why don’t we cut the middle man and just deal in prompts?
prompts are specific to the detailed version of the AI software, while images are a much more universal form of communication, so they remain intelligible even when the AI software updates and uses a different prompt format.
Cutting people is illegal
No, cutting people without their consent is illegal, cuz boy, I did done cut quite a kinky bitch back in the day, as did I enjoy getting my dinky shredded like it was a manatee in a boat propeller. Fuck, it was so weird masturbating for the next half a year…Jesus…getting a left-leaning boner just thinking about it…
I’m sure this is meant as a joke. But, really, prompts are the only part of AI art that is actually creative. Especially if someone has been trying to fine tune what they want for a while, the prompt might actually have something interesting in it.
Even though memes are shared as images, it’s often the text that’s the important and funny bit. The meme image is just context for the words.
I’m not saying I’m actually interested in reading people’s AI prompts. But, there might be an interesting idea in that prompt that the person could express in a way that’s not boring and soulless like GenAI tends to be.
This came up back on Reddit in the “what’s that book?” sub. Someone posted asking about a book; they had 6 lines of preamble about why they wanted to reread this, and 55 lines that were an excerpt from the book. This is normally a slam dunk–it’s pretty trivial to search for literal text. But nobody could find it. Discussion with the user led to the revelation that they’d asked AI about a book and described a scene they remembered, and the AI had responded with a title and “excerpt” matching what the user described. But then the user still couldn’t find the book, so they posted the “excerpt” to the subreddit. I.e., they were asking for a book containing an AI hallucination, rather than just describing the book to us the way they had to the AI. In fact the story they were searching for was “Harrison Bergeron,” one of the most commonly asked-about things on the subreddit, but nobody recognized it until we understood that the excerpt was slop made up in response to a scene they misremembered as part of the story.
It’s a frustrating time to be a human on the internet.
Man, that sucks. It’s really annoying how sycophantic these companies have made their chatbots, which makes this worse.
But, I think by the very nature of how chatbots work, you can’t fix that problem. Chatbots simulate what text is likely to follow other text.
If someone online has definitely read a book that really exists, and they describe a scene they remember from that book, the clear pattern online is that someone will say “Oh yeah, that’s the book X by author Y”. Some people might say “I’ve never heard of that book”, but it’s likely they might just not say anything. If we’re looking at a kind of forum with upvotes and downvotes, the person who found the real book will be the most upvoted.
So, that’s the pattern the LLM trains on. It knows that when someone posts a question like that, the best answer is one where someone names the book and types out the passage in the book.
It would be nice if the chatbot would instead say “I don’t know that book” or “That book doesn’t exist”.
But, it can’t do that, because it doesn’t “know” anything. Everything the chatbots put out is a hallucination. It’s just that some hallucinations are more useful. It has been trained millions of times on patterns when the passage someone remembers is “It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times”, so when it hallucinates about that sequence of words, its hallucination is bound to be more helpful. But, if what someone remembers doesn’t exist, or is obscure enough that it’s not in the training data, things break. Then it follows the general pattern used for every other book, and comes up with a “useful” answer that doesn’t match any actual book.
Yeah, one of the things that I WILL say there’s an art to… is trying to get Genmoji to generate emojis of copyrighted things without triggering its programming. All creativity goes into basically doing everything you can to walk around the obvious
I think I’d rather read someone’s prompt instead of having them paste me the output. I can always run it myself if I want, but a lot of the time I’d rather cut out the AI
I think most of the time that’s true. But, not always.
For example, I’ve seen people put up funny “remixes” of the “distracted boyfriend” meme. A lot of time they take historical figures, or celebrities, or characters from movies, or something that’s in the news. Now, I prefer the lo-fi versions of those memes where someone just spends 2 minutes in Paint and slaps a few photos together. I’ve also seen GenAI versions, and occasionally they’re good, even if I have an aversion to GenAI stuff.
Now, if the GenAI prompt were just something like “Distracted boyfriend meme but the boyfriend is Trump, the girlfriend is Lindsay Graham and the other girl is Putin”, that might be funny, and you can just know in your head what it looks like. That’s even a good lo-fi way to do it when everybody knows the meme well and can just imagine it. But, if you have a specific idea in mind that’s hard to convey, it can be different.
Sometimes the prompt is hundreds of words long and has to describe the various people’s clothing, their poses, their expressions, then other details like the background, foreground, lighting, etc. Sometimes in that case the result looks really good, and it’s really hard to parse that all in your head.
