reproduce their work, some even use assistants to paint the bulk of the piece, and they complete the work for sale. They expect and enjoy copyright protection beca

          • by ranton ( 36917 )

            Ok, say the AI program is sold/licensed to 10 people. Each one of those people run it with the same parameters and get the same exact resulting image (pixel for pixel), who owns the copyright now? 10 people can't each have a copyright on the same work, can they?

            For gods sake, people can already put the exact same combination of pixels into an image to generate the same image, and our courts handle it just fine. The first person to create the art and enter into commerce with it is likely to win out. The others can use the same inputs all they want, they are still not creating the original art.

            People can already copy the work of others without AI tools. Being pixel perfect replicas won't change anything, as you can infringe on copyright today with far less accuracy

    • Intention (Score:2, Interesting)

      by JBMcB ( 73720 )

      Here's one argument. A work of art has intention behind it. It is meant to accomplish something, even if it's purely aesthetic. There is no intent behind an algorithm. There might be intent behind the algorithm's author, but then the author is the artist, not the algorithm.

      I would go even further and say that, as a curator of an exhibition, your choosing of the thousands, or hundreds of thousands of algorithmically generated art makes you the actual creator, and it is not really an exhibition of AI generate

      • I not sure most artists have a conscious intention of what they are trying to create. Most people get wildly different interpretations of songs than what the original writer intended. I believe in some cases great art is somewhat accidental, otherwise the artist could create many identically impactful artworks... and yet there is only one Mona Lisa.
        • by fermion ( 181285 )
          If you reenact a song, you are an Elvis impersonator, not an artist and even Elvis, who is as far from an artist as you can get, did not just merely copy Hound Dog.
        • I not sure most artists have a conscious intention of what they are trying to create. Most people get wildly different interpretations of songs than what the original writer intended. I believe in some cases great art is somewhat accidental, otherwise the artist could create many identically impactful artworks... and yet there is only one Mona Lisa.

          They have an intention, it may not be what the audience gets, but there's an intention and a lot of the joy, for both paintings and music, is trying to figure out the intention of the artist*.

          Impact is different and certainly pretty random. For example, the Mona Lisa is largely famous because it got stolen [wikipedia.org].

          * I wonder if some of the "dead artist" premium in paintings comes from the fact that the artist is no longer around to potentially ruin the mystery of their own work. Imagine if da Vinci was still around

        • and yet there is only one Mona Lisa.

          Are you purposefully being obtuse to all the other works Leonardo da Vinci is famous for, in some cases more so, than the Mona Lisa? e.g. Vitruvian Man, Head of a Woman, The Last Supper, Codex Atlanticus, Codex on the Flight of Birds, ad nauseam....

          I am pretty sure he was conscious of his "intent" when he made most of his studies of the human body, internal and external.

          Intent, one could state, without argument, is the only true form art takes apart from subjectivity.

          Jackson Pollock has made a pret

      • by dissy ( 172727 )

        Here's one argument. A work of art has intention behind it. It is meant to accomplish something, even if it's purely aesthetic. There is no intent behind an algorithm.

        A counter argument is that "art is in the eye of the beholder"
        Not just the properties of that art, but even if I consider it art.

        You say intent behind it matters.
        When I look at some cable harness assemblies, I see beauty and art.
        The intent of the assembler was a functional system that is easy to maintain and diagnose.

        Why shouldn't I see that as art, simply because the creators intent was not to make art?

        Moreso, not all assemblies look like art to me. A google image search on the term provides plenty of ugl

    • It is and it isn't "real art" depending on what your criteria are. I think it's clear, though, that it's not "fair" to judge different kinds of art on the same merits. I not only wouldn't judge AI-generated art the same as Photoshop-generated, I wouldn't judge that the same as an oil painting. But that only means they don't belong in the same competition, as opposed to the same exhibit (unless the exhibit is media-specific.)

  • Why bother driving all the way to some snob's art gallery in San Francisco--risking your life by parking your car, no doubt--when you could just run Stable Diffusion or NovelAI and generate your own?

    Art galleries are viewings that let people see art in person they couldn't otherwise have seen. AI generates digital images, not canvas, and the person creating the art is just entering a bunch of prompts until they see something they like. It'd be like going to the zoo to see your own pet cat.

    • Why bother setting up a stable diffusion rig? Just put the images in a website for everyone to see and be done with it.

      No doubt many of the images churned out by AIs will be pretty, because they have been trained with visually appealing art. But the appeal of painting at least for me, lies on guessing the intent of the artist and the admiration of their creativity, effort and technique.

      There is not much of that in AI art. Just the mechanical procedure that makes all such art disposable and basically all
    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      All AI "art" need not be digital. Take yer basic robot with reasonable dexterity w.r.t. its appendages and let it paint a picture with brushes and paint. It isn't digital in the sense that seems to be what people think of as AI art. I see no difference since I think the digital angle is a red herring.

