I'm surprised how very little this forum and the public in general knows or understands about the current capabilities and availability to these ai art generators.
You have midjourney.com
beta.dreamstudio.ai
craiyon.com (real quick version no fuss, low quality)
creator.nightcafe.studio
and those are just some of the entry-level ones. I make ai art all day long! Check out my media feed on twitter @Sheilaaliens
I feel like this is the epitome of modern "content creation"
Typing a few sentences into a software you barely understand, said software shits 15 jpegs out, 2 are good, "hey I make art". What a sad state of affair, tech is consuming everything and people are cheering, one more step on the path to being complete useless key pressers.
Press a button on a box you barely understand and the camera shits out a pic. "Hey I make art". What a sad state of affair, tech is consuming everything and people are cheering, one more step on the path to being complete useless key pressers.
You still have to decide what you take a pic of, that's the artistic part. You have to chose a subject, lights, &c. it's still incredibly more complex than "hey google draw me a horse with a tuxedo"
You can tell that right away seeing how many camera users never produce anything of quality. A 6 years old can press the button of a camera but no 6 years old will produce meaningful work. In the case of Ai art tools you just need some basic english skills
There was a recent write up by a guy who used DALL-E to create his logo for his open source project. What was clear from that writeup is that it is still a process for getting exactly the look that one is aiming to achieve. Even with an AI, there are different styles, decisions, choices, and visual representations that have to be made.
Your position that with photography, you have to "chose a subject, lights, &c" doesn't change with AI generated artwork; one still has to describe the subject, color scheme, visual style, composition details, etc. for the AI to generate the image. Except that instead of composing a scene with makeup, props, and subjects, you do it textually.
I'd say that in some respect, it is far more "creative" than photography because it removes physical and real-world constraints from the artist which would otherwise require knowledge of CGI and digital tools.
> A 6 years old can press the button of a camera but no 6 years old will produce meaningful work
This is also true of even painting. Even a 6 year old can grab a paintbrush and paint without producing meaningful work. So that does not change with AI generated artwork. Yes, a 6 year old can describe a scene to an AI that generates some image -- just as a 6 year old can pick up a brush and apply paint to a canvas, but the likeliness of a 6 year old presenting the seed/input that the AI needs to generate something unique and of visual interest/originality is low just as it is with a paintbrush.
> Except that instead of composing a scene with makeup, props, and subjects, you do it textually.
One of the truly fascinating things with stable diffusion is that you can use a starting image. So you can start with a vague sketch to control the composition. It's quite incredible.
You still have to pick styles, tweaks, lighting, subject. Then iterate, set composition, guide the results. You need to pick the right models, params and samplers to get the style you want just like choosing your film/camera.
> it's still incredibly more complex than "hey google draw me a horse with a tuxedo"
And just like taking a photo of a random horse in a field you'll mostly get a pretty bland result.
You can argue it's simpler to create art with, which is an odd complaint, but if you're not working to make something great you generally won't get it - just like photography is much simpler than painting as it's "just press a button".
Exactly, this won't replace all other forms of art and if you're doing the "just press the button" equivalent you won't get things that are that great.
At worst the complaint seems to be "with care you can more easily create good art" which is a very odd complaint.
It's only sad if you think art or humans sacrificing their time has some kind of fundamental moral value rather than being just another type of product. As a materialist I don't really subscribe to that. I see work as a negative thing that society progresses to reduce.
The keypressing is clearly, objectively, not useless. It is useful, just less costly and more accessible to way more people. I'm generally happy with this.
I’m not crazy about the tone you’re striking, but the bit about “software you barely understand” does ring true. Lots of folks who think hitting play in a notebook makes them some sort of AI-art-engineer these days.
On the other hand, the whole point of automating creation is that you don’t need to understand the underlying mechanisms.
The user, me included, has less and less knowledge and skills though.
When your tool becomes a megacorp owned subscription based service you barely understand is it really a tool ? It doesn't produce art in the way a brush and paint produce art, you barely have any control on what it does, you just become an image filter, you press a few keys, look at the image for 5 seconds and decide if it triggers the right part of your brain or not
It's not so different from the artist shitting on canvas, but at least he had the creativity to do something new and daring.
The end result might be called art but the whole process is completely devoid of what makes art "art"
You have quite a lot of control from style and colour to composition by feeding in initial images. You can do this iteratively, selecting parts you want to keep and others you want to adjust.
Photography hasn't killed art, yet you can describe it as "point at something and press a button". Sure you'll get something out of it, and it might be alright. But the great outputs take more work and care, just like with the air art now.
Time spent designing a tool is time spent not using the tool to make art and honestly the types of brains that are good at designing art tools... often have very formulaic and structurally rigid ways of thinking about creating art (they tend to use tools for what they are intended for which almost no breakthrough in art has happened from). It is a good thing if artists can uses tools without having to understand the nitty gritty.
Not really. This very much depends on the prompt. Just look at these, made these yesterday in a batch run. Same prompts, different seeds. This all what it made on seed it chose.
You have midjourney.com beta.dreamstudio.ai craiyon.com (real quick version no fuss, low quality) creator.nightcafe.studio
and those are just some of the entry-level ones. I make ai art all day long! Check out my media feed on twitter @Sheilaaliens