There’s an art and a skill to doing the kind of creative writing necessary to generate a good AI image. Sometimes you need to know obscure things like specific hairstyle names, car models, types of furniture, lighting techniques, facial expression details, names of articles of men’s and women’s clothing, how to describe poses and posture, etc. But, while that might generate an image that’s exactly how you imagined, it was never designed for a human to understand, and can be really painful and/or tedious to read.
A a series fb post from an elderly lady attempting to prompt facebook into simulating her deceased child.
“Keep it realistic. don’t make make them sound too kind.”
Like fiction books?
Something ive noticed about AI art is it enables people who see themselves as “idea guys” to pump out every thought they have, call it good enough, and display it proudly like they worked hard at it.
When you make art you take an idea and that idea is shaped by external factors. Your skill level, your medium, how you collaborate if you are, all of these things influence what you make and that influence in turn changes your ideas. You may have an idea of what you want to paint, and during the process of painting come to appreciate the beauty of texture, and the next painting seeks to explore not just your idea but what you can do with the medium. Artists usually seek to push themselves to learn and explore and have their art change them as much as they seek to create the art.
But an idea guy only has interest in the idea. He doesnt want to do the process, he has no desire to be changed by his work. He has an idea and he wants an end product, and AI allows him to bypass that pesky learning to draw/paint/create business. It removes limitations in medium and skill level and spits out something close enough to his idea that its serviceable.
And I think that, to me, really signifies how much the idea guy values ideas over everything else. It takes all the work out of creation, and the lack of craftsmanship in the ideas is very telling in the final product.
This guy understands art.
It’s autotune for business majors.
Mostly agreed, but you’re putting the person who creates an AI image into a box.
I may make an AI image for personal reasons and because I can’t do anything more than rudimentary Photoshop, and even then I have to have a starting image.
My art lies elsewhere. We could spend two hours while I show you around my house, show you all the things I’ve created.
People who make one kind of art can undervalue another kind.
Yep, it’s been real disappointing seeing musicians and writers use AI album/book covers
I get your Point but even as someone whos like you in that Aspect (not good at Images) that just Sounds a bit lazy
humans can come up with
Let me stop you right there. This is almost too absurd to be a Onion article…
You can crucify me if you want. I do enjoy some AI art. Typically “setting” art. Like, some location or other. AI has a knack for making the location seem real, but also kind of surreal, like locations we experience in dreams. Could be real, but there’s some small details that add up to make it kind of not real.
Clearly I’m aware actual artists can create the same effect, but AI really nails that vibe.
Bottom line is it’s here to stay and I don’t hate every aspect of it. It’s like anything else, it needs to be regulated to prevent destroying actual artist’s creativity and livelihoods.
AI has a knack for making the location seem real, but also kind of surreal
ah yes the uncanny valley.
You dont have to hate it but you hate it too Little imo
I guess.
If my eyes see something they like, then I’m lying to myself and living in denial if I don’t accept that I like what I’m seeing.
I can hate how shit people are using a tool for nefarious reasons while still liking some of what the tool can be used to create. Kind of like the internet itself, I suppose.
You’re getting some hate, guess I’ll take a little too. There are two AI creations I follow, and it’s always in the back of my mind when watching them that they’re AI, that would be incredibly difficult and costly to make even as short as the stories are. They’re incredibly detailed visually, and the stories are darkly entertaining. The story and writing are written by humans and edited by them, but the visuals are all AI. They must put a ton of effort into programming the output to maintain stylistic integrity, it’s completely consistent, something the vast majority of AIgen stuff I’ve seen completely fails at. IMO these are what AIgen is for, they have to employ a decent number of people to maintain the output that has to come close to a small studio of CGI creators for something similar.
I’ve recently heard some AI Music that is objectively just good.
Like it sounds real, feels real, the lyrics have deep meaning, and so on. I hate it, and wish it didn’t exist. But fact is “I hate AI art because it’s bad art” just doesn’t really make sense anymore. You can hate it for many other reasons but the quality of the product is very good.
AI art also helps keep starving artists unfed
Making it as an artist was always difficult, because the way artists are paid under capitalism favors giving all the money to a few big artists, who ironically aren’t necessarily even that good.
I hate Matisse but apparently just because they use his trash to money laund he’s some sort of genius.
Yeah, like the Renaissance before capitalism! Let me check my notes, oh, uh, looks like “all the money to a few big artists” was the thing then as well.
this_engine_is_a_capitalist.jpg
My goal all through junior high and high school was to become a comic book artist. I’m still sad I never made it because I missed out on the opportunity to help Stan Lee achieve a net worth of $70 million.
