alt Hacker NewsWhat a great thing this didn't exist in the past. We likely wouldn't have had any of the amazing artworks that we have now. Imagine an AI generated Mona Lisa, Nightwatch or Sistine Chapel ceiling because prompting would have been so much cheaper than paying Leonardo, Rembrandt or Michelangelo...
Now extrapolate to all other artforms. Sculpture seems safe, for now, but only barely so.
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That's true, but you forgot a key piece in this puzzle. The AI can only produce things that already exist. It can combine new things, this is why you can it for a picture of Jesus planting a flag on the Moon. But it only works because Jesus is a concrete concept that already exists in our world. If you ask for a picture of jacquesm planting a flag on the Moon the result will be nonsensical.
I'd say these models only exist because we had amazing artworks in the past.
I have the creativity of someone not at all creative (couldn't even come up with a good analogy) and the stuff I created with AI art tools is awful compared to what I see from "AI artists" on social media.
Just being able to generate a vision and then be able to capture it in a prompt is an art within itself.
Ironically we live in a time that, overall, is probably better for artists than the world any of those guys grew up in. People have always valued art but not the artists, and many artists through history, including the famous ones, died broke with their works only posthumously attaining value.
These days, through commissions, art is a much more viable profession than it ever was.
I think of it more as that AI will destroy the profit motive in all things, not just art. What we used to think of as talent/skill/experience will no longer be scarce, because anyone will be able to make anything with a prompt. The perceived value will be in wholes built of valueless parts (gestalts).
AI is incompatible with capitalism, but the world isn't ready for that. So we'll have a prolonged period of intense aggregation where more and more value is attributed to systems of control that already have more than they could ever spend, long after the free parts could have provided for basic human needs.
In other words, the masters existed because they had benefactors and a market for their art and inventions. Today there are better artists and inventors toiling in obscurity, but they won't be remembered because they merely make rent. Which gets harder every day, so there's a kind of deification of the working class hero NPC mindset and simultaneously no bandwidth for ingenuity (what we once thought of as divine inspiration).
Terence McKenna predicted this paradox that the future's going to get weirder and weirder back in 1998:
Would anyone even care about Mona Lisa if the exact same painting was done by a random nobody? It's just a portrait.
I'll just be extremely candid: a lot of people don't give a shit about these art pieces or art in general. It's okay if you do, there is nothing wrong with that, but it's a myopic view that the world would be worse off if we didn't have a portrait of Mona Lisa.
We would have tons of great artworks if it existed in the past. The works would be both more numerous and at a higher quality.
I disagree. On the one hand, yeah, On This Day... 1776 is terrible, and it is sad to compare it to Requiem for a Dream or Pi, but even in this age where AI is available, we see tons of critically successful art being made without the use of AI.
I feel like the complete opposite is true.
Artists aren't doing it for the money. With advanced tools like these they wouldve iterated much faster and created much grander designs.
Art is about pushing limits of what's possible and AI just raises those limits.