SHINAN'S PROFILE

And even back then I think the people using it disparagingly were in the minority. I just don't have a sense that it has ever been a negatively charged word outside of... you know... people like me.

author=RedMask
I noticed a few people in this discussion bad mouthed tracing. You guys don't know art very well. I happen to have a bachelors degree in art illustration. For one assignment our teacher had us replicate a master illustrator's painting as perfectly as possible and although you can't trace a painting, we were encouraged by our professor to trace the masterpiece art and then paint on top of it. I remember my professor clearly saying, "How you make art doesn't matter, the end result is what matters." This statement was from a highly respected art teacher. Having said all that, I don't know how he or my other teachers would react to AI art. I haven't fully formed my opinion on the AI subject yet.

My original comment about it being as unethical as tracing was not meant to be disparaging of tracing. Instead it was supposed to be a literal comparison to how ethical it is.

I used tracing instead of copying because in my mind the difference between copying and tracing is it there will be imperfections and in some cases even a slight personal touch. Thus making the work somewhat but not completely transformative.

And in that way tracing can create a new piece of work that is its own thing while also being a copy of a different work. The ethicalness of that is the same as the point we've all made in this thread over and over. Is that the ethicalness of it all is depending on why you do it and what you will do with the result.

The sidetracking that seems to happen is in the idea that unethical=bad and ethical=good. When it doesn't really matter if the art is good or bad (or even art) or whatever. The unethicalness of AI art comes in the procedure of stealing other people's art without crediting them. Shamelessly opening pandora's box to teach algorithms to create new images without the consent of the people who have been wronged.

That's why AI art is currently unethical it was made through a shitty procedure by people who didn't give a shit about artists.

This doesn't mean that ethical AI art can't exist. By willing participants, teaching algorithms to generate new stuff by using... "ethically sourced" art.

It's not an either/or. AI art can be both ethical and unethical and it's all about how it's produced and why.

I just want to say that talent is meaningless in the big picture. It might give someone a head start and thus an incentive to try something out. But once someone has put in the time to learn something properly there's no difference between the person who started with talent and the person who learned it.

Did you study art and the history of art? Because I did.

I know it's not enjoyable to listen, but art was born of religion. Emphasis on "was". Times have changed and art changed with them. Religion is no longer as prevalent and therefore art now exists in function of the artist.

The ancient cave painters worshipped Gaia (or women in general for having the gift of giving life), represented as small statuettes of fertile women. This was before they stopped worshipping women and started worshipping men through the use of mehnirs (AKA giant erect penises).

Wall painting also represented religious rituals in addition to big hunts (which can be argued to be part of the rituals).

Later on, when religion took over the world, there were only 2 types of art, the large majority was depicting bible scenes (heaven, hell, etc) to impress the faithfuls and the rest was depictions of rather rich people.

Greece worshipped the male body, so what do we get? A ton of male nude statues (their depiction of the female body was rare) and get this, most of the depicted males were religious figures (Zeus, Hercules, etc) or rich folk.

A lot of this is wrong. Some of it are outdated ideas. (it's basically the archeological meme of "we don't know what this is, therefore it must have been used in religious rituals") Some of it are misrepresentations of what religion is. Some of it even contradicts itself, especially the caveats that all art is religious OR depicting rich people.

Saying cave paintings depicting hunting grounds are definitely religious seems very off. Sure the images have a certain divine power, but there are also plenty of theories suggesting they are utilitarian. ("here be dragons"/"here be plenty of game")

The mere mention of calling paleolithic religious practices as "worshiping Gaia" when that whole "gaiaworship" idea is pretty much a neopagan construct (not that Gaia wasn't a greek goddess. But she wasn't one of the really big ones) also sounds a bit like misunderstanding or misremembering the studies.

And calling female Greek statues "rare" is also just factually incorrect.

If we're going to go down the what is good art or what is art and/or if AI can generate it... Then...

I think that AI can be... art. But it is all down to curation. An algorithm can spit out millions of random images but the art comes down to curating the pieces and putting them into a context. Like in many ways it's like traditional pop art (funny how pop art can be called traditional), taking something known and remixing it, giving it new context.

Art, after all, is about giving a statement. So making the explicitly soulless (Algorithmically generated art) is its own statement. And through context it then becomes a thought-provoking thing. (like I can see a thing where someone would use generated art and their own art and then also their own art made to mimic the generated art and make a sort of game about who can spot the fake ones. Context makes the individual pieces meaningless but as they play off each other they create a whole new piece of artwork. I'm sure all of this has been done already)


And as a random aside I also think this is funny:

Yes, the same is happening with music. There was so much good music when you go back from the 90's up to when music was first invented.

The dates of when music was ruined moves around a lot depending on one's age. I've heard it was ruined in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s (the 80s ruined a lot of things), 90 and 00s.
And it's usually for the exact same reasons!



Oh and on the ethicalness of it all. The issue always comes down to what was used to teach the algorithms. I'm sure an artist or an artist collective could get together and feed their art into an algorithm and see what it spits out and there wouldn't be any ethical considerations at all. They willingly put that stuff into the machine and thus they also own what it spits out, no ambiguity there.

The reason AI art is so shat upon is that a bunch of people's work was used for it without their permission.

Like I said earlier it says something about the (lack of) power of artists that they just scraped all that stuff and put it into the world and no one gave a shit. Just imagine what the record companies would have done if they had just put the last 100 years of pop music into the algorithm and started generating a bunch of random new pop tunes for people to listen to. (This is something I have no doubt these algorithms could do just as easily as it generates text and images. But I have a feeling that they for some inexplicable (:P) reason just chose to not teach their music bots by throwing in all of Queen's albums in there, instead used... more "ethically sourced" music)