More like, it favors giving the money all the people who make a living off of what the artist produces.
Its like a factory. The artists are the workers at the bottom who actually produce and make the art work. Then there are the managers who promote the art and their bosses who sit at the top, running the factory. It is always those who benefit off of other people’s hard work who get to enjoy the fruits of other people’s labor.
Artists are why publishing houses exist and the reason why editors have a job in the first place, but it is the editors who drive nice cars and live in nice houses while the artists who draw and write the very books the publishers sell, get to enjoy getting paid so little that they can’t make a living off of it.
If you look in places like the animation industry, you can point to any of the big animators who helped make Disney big in the 90s and you will see that none of them can get work. None. New animators have no chance. Artists who have been in the business for 20 or 30 years, who are responsible for the movies that defined a generation are jobless and if they get a job, it is the kind of entry level gig that you’d normally only give to a recent graduate.
Illustration had been fucked for decades. They are getting paid the same as in the 80s, but not adjusted for inflation. More often than npt they get offered jobs for exposure and when they land gigs that pays, it will be two months work for one week’s pay. Asking for more money is not an option. There are no unions. All they can do is work faster to maybe make the low pay worth it. Meanwhile their editors live in gleaming mansions.
You might end up being one of the lucky few scammers in fine art who become rich people’s favourite, but that is a completely different world from the commercial art industry. People work themselves into early graves. There’s a reason why Berserk’s crestor died in his 50s.
Back problems, wrist problems, eye problems, weight problems. And these are passionate souls, which is why it is so easy to take advantage of them and their skills. Most people in the animation industry burn out before they’re 40. You don’t see many middle aged artists in the industry today. Some end up teaching. Most leave the industry all together when those who benefit from their hard work has sucked every bone dry.
The higher ups get fat bonuses. They live the great life. Not a creative bone in their body, but they make a living on the piles and piles of passionate souls who will be eaten up and spit out with nothing to show for it.
That is the life of the artist.
The very, very few ones who rise to the top are often those who have a rich family member or spouse to finance their artistic endeavors. Illusteators, painters, authors, animators, you name it. More often than not, the ones who do well and are successful, have no real financial problems in their lives because their loved ones got them covered.
It’s easy to make an amazing piece of art when you don’t have to worry about money.
yeah sure, even with companies, the owner of the company gets all the output that many people helped produce; but typically, a worker would get at least $5k /month as wages instead, depending on where you live of course (cost of living), but sth like that.
now, show me one small artist on the internet who makes $5k /month from commissions. meanwhile big studios make millions. my point is, income is even more unequally spread for artists than it is for factory workers.
so i don’t really think of the “art market” as especially keep-worthy to sustain the livelyhood of small artists, because that’s not really a way to make a livelyhood to begin with.
Artists are why publishing houses exist and the reason why editors have a job in the first place, but it is the editors who drive nice cars and live in nice houses
I agree with most of what you said, but I think most editors don’t make that much. It’s the corporate heads (i.e. the editor’s bosses) who get paid - the MBAs who’ve been put there to squeeze maximum profit at minimum cost.
a few big artists, who ironically aren’t necessarily even that good.
I get your point and all, but I just had to ask - how do you define and separate ‘good’ from ‘bad’ art, though?
I agree with you though, the traditional art world is no different from any other industry under capitalism. It’s filled with sharks, ass kissing and networking. Most either come from fame, and/or from a wealthy family who’s willing to support them. It’s more important to be a driven entrepreneur with good social skills and the right connections, than an artist.
Hey, that’s not all it does! It uses all the water so they remain unhydrated as well! As well as all the electricity to keep them unpowered, and ruin the sleep for everyone within a 60 km2 square radius, so they also are being kept unrested. Jeez this is the dumbest timeline. By a lot
60 km2 square radius
Dude here lives in a 6D space.
No that’d be 60km² hexagonal radius, right?
Afaics they measure ‘area’ in km4, and I assume the ‘surface’ is one dimension lower than the total dimensionality of space.
Yeah I’m just kidding around.
Yes, my middle schooler was going to hire a team of artists to create minion memes and dogs kung-fu fighting if not for AI.
Or, you know, your middle schooler can just draw silly things like we all did growing up.
I’ll pass along your suggestion
The algorithm rejected you.
Weird way to brag that your child will not only always be a talentless hack, but won’t even try.
not trying because there’s an easier way is considered smart, actually. that’s basically how most of human civilization progressed. not keeping with tradition, but trying new ways.
