Is AI the End of Art?
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- Опубликовано: 7 сен 2024
- Philosophical musings about the grave threat AI poses to humanity and art. We've created artificial intelligence and robotics, which combined can defeat us at virtually every pursuit. Our greatest hope is to reevaluate what it means to be human and to cultivate what is most uniquely human in ourselves. The best place to do this, and the one most at stake right now, is art. The only way to survive is to rethink why we value art and learn to appreciate its most human aspects. We move on to valuing what humans can accomplish in art, irrespective of the ability of AI to mimic or encompass it. We respond to AI by becoming more human, especially in our art.
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I can almost imagine art becoming more sport-like in an attempt to manufacture purpose and achievement, even a return to academicism in regards to strict rules and regulation. The analogy that you gave of motorcycles in foot races shows that when technology outpaces raw human skill we require structured systems (like closely monitored races) to give that skill a purpose. Because technology has now outpaced human art from a purely practical standpoint, as it did with running millennia ago, and there are no more artistic barriers to be broken by humans that AI can't break, I can imagine a shift from a focus on experimentation to technical human skill in art.
Great vid by the way, you're quickly becoming one of my favourite channels on RUclips👌
Thanks. I'm so glad you like my channel. Yes, I think there might be an increased emphasis on standards and visual literacy that could relate to your idea of "academicism". For me, as an artist, at present, I'm drawn to what is uniquely human, individual, authentic, and original. All of those things have been poo-poohed by the art establishment in recent decades in favor of conceptualism and things like appropriation. And this includes the mistakes even the old masters made, because nobody is perfect, and our small imperfections are part of our distinct recipes. The individual touch, the manifestation of the artist's personal vision, and the aura art has when the whole transcends the sum of its parts are already what really matter to me. AI art makes all those things even more valuable in contrast, at least for me.
Remember when Andy Warhol said, "I want to be a machine"? A lot of art has strived to be something like that. Well, we can't compete at being machines with machine learning. Hopefully, others will see as I do and want a return to the human in art: human vision, human vulnerability, and human skill.
just discovered your channel. Thank you !
A machine does art to be human like, we do art because we are human. Yeah, I am proud to be a non-AI artist.
That's fine with me.
Humans ... neuroscientists say free will is an illusion and soul a product of the brain.
Great video! As a "traditional" visual artist, I've been trying to wrap my head around AI generated imagery. I think the coming disruption will be similar to the advent of photography, albeit on a much larger scale. Commercial art/Illustration was drastically affected then, as it will be now. On the upside, I think AI could become (like photography) another fantastic tool in the visual arts toolbox, a way to help us understand our world better. Note how painters depicted galloping horses before and after Eadweard Muybridge's groundbreaking work. Only time will tell how it will all play out. In the meantime, I'll just keep my head down, trying to improve my skills. It's heartening to know that, even in the age of supercomputers, there are people who still collect and appreciate a well-made abacus.
I like your optimism and your value of traditional mediums and tools! But I’m not sure the camera analogy really works. Imagine you’re a college teacher, and one of your students turns in a final paper written by ChatGPT. You tell the student he needs to write it himself, and he replies, "AI is like the typewriter. Just a tool."
The problem is that the AI, which can now pass the BAR and get excellent SAT scores, is a superior writer to the student. For another analogy, AI is to the camera what the Terminator is to the pistol. It's not just thousands of times more powerful, but it also replaces the human soldier, and is vastly superior to 99% of people at fighting.
@@artvsmachine3703 -- Passed the BAR? Wow. Honestly trying to keep up with all the latest developments is dizzying. It reminds me of the early 90s when I was trying to find out more about this thing called the World Wide Web at my university library...and realizing that there weren't any books on the topic because it was all so new. I remember telling everyone the Internet was going to change everything -- and it did. But not in the ways I thought it would. I'm guessing it will be the same with AI. We can prognosticate, but be completely unable to imagine certain uses. With the 'Net, I envisioned vast amounts of free, digitized info at my fingertips, which I got; but I certainly didn't foresee Tide Pod challenges or live-streamed shootings. So yeah, sobering stuff. Thanks for the discussion. :)
@@LauraGYoung Right. Thanks for bringing up the internet. And social media, as well. There's foreseen and unforeseen good and bad. And that means there's probably going to be a bad side to AI. I know there could be a good side. I wish that's what people were really thinking about. But it seems like what they are really thinking about is $$$.
@@artvsmachine3703 If the internet has already proven to be any indication, a tool capable of revolutionizing the way we live and benefitting mankind, can also and will be abused, exploited for personal and financial gain, and reduced to it's lowest form, the quickest path to mindless consumption and pleasure seeking self indulgence. AI will be no different, and really hasn't given any indication that it has ever truly been intended for anything else. At least it took some time for the internet to devolve into the cesspit it is today, or at least before the toxic and harmful elements of it became widely used and socially acceptable.
So far, using AI for anything beyond a momentarily entertaining novelty gives results that, at best, are stale and very mediocre. It can serve as a brainstorming tool for topic ideas, or give you an image maybe for advertising use that you'll inevitably have to touch up yourself, but I don't see it ever creating anything truly worthwhile. I mean, it's literally incapable of anything new or creative. It's not genuine AI, but rather creates an aggregate, a Frankenstein sausage of existing material. It may become harder to recognize as AI, the "better" it gets, but by design, this could also mean a more generic and unoriginal product, disposable junk. There's already plenty of youtube channels that even those less discerning can recognize as content farms, based solely off of the quality of content alone. It'll never have the soul of genuine human expression. That doesn't make its application any less threatening, though...
