I've been trying Fable for coding in the past week and while it's incrementally better than Opus sometimes, what it's churning out is still far from art - and I do think it's possible for code to be art.
Now I happen to be in the camp that believes that AI on its own isn't really capable of producing art (but like a human creating a collage, there can be art created by humans using AI... there is artistic merit in the arrangement).
I still despise that AI is going to be used to strip creators of their labour value, but that's more related to my objection to capitalism than it is to AI.
(If you want to define it as professional artists instead, then I don't even see much of a conflict of interest. Professional programmers tend to be cautiously optimistic about the new tool and are finding uses for it, why wouldn't professional artists? But, they largely do not see it that way.)
Yes the people making these are frustrated by how much stress it puts on them (directors managing multiple shows at a time daily must be stressful af) but nobody (neither artists nor audience) are complaining about AI usage. As always they don't hate AI, they hate capitalism.
That side is quite vocal, and has been effective at resulting their fanbases into a witch hunt for anyone who's ever even touched ChatGPT. So anyone who disagrees just stays quiet, for the most part.
More seriously, it reminds me of a video I was watching yesterday about a tabletop roleplay DM who was great at _telling_ stories but the players felt they were not included in the story. That is, the 'art' (if it is) of roleplay is collaborative between the storyteller and the players.
Are movies not usually a collaboration among a group of people (director, crew, etc) to produce a single work? Rather than liberating the vision, this process forces the visionary to engage with the constraints and limitations of the real world. Mabe why movies made on massive budgets by directors who have a string of recent successes can sometimes turn out terrible, as their ego outgrows the project?
First you use crew and directors as holding dual use - one is collaborating on the idea itself. One is a necessary thing in the process. Crew is important primarily because they literally appear on screen. That they help collaborate is a good side effect.
AI still allows you to get collaborators for ideas and eliminates need that is usually a waste of time.
I get your point on using constraints in reality to make something sublime. Ironically it adds to my point rather than yours. Indie movies are generally considered more artistic than blockbusters. We realise that we shouldn’t don’t go out maxing things like scale and power. This doesn’t make a movie more artistic. So what remains? It’s the idea. The vision. AI lets you directly address this. What you suggest is adding fake physical constraints that we should surpass. Idk how that is artistic.
>fake constraints
People add fake constraints all the time. Artists using AI will have to learn to artificially constrain themselves to produce anything good. My guess is it takes about 50 years.
At the same time there will always be people who want to see real actors on a real set.
I do notice a lot more bugs these days, a lot more slop code and a lot more complaints about slop code.
Do you plan to mitigate that or just let them slide?
That's a very strong statement with virtually zero argumentation.
Art has nothing to do with _mechanical_ difficulty. I see this misconception all the time. Examples
- Kumail Nanjiani roided up for his next movie. This has mechanical difficulty, sure. But what does it add to the artistic element?
- Dream Theatre guitarists play olympics with their guitar and play solo's that are mechanically impossible for normal people. Yet we still find Beatles have more artistic value, why?
I hope this popular misconception will die down. I don't want mechanical difficulty in art being praised. I feel these are things people hold on to because mechanical difficulty has some moat and people don't want to give it up.
Most people find it more impressive if you learn to play Dream theater song on guitar than if you program it in daw.
However, consider works like photorealistic drawings of eyes (usually at a very large scale). A lot of people like these, and consider them to be fine art, while others (art critics?) consider them bland. Contrast that with a Picasso flamingo drawn with a single line.
There is artistic value in high-effort, low concept works as well as low-'effort', high-concept works and other combinations. Perhaps what we are all looking for is effort of some kind (I prefer human effort) whether that is conceptual effort or practice in drawing lines on paper.
Both are pushing boundaries in mechanical dexterity. Yet one is considered art and another is not.
Others have said this better, but art is an qualitative/emotional thing, not a simply measurable quantity of an object. We tend to use the effort put in as a proxy measure for quality, but when photocopiers and 3D printers and - yes - genAI get involved, that becomes harder or impossible.
Beating Guitar Hero is emotional, but not artistic. Photorealistic drawings could be emotional, and may or may not be artistic. Putting a text prompt into a generative model to make a (frankly terrible) music video for $100 is ... something else.
Beating Guitar Hero could artistic. I don't even know how, but I'm sure some artist could beat Guitar Hero in a way that was somehow artistic.
This terrible $100 music video which I'm not even going to watch, is surely not art. Also I'm totally sure some person is going to spend $100 with an AI and make art. It's very hard, but they day will come. The slop-to-art ratio will be astronomical.
Okay, clanker
If there's a way to do something better and worse, then one can absolutely talk about added and absent value. I browse AI generated images a ton, and the difference between beginner / low effort submissions and high effort / advanced submissions is very stark.
That's not art, that's the limitations that everyone working in this industry have been working night and day to overcome for hundreds of years
I would love to get around the "individual skill" part, but all of my artist friends would excommunicate me if they knew the AI projects I've been working on, let alone if I asked them to collaborate.
Art is (often) provocative, uncomfortable, taboo, explicit, subversive, or challenging of norms. You're never going to get that out of increasingly locked-down and Disney-fied BigTech hosted LLMs obsessed with "AI safety."