Ah yes, peak human ingenuity:
Also forgetting how to think because ChatGPT does that for you.
Weird way to dunk on a child.
Yeah, it’s totally the child’s fault that they aren’t learning anything, and not the parent’s. Why would parent ever be obligated to teach their child, right?
I would ask your parents if they could explain to you what a meme is and why you would find them in a meme community.
You’re going to have a stroke if you read every meme as if it were reality. There’s no middle schooler, the cute dog or cat isn’t actually asking to has cheeseburger it is a human writing a caption on a picture and Gigachad isn’t a real person.
I’m sorry to be the person to have to tell you all this.
That joke doesn’t work, I’m not in a wheelchair and that’s the important fact about the joke.
Engagement farming? I refuse to believe the top person is for real
Also Youtube feed is the videos they haven’t watched, so isn’t in their mind (yet)
Reading every single tweet you ever see through the lens of “they get paid to create engagement” really elucidates why people say the things they say.
Sad as it is, I much prefer that worldview to thinking that people really are this stupid
Top guy doesn’t even have the checkmark you need to monetise on xitter tho…
These platforms are built on the backs of chuds working for free. Someone did a study and most of the Russian propaganda is shared by ordinary people and some of them were dubbed super sharers who will share like 30+ right wing posts a day.
Maybe most people feel discouraged from trying art because they think it needs to be good enough to get likes and shares online. If people were more encouraging to beginner artists or people who just don’t have time then maybe the average person wouldn’t care as much about AI art
Imagine if people were going to the gym with a robot and having it lift weights for them. Then, they would post about how many reps they did. And then you said “Hey, maybe if people encouraged beginners to lift weights more, then they wouldn’t be using the weight-lifting robot!”
There’s a lot more going on here. The people using AI don’t even understand what the assignment is.
You’re comparing apples and oranges a bit here. Sure, using a robot to lift weights at the gym is analogous to using AI to create art, if your goal is to get better at being an artist.
But if you’re a person with no painting or drawing skills who uses AI as a way to express your ideas visually, it would be a little more akin to being a shitty machinist who uses Sketchup and a 3D printer to manifest their mechanical ideas in meatspace.
99% of AI “art” is absolutely a cringey slopfest, but I’m not going to lie and pretend I can’t relate at all to people who use it as a tool to supplement their own practical deficiencies. Whether art should be more about the output or the process is a whole other philosophical debate…
IMO you need to work to become an artist, seeing alone is a skill you need to work on for example, so no newbie will be helped with prompting AI images, how on earth could they?
That philosophical debate doesn’t matter here, because with AI both the process and the output are worse than useless
The only reason people think they need likes and shares online for their art to be valid is because social media companies have been carefully and intentionally crafting that obsession with online recognition and growing numbers. This isn’t a “people aren’t nice to beginner artists” issue, because trust me nobody is kinder and more welcoming than the art community to newbies. Its a corporate social media issue.
That’s fair a lot of art communities online are nice. I guess I meant more cringe culture encouraging perfectionism
I actually closed my eyes and took a moment to prepare myself after reading the first sentence because I knew I was about to read the most brain-dead take imaginable.
They can’t even form basic logical opinions anymore.
Many if them couldn’t before AI, which is why it’s so crazy good un their view.
Seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of what AI art is.
is the accumulation of one’s youtube feed truly the deepest gaze into the soul?
Yes, absolutely. If you look at my history, it shows nothing but repeated watches of the dog of wisdom.
Says a lot about me, I think.
YouTube keeps pushing right wing and pseudoscience to my feed even though I have marked “Do not recommend the channel”, blocked them, reported them, and sent feedback saying the “Do not recommend” doesn’t work.
I think what it pushes on me is bad, but then occasionally I look at it with a fresh account or an account I never use. The suggestions it gives for new accounts is awful. Mostly it’s just absolute brain rot content. It’s stuff that makes “Ow My Balls!” look thoughtful.
Even if I’m not interested in 95% of what the YouTube algorithm suggests, at least with my actual account it tends not to suggest things that are actually offensive to me.
It seems to me like there’s a lot of “engagement bait” in the suggestions it gives. Sometimes that’s good, in that it’s stuff you’ll engage with because you actually find it interesting. Other times it’s stuff that keeps you engaged because it makes you angry or something. It doesn’t distinguish between “You’ll love this video!” and “You’ll hate this video, but you’ll watch the whole thing!”
But, I don’t think we can discount that a lot of people who watch YouTube are absolute idiots who have 2 living brain cells remaining. Any time your feed gets a suggestion based on what other people are engaging with, it’s inevitably going to be terrible.