    • You're 42% more likely to be the victim of a violent crime parking your car in Billings, MT.
      You're 57% more likely to be the victim of a violent crime parking your car in Dallas, TX.
      You're 127% more likely to be the victim of a violent crime parking your car in Houston, TX
      You're 177% more likely to be the victim of a violent crime parking your car in Kansas City, MO.
      You're 221% more likely to be the victim of a violent crime parking your car in Little Rock, AR.

      But they're very far from the most crime-
      • "Heh-heh, you fell into my trap: there are more dangerous places than that dangerous place filled with drug addicts, crime, and housing so expensive you can't afford to have a family. Check mate, kiddo."

        • Posts from you using terms such as "the left", and making San Francisco out to be the most fucked up place on Earth need real information as ballast to keep your hot air from flying into the stratosphere.

          San Francisco has a lot of big city problems, but among big cities, it's not that bad- particularly those big cities of the midwest and south.
          • I didn't mention "the left." I didn't mention other cities. But since you made it political: https://i.imgur.com/UqhK3A7.jp... [imgur.com]. Uh-oh!!

            • Uh oh what?

              You realize that graphic is cheap misinformation, right?

              Christ, you're a stupid motherfucker.
              Now, if we qualify that graphic, as the most dangerous cities with over 100,000 residents, then it becomes true.
              Which is how most misinformation works- present information with a kernel of truth that leads you to make an incorrect assessment of it.

              The most dangerous cities in the US however are cities with far less than 100,000 people.
              Nome, AK for example has twice the violent crime rate as Detro
              • 1. Make a list of cities with the top homicide rates

                2. They all have democrat leadership

                That's the "uh-oh!" _YOU_ made it about left vs. right. And now that you're called out you're turning into a giant baby.

                • 1. Make a list of cities with the top homicide rates

                  Top cities with over 100,000 population, you mean.

                  2. They all have democrat leadership

                  Yes, nearly all cities with over 100,000 population have democratic leadership.
                  Amazing- a list of Democratically run cities are all run by Democrats.

                  What part of this is complicated?
                  Are you too fucking stupid to see that mistake you're making, or are you just repeating the same misinformation over and over again regardless of how many different ways it is explained to you that it is misinformation?

                  That's the "uh-oh!" _YOU_ made it about left vs. right. And now that you're called out you're turning into a giant baby.

                  It always was for you, and you know it. That's why I refe

                  • >Top cities with over 100,000 population, you mean.

                    No, all US cities, ranked by crime rate: https://worldpopulationreview.... [worldpopul...review.com]

                    They shuffled around and now Tulsa is in the top 15, which has a Republican mayor. Other than that, all Democrats. You're grasping at straws and failing at even that.

                    >Amazing- a list of Democratically run cities are all run by Democrats.

                    A list of all US cities ranked by crime rate are all run by Democrats. At least up until the year in the infographic in question.

                    >It always w

                    • No, all US cities, ranked by crime rate: https://worldpopulationreview.... [worldpopul...review....] [worldpopul...review.com]

                      Cities with over 1000,000 population, you mean.
                      Why do you keep dodging this?

                      A list of all US cities ranked by crime rate are all run by Democrats. At least up until the year in the infographic in question.

                      LOL. That is not a list of all US cities.
                      There are 19,495 cities in the US.
                      The most dangerous cities in the US are not on that list, because that list doesn't include cities of the most dangerous size.
                      Sauk Village, Illinois has a violent crime rate of 5,490 per 100,000.
                      That's 175% higher than the violent crime rate for the first city on your most recent bullshit list, St. Louis, MO.

                      No, San Francisco fucking sucks no matter how you slice it. That's called an opinion. When you encounter one it's not an excuse for you to freak the fuck out and start insulting people and assuming things.

                      It is an opinion, and if your opinion weren't

  • by Rashkae ( 59673 ) on Monday October 31, 2022 @11:20AM (#63012515) Homepage

    The only problem I have with machine generated art is the data that is used to train it. AI art is just a fancy way of copying bits and pieces of other artwork... It's fine if the dataset is the artist's own work, or art that is out of copyright, or otherwise licensed in such a way that this would be acceptable. But it's a a *big* problem if you feed the AI art to which you do not have the rights.

    • But it's a a *big* problem if you feed the AI art to which you do not have the rights.

      How would that work? Are you saying you couldn't show the software images of Jackson Pollock paintings? Why would not having a right to art make a difference? All they're doing is showing an image of the art.
      • It's an open question whether putting the image through the software does close enough to the same thing as putting it through your brain that they are legally equivalent, or not.

