Ah, very interesting that you want to focus on photography as a comparison. To me, this just infers that you are not familiar with the type of choices that photographers do make, creatively. Just because they have endless amounts of subject matter readily available at their disposal, does not make the process any easier or different than other types of art.

Photographers still consider composition, lighting, area of focus, color, etc. Along with a large amount of other factors such as camera body, filmback, lens, fstop, iso, flash, supplemental lighting, post-processing, the list goes on.

Again, all of these choices are actively made when creating the work - using one’s critical thinking, decision making, experience and knowledge to inform each choice and how it will affect the outcome.

Generative AI is not that and will never be that, no matter how much you argue otherwise. You are entering a prompt, the model is interpreting that and generating a result that it calculates to be most statistically accurate. Your choice of words are not artistic choices, they are at most, requests or instructions. If you iterate, you are not in control of what changes. You only find out what has changed after the result has been generated.

Again, you are totally missing the point to the Fountain and using it as a false equivalence. It was made as a critique of the art world, to show the absurdity of what art critics said was valid art at the time. Whereas today, generative AI is not being made as a critique to anything. It’s being made for profit, to replaced skilled labor and using the work of the same people it’s trying to replace. Hopefully you can see how the two are different.

Wow, nice rhetorical questions you got there, bud.

What the fuck do you think?

If you had enough reading comprehension and read through my whole response, you would have got to the part where I said creating art is about the culmination of choices you make in each part of the process.

Maybe you can point it out to me, but I don’t recall the part where I said you have to recreate the fucking wheel every time you create something.

That particular quote you pointed out, was specific to generative AI, because you don’t make those same choices. The model and the training data is what produces those results for you.

But since you asked, yes I do have the knowledge to create textures by hand without Substance Painter. I’ve been doing 3d art since 2003, before that shit even existed and we hand to do it all manually in Photoshop.

No, I didn’t fucking create color and perspective theory. What do you think I am… like a fucking immortal from ancient times? But I did have to learn that shit and took multiple classes dedicated to each of those topics.

Lastly, you must have skipped on your art history for the last one, because the whole concept of that particular piece was that it was absurdist - an every day object raised to status of art by the artist. He didn’t fucking sculpt the urinal himself. So it would have been more appropriate to say he was a janitor that got lucky. Nice try, though.

It’s clear where you hold your stakes in the matter and where I hold mine. Whether or not you want to continue the conversation is up to you, but I’m not going to go out my way to be polite in the matter, because I don’t really give a shit either way or if you’re offended by what I say. AI personally affects me and my livelihood, so I do have passionate opinions about its use, how companies are adapting it and how it’s affecting other people like me.

All the article you linked shows is that they held a meeting, which doesn’t really show anything. The government has tons of meetings that don’t amount to shit.

So, instead of arguing whether or not the meeting actually shows they are considering anything different, I will explain my personal views.

In general, I’m not against AI. It is a tool that can be effective in reducing menial tasks and increasing productivity. But, historically, such technology has done nothing but put people out of work and increased profits for the executives and shareholders. At every given chance, creatives and their work are devalued and categorized as “easy”, “childish” or not a real form of work, by those who do not have the capacity to do it themselves.

If a company wants to adapt AI technology for creative use, it should solely trained off of content that they own the copyright to. Most AI models are completely opaque and refuse to disclose the materials they were trained on. Unless they can show me exactly what images were used to generate the output, then I will not trust that the output is unique and not plagiarizing other works.

Fair use has very specific use cases where it’s actually allowed - parody, satire, documentary and educational use, etc. For common people, you can be DMCA’ed or targeted in other ways for even small offenses, like remixes. Even sites like archive.org are constantly under threat by lawsuits. In comparison, AI companies are seemingly being given free pass because of wide adoption, their lack of transparency, and the vagueness as to where specifically the output is being derived from. A lot of AI companies are trying to adapt opt-out to cover their asses, but this is only making our perception of their scraping practices worse.

As we are starting to see with some journalism lawsuits, they are able to specifically point out where their work is being plagiarized, so I hope that more artists will speak up and also file suit for models where their work is blatantly being trained to mimic their styles. Because If someone can file copyright suit against another person for such matters, they should certainly be able to sue a company for the same unauthorized use of their work, when being used for profit.

I appreciate that you taken time to explain the technical aspects into what generative AI is processing under the hood, but the reality is that no amount of programming will ever be able to recreate the uniqueness and infinite variability of human creativity, emotion, imagination or consciousness. There is an immeasurable difference between true creativity and producing variations on a data set. I say this as both an artist and a programmer. I’m not just talking out of my ass.