Get FreeTube and never sign in again. Only get served videos from channels you subscribe to (in the app, not on your account)
just being in a certain demographic will do that
My Youtube feed is utter shit. I watch one One Piece theory video, and that is all Youtube starts recommending. I watch one trauma video and that is all my feed shows. Youtube is so annoying nowadays, more akin to dementia addled mind with ADHD.
Yeah they are sure pushing some things really hard, while I have to reclick on videos I have already seen so that theme doesn’t vanish, like some stupid algorithm.
Pro tip for YouTube: don’t use the main feed. Instead, look at the recommendations under an interesting video for other ones that catch the eye, and save them into ‘watch later’ playlists by topic.
Also, don’t watch random videos under the main account, open an incognito tab for that. With these two approaches combined, YouTube gives me some great recs, especially for music.
The kinds of videos I always make sure to watch in a private tab are things like:
- viral videos
- videos recommended by a friend
- “how do I fix this broken toilet” videos, or something else that I need once and won’t ever look at again
With that approach, my recommended videos feed is still trash, but at least it’s vaguely on-topic trash. I don’t get recommended 500 plumbing videos because one time I needed to know how to fix my toilet. It doesn’t take the fact that I watched a video that 500 million people also watched as meaning “I want to watch all the popular videos” or “I have the same tastes as everybody else who watched this video”.
I can always tell when I screwed up and watched an off-topic video in my normal account because the recommendations go to shit for a while.
It’s also important to do the same with links from social media.
Yeah, that’s basically what I meant by viral videos or ones recommended by a friend.
I browsed some music on youtube on a fresh, logged out device a few days ago and it was so refreshing to get recommendations based the video I’m currently watching. Like 15 years ago. Now, if I’m logged in, the recommendations next to the playing video are the same ones as on the landing page, utterly useless.
You can go into your yt history and delete videos and it will fix the recommendations
I deleted my whole history last week, and within a day YouTube was recommending me anime openings for things I have not had any interest in for 10 years. I’m pretty sure it’s at least partially bullshit.
I ended up just deleting my whole Google account. I’m making do with an RSS reader and yt-dlp for now, but I’m already so fed up with that whole process that I’m making a simple QT app that does the RSS reading and yt-dlp calling for me. Akregator fucking sucks, by the way. Every time I shut down my PC without closing Akregator first, it loses its shit and does not remember any read statuses.
I just browse on incognito (without an account). The home page is blank every time.
Yeah. Fuck YouTube and everything, but it’s still possible to curate a decent feed.
Naaah. Nowadays YouTube just represents the pinnacle of enshittification. Not something I’d admit publicly to using.
Around 825 AD, Persian scientist and polymath al-Khwarizmiwrote kitāb al-ḥisāb al-hindī (“Book of Indian computation”) and kitab al-jam’ wa’l-tafriq al-ḥisāb al-hindī (“Addition and subtraction in Indian arithmetic”). In the early 12th century, Latin translations of these texts involving the Hindu–Arabic numeral system and arithmetic appeared, for example Liber Alghoarismi de practica arismetrice, attributed to John of Seville, and Liber Algoritmi de numero Indorum, attributed to Adelard of Bath.[8] Here, alghoarismi or algoritmi is the Latinization of Al-Khwarizmi’s name;[9] the text starts with the phrase Dixit Algoritmi, or “Thus spoke Al-Khwarizmi”.
So in referring to what someone’s true soul is, you can say “Thus spoke The Algorithm”
It is when a person’s depth is measured in teaspoons.
It is to a smoothbrained techbro.
The deepest gaze into my soul is apparently that I enjoy disc golf, competitive pokemon battles and asian street food.
I just wished to drop here a novel from old times…
Ooh, I forgot it was Gogol that wrote that one, thank you, it’s marvelous!
timely! you should post this to !shortstories@literature.cafe
This is what traditional art reveals. And quite well.
Couple of years ago I was at a cannabis painting event (get stoned whilst painting), with my friend. I’ve got some experience drawing and sketching, very little with painting. My friend has very little experience in anything art related, yet whilst I was struggling to figure out what to paint he manages to make a lovely blend of colours and themes, in ways I never could. I was looking at it for a good while, and it had so many lovely elements. He kept thinking his wasn’t good!
He would’ve never been able to make that with AI, it would have missed all that nuance.
