(prepreface edit: actually. my post Sucks mostly and i am rethinking much of it. but i think it would be posting unfairly if i were to edit it)
(preface: "art" is a generous term. "art" is not necessarily ethical, interesting, effortful, meaningful, worthwhile, or good. "great art" is not necessarily ethical, worthwhile, or good.)
the most notable things aren't that neat:
- the 2014 "deepdream" algorithm, the result of a convnet debugging session, introduced the general public to some interesting and trippy applications of neural networks
- those "biden and trump playing minecraft" memes used AI to add an air of authenticity to a shitpost that elevated them and contributed meaningfully to meme culture
- "endless dungeon", "AI seinfeld", etc. were funny and at least interesting demonstrations of the technology
- t-SNE and UMAP continue to be unusurped as the most meaningful 2D/3D embedding algorithms, and IMO is a visualization algorithm which is only an art.
- AI generated pornography continues to be 'great', explicitly in the sense that there is a great magnitude of horrifying and awful implications
- NN accelerated smoke/particle/fluid simulations still promise huge potential for creating perceptually believable results, which should increase the accessibility of "neat 3D rendering" to more people
what do the "ai art" people call "great ai art"? nothing that great
But if you search "great AI art", the best examples people will show you are like... AI generated paintings of faux- romantic era paintings? Like, that's a 7 year olds idea of "great art".
There's a pretty neat space between generative art (i.e. procedural or algorithmic, not generative) and generated art. Electric Sheep is probably one of the most well known examples. The art piece is the algorithm, and the result.
what about great art that looks like ai art
Luis Ricardo Falero's works are probably the most "AI-art" looking pieces of art out there (e.g., nsfw). Surely something as interesting as this is possible within the hands of some prompting-and-patching photoshopper.
the rest of the post
I'm not even asking for a Piss Christ. I'm not expecting an Ai Weiwei of AI art to pop up. But there aren't even any movies, games, books, etc. which make any meaningful use of AI-generated stuff.
Very few self respecting artists would use AI tools, but there are many artists who don't respect themselves. Where are they? The answer is that "AI art" continues to be pretty worthless!
You'd think someone would've done something neat by now! But "AI art" just isn't neat or good or anything like that.
the point of the post
I think AI art is like Family Guy. You'd never watch it on your own, and it's not good, but if someone you trust says "Hey, this clip of Family Guy is kind of funny"m you'd trust that curation.
The most artistic part of "AI art" is the curation. If someone sent you those "presidents playing minecraft" AI-voice things, that's because of a lengthy system of curation to pick that turd from the poopstack. Far more effort went into the apparatus for showing you the shit than the shit itself.
toasthaste wrote
I wouldn't expect a search for "great AI art" to give you very useful results, for the same reasons I wouldn't expect a search on the Target website to give you very useful results for "great art."
I think a decent number of artists are figuring out ways to incorporate ai into their workflow, much like they did with previous digital tools. "AI-assisted Art", rather than "AI art". Rapid concept iteration, or just filling in textures instead of doing it agonizingly slowly by hand, or whatever; it makes sense to me that this would be one of the more common real-world uses for it and I just am not convinced there's some spiritual wrong being done there.
And that's the thing, like, if this is the attitude they are likely to be met with, it makes sense that they would not advertise when they're using it! There's collective of artists who I'm socially adjacent to online that's very earnest about ethically exploring the potential in this new medium, and all their spaces are extremely private and locked down, out of necessity, due to constant really vicious harassment. Are they making Great AI Art in there? How would either of us know?
It's just. Digital artists have been using algorithmic and generative tools to speed up the repetitive drudgework parts of art for decades now. There was a time when people spoke with scorn about artists using any of the labor-saving tools you can use in Photoshop and called anything people made with the help of those tools "not real art". So often, this feels like the sequel to that.
idk. AI art and its cousins make me extremely uneasy, and occasionally fill me with horrible existential dread if I think about it too much (even if my wrists ever got better, would I ever draw again? What would be the point? Why even try to improve? etc); but the way people talk about it still bums me out. I dunno, it's an extremely brand new medium just starting to be explored, with so much hostility directed toward it (which as ever is mostly going to actually land on the people who are earnestly putting their hearts and souls into it and not the people making airbrushed anime porn image #5776889). Some of the things I do see are really promising and exciting (in between the feeling that I am being swallowed up by quicksand). It feels like if you looked at Tennis for Two and decided that its undercookedness meant that these "video game" things are going nowhere.
(Also like. I dunno. Some of the only pictures I've been able to bring into existence in the past 2 years have been ai generated. It was a lot of fun learning a little bit about how to maneuver the tools to try to coax them into producing something anywhere near the picture I had in my head; the process gave me a nutrient that my soul has been corroding from lacking, with unsolvable chronic pain preventing me from being able to draw any more. The big reason I don't play with generation more is because it's actually pretty difficult to learn to use these tools effectively, they are very complex. All that to say I guess I have more personal investment in this as it looks more and more like I'll never be able to make art with my hands again.)