Tracing paper beat AI a long time ago.
Good one.
I'm starting the day the right way - with a fresh vid from Art vs Machine ☺️
Is it just me? Surely someone else realizes that AI uses human images to overlay and had to be programmed with "style" parameters
Excellent vid! Yes, it's AI mimicry - I enjoy AI but I especially enjoy the creative human mind ❤
I know AI is trained to appeal to human aesthetic sensibilities. It always attempts to make an image that will appeal to us visually. I tend to visualize algorithms as stacks of filters for this or that considerations. Sometimes it seems as if it overlaid images like we would do in Photoshop, but I don't think that's how it operates. I don't really understand what's happening under the hood.
It is mostly mimicry, but I wouldn't put it past AI to generate novel images either. People are using ChatGPT-4 to write prompts to use to generate AI images. The human middleman there could probably be cut out and AI could make art all on its own. In the end, it's the fallible stuff a living creature makes that's more interesting when it comes to saying anything about what it means to be alive. Agreed.
Interesting experiment, and a different take on the usual AI art debate. Despite the commands being designed to not be helpful to the AI, it still generated a couple of not terrible images surprisingly.
I keep meaning to write a video about AI art, but every time I finish a sentence it is already out of date.
Yeah. You can dump anything into a prompt -- as I did here with "zero effort" -- and AI will by necessity attempt to hit it out of the park. It is trained to make aesthetically satisfying images according to human standards.
If I had paid to use MidJourney5, the results would have been even better. One doesn't need any skill or experience as an artist to get good results from AI. I could dump this comment or yours into it and get decent results.
Rather than showcase the best images AI has produced, my tactic was to show the minimum level it achieves with no effort and prompts that are not even attempting to be functional. Prompts typically describe the image you want to see and aren't just blocks of text articulating ideas.
As someone who's not very good at art besides a little photography, I'm fully embracing AI art. And I'm amazed with the images that I can get it to create, as I wouldn't be able to create it myself.
There's no denying that AI art bots are a fun toy.
I have yet to see a decent AI art in the style of van Gogh. It massively fails to actually understand why his art was painted the way it was. Even amateur artists do a better job.
Yes! AI really struggles with Van Gogh, probably because the thick impasto paint adds another level of complexity. His paintings aren't just impasto; the strokes follow and articulate forms. It adds an additional dimension for the AI to try to calculate. Meanwhile, Van Gogh was not a realistic painter, so AI has to try and figure out his particular style.
I don't know how long until it masters Van Gogh, though. Just a few months ago, AI couldn't do faces or hands. Now MidJourney 5 can make convincing photographs of humans on the fly. I used a free AI tool for the images in this video. MidJourney is much more impressive, but I didn't want to pay to use it. What do we do if and when AI does conquer Van Gogh?
Only the very best artists can beat AI, and only at their own game. Van Gogh couldn't hope to compete with AI at tens of thousands of other things it does in split seconds, and neither, by the way, could I.
I would be thrilled if AI could never crack Van Gogh! That would say something about our consciousness being essential for art. I'm rooting for Vincent. He is my favorite artist of all time, and he only gets better as I get older.
Thanks so much for watching and commenting.
@@artvsmachine3703 It doesn't do well on a lot of old masters like da Vinci. As long as it's trained on too many photos, traditional art is not great. You can see that it brings in what it has learnt from photos and tries to 'improve' old masters. Even Modrians are bad.
@@Jules_Pew You can directly upload old master paintings for it to work with. I think it's a matter of directing the AI. But rather than focus on the things it can't yet do, like knock of a completely convincing companion to the Mona Lisa, notice how many other things it can do, including things humans may be incapable of. And each iteration, AI gets closer to mastering the old masters, just like it gradually beat better and better chess players. I see the incredible things AI has achieved, and the extraordinary protentional, which just keeps expanding.
Do you think AI will never be able to make superb versions of da Vince or Van Gogh paintings? Like I said before, I would love that about more than anything. It would mean the human spirit and consciousness are essential for art. But AI art bots are in their relative infancy. People don't realize what is at stake here and how profound it is. Is a "soul" necessary? This is man versus machine. This is Art Vs MACHINE!
@@artvsmachine3703 Not sure. Maybe the AI has been contaminated too much by photos. Would someone wipe it clean to start again? Sure you can combine old paintings together, but once you introduce a photo and say paint in in old style, it starts with the photo. Nuance is not in AI, just logic.
@@Jules_Pew It depends on which AI bot one uses, and most people are prompting for photo-realistic results. If you want a da Vinci painting you need to put the right cues in the prompt. The images you are seeing may reflect more what the general populace wants to generate than the capabilities of AI. I was able to get very good Pre-Raphaelite images in the past using proper prompting.
Couldn’t finish the video because of the background music. 👎🏻
I recommend you stick to channels that regurgitate the dominant narrative in a straightforward manner with no creativity.
It's simple ffs: Art is a human endeavor by humans for humans. Nothing more, nothing less ! Image generators are not art for it lacks humanity ! Stop the fear mongering !
Glad to hear you have that confidence and belief in humans and human art.