That sounds like a lot of fun
It’s quite a nice event, they try to do them weekly unless something comes up. They sometimes do stoner pottery, or design your own bongs with the erm, right type of paint I would presume lol. I don’t want it to sound like advertising, so if you are planning a trip to Amsterdam send me a message and I can give the website/socials :)
If you’ve had very little experience with painting, how do you know how good you would be at it? Your friend might have a natural talent, but that doesn’t mean that you couldn’t learn how.
Natural talent is a myth, it’s like believing that you shouldn’t think about what you’re doing to paint loose.
It’s all hard work, and maybe in the end you can split up artists by talent, but until then it’s just who have learned the most.
This is true. I’ll be going to Amsterdam again soon, and I’m hoping there’s another event at the time.
I chose to believe this happened. Jaden Smith has at least one friend and they were impressed with the art their friend made.
I will carry this story in my heart and retell it at the next paint and sip I go to.
If someone wants to know the weird shit people have on their minds you just have to find their social media timeline, especially Reddit, Tumblr or Fedi. Or, like, talk to them.
Given the flavour of weird shit in someone’s head most AI wouldn’t even slop anything like that. Like, I’m thinking of three shrimps having a raging threesome right now with Jim Carrey’s head in the background watching one shrimp-dick explode. The AI would probably refuse or just make Carrey sit in front of a meal.
I challenge any AI to come up with a comment like this.
Thank you for that vibrant mental image
I understand the OOP’s sentiment. There are plenty of us who have visually detailed and complex ideas, but are unable to fully express them via conventional media, due to lack of skill or disability. Not everyone can practise their way into being a master painter. It doesn’t mean I think of it as art, and I can’t understand why some people are fine with passing off something generated from others’ work as their own creativity.
Get a pen and paper, that’s enough to make great art and express yourself.
If you try.
No shit, mate.
Whilst true that not everyone can practice their way into mastery of painting, I usually find people don’t even try.
I definitely prefer honest garbage to polished inauthenticity, but, based on AI usage, it seems the ordinary person disagrees. It’s sad, don’t you think?
100%. Obviously-AI images induce immediate repulsion in me, and I hate that I feel the need to inspect normal-looking images to see if they might, too, be AI. For some I’ll never really know.
I also hate that there’s now certain styles and fonts that I now just assume are AI without any other evidence
Having a linguistic concept in your mind does not mean you have a “complex visual idea.” The whole point of “practicing” is training your mind against it’s nature and start to think visually for the first time. The tragedy of AI image generation is that it keeps people from exploring that side of their imagination and learning to really see. they never really develop a visual language but instead take the prepackaged style of the llm vending machine. It is sad to think that a voice is lost because they traded the vulnerability of making something to getting a predetermined product and pretend they had something visual in their mind to begin with.
The whole point of “practicing” is training your mind against it’s nature and start to think visually for the first time.
Speak for yourself.
It is common for people who start learning a skill to talk that way; They believe they have a strong grasp on some kind of thinking and in practice they find out they are way behind… They call it Dunning-Kruger something? In people who are learning art or design i see it all the time, people talk about their “visual ideas” and then get frustrated because they can’t put them into paper. A lot of their visual ideas are Imitation without personality. When the student starts to develop a language they gain an added feeling of empowerment: They have connected many forms of knowledge and experience that once existed arbitrarily in their heads. They have a method a system and i repeat visual language. It’s one of the biggest tells of AI slop images in the wild. You can’t see a person, you see the diffusion model itself, and often times since diffusion models need to take information from training that casts a very wide net it looses any personality or distinct voice.
Lastly; we often confuse “making art” with “making a product” and forget that art is a form of communication itself. If people rely on translators instead of learning a language, do they really “think” in that language?
You can make a product: Write a novel in German even if you barely speak that language by inputting your English text into google translate and carefully and editing the output as best you can. But there is a communicative barrier between you and your product. You don’t really think in German, you don’t know the slang, and the nuances of the language by relying on the translator.
You believe people who can’t draw also can’t… think visually? That’s a completely different skill common in most of the population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_thinking
Not exactly; People who can draw can use that tool to explore visual ideas and think visually; But you can do that with design concepts, paper cutouts, Adobe Illustrator shapes and so on. People who only engage with linguistic concepts as in the case of an LLM are not really engaging in the nuances of any visual language. They are using information set into a translator that outputs a result. It’s like thinking that Using google translate Makes me “Think in Chinese” lol.
I see it often that clients come to me thinking that they have a realized visual Idea but they really don’t have much. They have some overall aesthetic short hands. A couple of images they liked and a standard they want to meet. This is not visual thinking; this is called being a client. Then there is the job of art directors, they won’t draw everything themselves but they will offer a system, information critique, cultural awareness, even technical methods.