        I have a small collection of images where s-d has attempted to put a watermark into the picture because it associated that with whatever it's trying to produce. I find them to be kind of hilarious. I predict that at some point someone is going to be statistically comparing those kind of images to their work and trying to make a cas

    • by Sloppy ( 14984 ) on Monday October 31, 2022 @12:32PM (#63012727) Homepage Journal

      Are these problems avoided in situations where a human artist is trained on copyrighted art?

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Are these problems avoided in situations where a human artist is trained on copyrighted art?

        Exactly. It's pretty hard to argue that most human art isn't extremely derivative. Barring perhaps the first creator of cave art or very sheltered children, anyway. Not just images, either; writing, sculpting, (and we'll probably see a diffusion based sculptures before too long, I'm guessing), architecture, music, moving images, acting, 3D models, VR... hugely derivative.

        As I see it, art has two entirely distinct and

  • AI art inspires the reaction, "This is bullshit!"
    • Are you sure?

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      The term "art" is fundamentally and irrevocably devalued, to the point that it is meaningless. I could stab a coke can with a #2 pencil , shine a light on it, and present it as "art", and you could not refute it.

      Why not AI-generated art? If you can't point to a clear source close enough to be plagiarism, then sure. It's art.

      • My favorite example: "In 1961, one Italian artist named Piero Manzoni decided to fill tin cans with his excrement and call them art." Well, it certainly does inspire human emotion, doesn't it? One of those cans sold for $300,000 in December of 2016.
  • The key is intentionality. Thomas Kincaid is rat because he intentionally puts a few specks of paint on every canvas. If someone is intentionally trying to create an e press ion, it does not matter what tools they use.

    We donâ(TM)t denounce art because the painter did not personally create the colors but bought them. We donâ(TM)t denounce the painter because they did not personally put the lead filled jars in the ground that they used for the white paint made to prime the canvass

    I think the iss

  • by Rhacman ( 1528815 ) on Monday October 31, 2022 @11:30AM (#63012543)
    My understanding of AI art is that a human still needs to tune / direct the process, select from the results, and decide how to present the piece.

    If folks want to start filtering art based on effort of submission, let's start with the solid colored canvases and move up from there. /s

    Beyond that, if art is for the artist then make whatever you like and enjoy. If it's for the viewer, then let me decide what speaks to me and reward it with my attention.
  • Plato is having his day over this. Art is just another way people live by appearances.
  • Real art is simply that which you can get into a gallery. There are millions of artistic images created every year which do not count as "Real" art because the Art establishment do not view it as such. As such, this is a publicity campaign to make AI art commercially valuable - which is the only definition of "Real" which galleries and auction houses recognise.

    Meanwhile, what is art? Beethoven believed that art is a communication from one mind to another, which I'm generally sympathetic with. Random events

    • by mark-t ( 151149 )
      Even simpler, "real art" is simply anything that which somebody (generally other than the creator) believes to have an aesthetic appeal. Whether it ever gets into a gallery is immaterial.
      • by nagora ( 177841 )

        Even simpler, "real art" is simply anything that which somebody (generally other than the creator) believes to have an aesthetic appeal. Whether it ever gets into a gallery is immaterial.

        Even the "art is anything we say it is" is part of the Art establishment's con. By making the word "art" meaningless they deflect any criticism which does not come from approved sources, i.e., other members of the establishment.

        • by mark-t ( 151149 )

          Art is, by definition, something aesthetic, and since different people have different ideas about what they like, different people are going to have different opinions about what makes an environment appealing or not.

          Being opinion, it follows from simple logic that saying that something "is not art" has identical merit to saying that something *is* art. This does not invalidate any and all criticism, however,,, particularly if the person actually knows why they like or dislike a work.

    • Real art is simply that which you can get into a gallery.

      Lol, I have some very disturbing news for you.

  • There's no contradiction between the definition of art and anything that could be generated. People that have skilled hands, but no original ideas, are the only people worried. If you try to say that generated things are not art, then you are calling a lot of things into question. If you use a compass, an arc/circle generator, nothing you create with it is art? If you draw according to an algorithm or pattern, is that not possibly art? No works that had paint splattered, dropped, or poured can be consi
  • by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Monday October 31, 2022 @05:07PM (#63013413)

    It's a automated generation, compilation and remix of everything humans find beautiful in a painting, and, btw., mostly redacted and selected for the best parts by humans.

    One could argue that it is it's own technique, like gouache, oil painting, acryl, airbrush, digital painting and now "AI/ML assisted generation and compositing", but it is art none-the-less. Just because a machine-brain is better at creativity than you doesn't make it less worth.

    If you'd think robots would stop at kicking human ass at chess, you're in for a hell of a surprise, buddy. Prepare for incoming, these art generators are the beginning, not the end. We have seen nothing yet of what is to come.

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