Because I can assure you that much of what I've gen'd checks those boxes (unless Sorry To Bother You's third-act twist no longer unsettles).
I would love to see examples if anyone has any. I saw a few things on r/AIVideos that I sort of liked, but I wouldn't go as far as to call them quality art.
He (they?) have a vision, and are trying to get it on the screen via AI tools. I don't think the tools are quite there yet, so I wouldn't call it "quality art", but I think it shows the direction of travel, and it shows somebody trying to use those tools to say something (ironically, the message is that the tools are kinda bad news).
I'm reminded of the tipping point when a generation of bedroom producers got tools "good enough" that they didn't need studio time any more. We got some creative music and a lot of slop out of that change. But hey, 80% of everything is crap, so it shouldn't be a surprise.
But I do think it's a harbinger of things to come: bedroom auteurs with new tools (although they'll be surfing an absolute tidal wave of slop). The tools are going to get better; early synthesizers were pretty primitive.
You probably won't be impressed and these are legendary figures in experimental film making either.
There is no audience or market for what these tools would be good for.
These videos in the examples are laughable uncreative trash to me but so are big budget super hero human slop.
The main constraint with AI art is that I think the models have been overfit to a very narrow range of visual expression. Midjourney in 2023 could produce the absolute most fucked up images I have ever seen and I have seen a lot of fucked up visual art. That has all been washed out of the model at this point towards a statistical average of what people think is "beautiful".
Also no nudity allowed. What we have is nothing like a model trained to output the sensibility of Hieronymus Bosch or Francis Bacon with nudity. We have literally the opposite of that.
It is the difference between an artist and a "creative". These models are for "creatives", the conformist corporate bullshit version of the artist.
Instead of Hieronymus Bosch we have the statistical average infinite pretty portraits of the virgin mary because we are good people and good corporate citizens.
The point of art isn't "I made it pretty so it has value now", it's "This is how I see the world, am I the only one who feels this way?".
And yes, this is valid even for absolute jerks who couldn't care less about that the other people were thinking at the time, Like Lou Reed for example. The questions in his music were rhetorical and directed at himself in that case. Unfortunately, as Pablo Picasso said, for this computers (or AIs, in this case) are useless. They can only give you answers.
AI doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's the sum of training, inputs and outputs. If I give it novel inputs, the outputs won't be solely within the limits of their training. If I use it as part of a pipeline, the end result of the pipeline too won't be forced within the limits of AI training.
Look up "The Chronicles of Bone". It's pretty good.
I think it's pointless dribble. There's no punchline that it's working towards other than "pigeon dumb"
I think right now most people here and on twitter have no taste, and post slop that were just sort of one shotted.
But there are people using these tools in a sort of hybrid way, which I think has incredible potential. You can use it to do CGI on existing footage, in a way that's orders of magnitudes faster and cheaper than current CGI methods.
I also think that the most viable models will be video-to-video, and audio-to-audio.
If you've read A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, I think you might get what I'm saying. But essentially, you can capture a lot of emotion, expression, etc, using a cheap camera and a single actor, and then use AI to "stylize" it in a really cheap effective way, while keeping the emotion/expression. Adding lighting for example, upscaling the quality, changing the voice timbre while keeping the pacing, etc.
> Your mind is your limit. AI is a tool.
Then the companies should start talking about them the same way as they talk about tools. Because when they are pushing for artists replacement by AI, they are not talking about tools. They are trying to make AI into a person while very intentionally devaluing things people actually like.
> a creative person with a vision that would usually required $1 million budget, could create such a video using AI by being very specific in what they require which would not be a " grey goo of the average of every concept "
How many $1 million budget music videos you look at? The sold vision of AI is to not be the tool you are talking about here. Yes, there is an alternative reality where these companies tried to make tools for artists, but it is not a reality we live in.
If you can't afford a video then don't make one. A slop video for $100 will devalue your entire brand. People will question your music.
There's a lot more value in just cutting some live performance videos together cheaply.
No need to even be so detailed: "Make this an ancient egypt theme" would probably work.
My point being there's a lot more complexity in not producing slop than it seems.
A fake Gauguin painting and a real one can be almost indistinguishable to the human eye. But only one is worth the big bucks. Everyone scoffs at the other (once told which is real and which is fake). Something similar might happen to AI where the requirement to disclose it becomes a signal that the creator has cheapened out
Edit: oh I remembered another, The Blaze said their first music video cost them $100 to make: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UivZrL2znh0 and their follow up didn't cost a whole lot more they've also been on record saying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54fea7wuV6s
AI is obviously very useful, but perhaps not in the way people think. Two aspects I would like to see improved are instruction following and providing relevant feedback.
eg. "scene 32, same 2 characters from the previous scene, now dressed in the garb of Egyption middle kingdom high priests, though with cat faces, dancing on the back of an elephant that is running fast with blurred feet on the surface of a river with licks of water that burst from the water in time with the music that I gave you before, length of song for this clip 2:21 to 2:31"
Your mind is your limit. AI is a tool. If you tell it "create me a music video for this song set in egypt" then it may turn out AI sloppy.