You can engage an LLM as a client or an art director; But in the end you are still using google translate to write in English and have an output in Chinese, if you follow my former metaphor. You are not really thinking in the true language of the output, There is wide cultural barrier between you and what you are making; most of the context cues and nuances of your message are lost or irrelevant.
That’s true, and I didn’t say that. I’m talking about being able to visualise something in one’s imagination, but have difficulty in translating that into reality, so others can see an approximation. I agree with the negative affects on imagination, cognitive surrender is real.
So what then for those with aphantasia? They may be able to describe something in detailed words, but not visualise it themselves at all. In that case, AI really might be able to help them express an idea.
The thing is; Our “Imagination” lies. Our brains are especially good at forming concepts that are often snippets of visual echoes and linguistic narratives but don’t form into anything concrete. In order to form a concrete visual idea you need to engage with visual concepts themselves. A character designer needs to have a grasp on human anatomy but there is design specific information like contrast and color balance, form, shape, line economy, design sense; then there is cultural information like emotional response to shape and color, particular fashion sense, cultural and environmental cues. All those are choices; a designer engages with them, interiorizes them, experiments and chooses what works best for them. Every Specific Area has different context and it’s own sense of rules.
A Good character designer might think they would have good “visual ideas” for graphic design but in reality this won’t be true until they engage with the particular context that is proper of graphic design. Since by using AI people are cutting themselves off to working with any visual concepts: (It’s all linguistic descriptions) They are cutting themselves off from making decisions that are truly visual. They are clients. Just like the clients that hire an artist that more often than not, don’t know what they want. But “think” they have an idea that is concrete in their heads. People that instead of immersing themselves in visual or cultural concepts take short hands. Reminds me of this thing of calling visual trends “punks” putting “cyberpunk”, “cloud punk” or “hope punk” in their prompts. Oversimplification. Visual stupidity.
As for aphantasia; Supposedly I have it. Back in college it was impossible for me to visualize images. And I used to heavily forget faces, places or shapes. I confuse people I already know with other people, Images just don’t stick in my head. But again. Visual education is not so much as a mental faculty but a system. I have a very particular system developed with experience and a formed visual language. So It doesn’t matter that I can’t visualize something in my head; Because I can get to any drawing pad and jot it down. Journaling is important for me. Often time I record the process I used to find a particular answer and keep them as “maps” to retrace my steps. As I developed more visually intelligence I got better at retaining images in my head. I feel my ADHD has a bit to do with it, because back when I was a kid it was difficult to find contextual cues, subtle proportional differences and cultural responses. I trained myself to get better at picking up on those over time, and my “aphantasia” feels less prominent today.
I think we’re talking about separate things, you about those who don’t fully know what they want to express, and that art comes from their attempt to express it, with the influences of their life experience, and should they offload that attempt to express a concept to AI they lose that idea (or never really knew it). I’m talking about those who do know what they want to express, visually, and regardless of the tools used, could look at the output and say with confidence ‘that’s not it’. It seems this is a bit foreign to you because you perhaps have never experienced seeing a full visual scene in your mind’s eye, and known you are unable to draw/paint it with a level of fidelity that even approaches the visualisation. I can imagine all sorts of things, see them clearly in my head, and though my drawing skills aren’t terrible, I couldn’t reproduce them well. I could describe something linguistically, but have no interest in spending time using an AI to try to express it. That doesn’t mean no people exist that have things in their heads that could be expressed via AI.
I have aphantasia. I still draw manually; I just need a reference photo (or subject) and “modify” it as I draw. Imagine if you couldn’t remember what something looked like so you have to memorise “ok their right eye is 30% down their face and only half visible from this angle and extends 20% horizontally at about 10 degrees until it’s covered by the nose which is…” etc. Then I draw that tiny line and have to check again
Writing it out, I just realised it’s actually similar to how you would describe it to an LLM 😂. I will admit that I’m very unsuited to this skill, and it’s extremely difficult for me, but I still find it fun. Maybe because of the difficulty itself?
Actually, lately I’ve been challenging myself by using pen and doing line-art. Normally, because I fuck up so much, I do messy sketches; so it was really interesting using a medium that is so punishing. I’ve learnt with line art it’s mostly about what you don’t draw, rather than what you do, if that makes sense
I fucked around with a locally installed image generator A.I. for a while in the past ~ it was fun, but I got bored of it quickly, and it became kind of hollow
I do not have aphantasia, but a painting technique I follow could work for someone with aphantasia. It’s more about pattern-recognition than imagining something beforehand.