I agree with you that a goal of art is to express ideas and that there’s are a lot of people in the art world that fetishize art in to being something more important than it is in certain contexts, but art is also a core component and something unique to humanity(and sometimes even to other species.) In that way, it’s something to be cherish and regarded - and throughout history it has been extremely culturally significant. Trying to translate these concepts into an algorithm, in my mind, nothing but an extremely arrogant waste of effort and time. Why not spend your time automating the boring shit no one wants to do rather than the creative things people actually enjoy doing?

I am not gatekeeping. I am just stating simple facts. I find it offensive and demeaning that you are devaluing the immense amount of effort that artists undergo to hone their crafts and produce art. You’re damn right it’s work - if you want to get proficient at something, that’s what it takes. I don’t care how boomer-ey that sounds. Yes, some artists have natural talent and don’t need as much effort as others. But, nonetheless, effort is required to create. Anyone can create art, not just some elite select few. But, not everyone can create art that is universally recognized as great or masterful, and it’s not a problem that need to be solved by technology. Unfortunately, art is subjective, so not everything one creates is perceived the same. That’s why some are more successful than others. You may argue that AI levels the playing field, but the fact is that it leverages the work of “successful” artists or artworks, and generates results that are perceived as successful or appealing as a result. It’s a shortcut. You are bypassing the effort otherwise needed by using a tool, which allows most users to to be totally ignorant of the basic knowledge required to create an art work - shape language, color theory, composition, lighting, appeal, posing, etc.

Entering a prompt into an AI model is akin to directing, producing or acting as a muse. It’s a very similar argument as to the validity or artistic merits of factory artists like Andy Warhol or Jeff Koons - While you are responsible for the idea that produces a result, you are still relying on the work and effort of not only the numerous team of people creating the AI model and its algorithms , but also the immeasurable amount of man-hours and creativity involved in creating the source content for the model training materials.

It’s one thing to use generative AI as tool, with intent to make use of the output as reference for your own work in a larger context. But to take the direct output and call it art is morally and ethically wrong. In my eyes, it makes you look like a total hack who doesn’t want to put the effort in to make things for themselves…no matter how much time you put into coming up with the prompt for the output.

I still stand by my original arguments - coming up with a prompt or a training data set to create an image is not art, because you are not actively involved with the creation of the imagery, itself. What an AI model generates is not a creative work and it is not your creation. If that is offensive to you, there’s nothing I can do about that, because it’s apparent that your arguments only serve to make yourself feel better about using generative AI.

It’s also apparent that you have an extremely skewed view of what art is and what it means to be an artist. Art, at its base level is about expressing HUMAN creativity, not what an algorithm interprets it to be. It’s about making countless, specific choices for each step of the creative process and having complete control of the final outcome. It’s those choices that make your art truly unique and an expression of your creative vision. It doesn’t matter if it is objectively bad or good, just that it came from you, and that every detail, every color, every line, was your choice, not an interpretation of your words.

Unless you are creating your own AI model from scratch and training it purely on your own artworks, I don’t see how you can, in good conscience, claim the results to be your own.

Any one can create art, but an artist is someone who dedicates themselves to their craft, as with any other craftsman. That passion is what separates an artisan from a hobbyist. You may view this as snobbery, but I view it as respect and honoring a tradition that spans all of human kind, back to the earliest cave paintings tens of thousands of years ago. I know my limits and what I’m capable of and I have come to terms with those deficiencies in my work. I’m not delusional enough to think that by generating an image through AI, it somehow makes up for those shortcomings and makes me into something I am not.

Yes, using existing works as reference is obviously something that real human artists do all the time, there’s no arguing that is the case. That’s how people learn to create art to begin with.

But, the fact is, generative AI is not creative, nor does it understand what creativity is, nor will it ever. Because all it is doing is performing complex data statistical analysis algorithms to generate a matrix of pixels or a string of words.

Im sorry, but the person entering in the prompt to instruct the algorithm is also not doing anything creative either. Do you think it is art to go through a fast food drive through and place an order? That’s what people are objecting to - people calling themselves artists because they put some nonsense word salad together and then think what they get out of it is some unique thing that they feel they created and take ownership of. If not for the AI model they are using and the creative works it was trained on, they could not have created it or likely even imagined it without it.

People are actively losing their livelihoods because AI tech is being oversold and overhyped as something that it’s not. Execs are all jumping on the bandwagon and because they see AI as something that will save them a bunch of money, they are laying off people they think aren’t needed anymore. So, just try to incorporate that sentiment into your understanding of why people are also upset about AI. You may not be personally affected, but there are countless that are. In fact, over the next two years, as many as 203,000 entertainment workers in the US alone could be affected

Generative AI Impact Study

You want to have fun creating fancy kitbashed images based off of other people’s work, go right ahead. Just don’t call it art and call yourself an artist, unless you could actually make it yourself using practical skills.

Also, good luck trying to copyright it because guess what, you can’t.

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10922