I pretty much start by following whims. I pick some colors and do what feels right. Only after a bit do I look again at the work and think, “Huh, that looks like an alien” or “That kind of looks like a tree,” etc. It’s kind of like making my own Rorschach test - making sense of the noise on a canvas. Then, I start accentuating the pattern I see until others can see it, too. In the end, it’s a unique piece that looks like I planned it all along.
I’m not sure if that sounds up your alley, but I figured I’d share just in case.
Thanks! I’ll give it a go one day
Nice! Don’t know why you got downvoted just for sharing your experience.
I remove my own upvote from my comments because I like things starting at 0
I mean one of my brothers is aphantasiac. He’s a great 12 string guitarist. He does covers, but even with practice not everyone can write music well.
That’s cool, but if he was having trouble communicating a visual idea, and he wasn’t good at painting, drawing, sculpting, or digital tools, would you think less of him for using AI to help him crystallise it and show it to you?
You don’t have to be a master. Started drawing recently which you can do for less than £1 and free if you wanted to put effort into doing it for nothing.
Helps to find things which are easier to draw with minimal skill, which isn’t necessarily everything. Also repeating the same or similar thing too.
I want to come up with decent patterns to engrave into wood which does limit it a bit, can’t really do shading and the lines can’t be too close or once carved into wood they merge into each other. I think a bird standing on a branch and some Halloween ghosts are probably things I can do well enough now that they could be worth carving at some point. Sanded some more scrap wood recently which I could use, might be worth buying some boards soon if it comes out well.
but are unable to fully express them via conventional media, due to lack of skill or disability. Not everyone can practise their way into being a master painter.
A master? Maybe not. But you can absolutely practice your way to being a decent painter. Enough to get your creativity expressed.
And there are plenty of disabled artists out there. I’ve seen decent painters who had no arms and had to do all their painting with brushes held between their toes. Don’t let disability be your excuse. (Unless your disability is blindness, I guess? It would be awfully hard to be a blind artist. But a blind person is going to have an equally hard time getting anything meaningful out of AI.)
I get it, but I don’t see it as all or nothing. If you want to be an artist, but you’re “creating” with gen AI, I’m not interested.
If you have something inside your head that you want to just show someone, and its not intended to be art, or remembered, then should you spend years practising to use some medium in order to create it yourself?
If you have something inside your head that you want to just show someone, and its not intended to be art, or remembered, then should you spend years practising to use some medium in order to create it yourself?
Yes, because creating stuff is fun.
How many resources does that use, and opportunity cost in time spent, vs a occasional generation? I have a fair idea. Creating stuff is fun if that’s your goal. Dedicating time and resources to become an artist only to convey a bit of info occasionally, not so much.
i mean if you want to do a cost:benefit analysis doing it yourself wins every time
You might want to revisit your maths, there. There’s no way sitting at a computer learning Krita for months uses less electricity than a few prompts to an AI, and there’s no requirement that the AI in use has to be running remotely at one of those big, fuck-you data centres owned by Anthropic, OpenAI, or whoever.
People have been communicating ideas through stick figures and poorly drawn lines for about as long as people have been drawing.
Edit to add: perspective and shading are also extremely modern techniques, invented during the Renaissance. Every castle, every cathedral, every bridge, and everything before then would have been planned and communicated without any way to communicate a 3 dimensional shape in 2 dimensions
yeah but perspective and shading ruined art of cats.
Does that not illustrate the point? Our methods and tech for expressing ideas have come a long way. Historically, there would have been more people (at least proportionally) who lacked the means to communicate their ideas as fully as they would have if they’d had access to the same education and resources as we do now. It’s an analogous situation that there are now technologies one can direct to (potentially) communicate an idea better than if one first had to achieve decent artistic competency to produce a similar result.
Yeah, why use technology when decades of practice will accomplish the same thing? Everyone is just too lazy to master every skill.
/s
That is not the argument being made here. The argument is that people would rather see a bad or decent piece of human-made art to be able to look in someone’s mind, than look at amazingly skillful AI art.
Your thinking comes from a productivity and competition standpoint, which is just not what’s being talked about here. Productivity and competition is so deeply ingrained under capitalism that not caring about both of those things is hard to conceive.
It’s not talking about making a movie that succeeds on Netflix, or making a cover image to sell a product, etc etc etc, but about expressing yourself as a human to other humans.
What was 2/2?
