The past few years' innovation in AI has roughly been split into two camps for me.
LLMs -- Awesome and useful. Disruptive, and somewhat dangerous, but probably more good than harm if we do it right.
'Generative art' (i.e. music generation, image generation, video generation) -- Why? Just why?
The 'art' is always good enough to trick most humans at a glance but clearly fake, plastic, and soulless when you look a bit closer. It has instilled somewhat of a paranoia in me when browsing images and genuinely worsened my experience consuming art on the internet overall. I've just recently found out that a jazz mix I found on YouTube and thought was pretty neat is fully AI generated, and the same happens when I browse niche artstyles on Instagram. Don't get me started on what this Sora release will do...
It changed my relationship consuming art online in general. When I see something that looks cool on the surface, my reaction is adversarial, one of suspicion. If it's recent, I default to assuming the piece is AI, and most of the time I don't have time or effort to sleuth the creator down and check. It's only been like a year, and it's already exhausting.
No one asked for AI art. I don't understand why corporations keep pushing it so much.
There's this FinTech ad on the NYC subway right now. I can't remember the company, but the entire ad is just a picture of a guitar and some text.
Anyway, the guitar is AI generated, and it's really bad. There are 5 strings, which morph into 6 at the headstock. There's a trem bar jammed under the pickguard, somehow. There's a randomly placed blob on the guitar that is supposed to be a knob/button, but clearly is not. The pickups are visually distorted.
It's repulsive. You're trying to sell me on something, why would you put so little effort into your advertising? Why would you not just...take a picture of a real guitar? I so badly want to cover it up.
> You're trying to sell me on something, why would you put so little effort into your advertising? Why would you not just...take a picture of a real guitar?
Is this not evident? Because using AI is much cheaper and faster. Instead of finding the right guitar, paying for a good photographer, location, decoration, and all the associated logistics, a graphics designer can write a prompt that gets you 90% of the vision, for orders of magnitude less cost and time. AI is even cheaper and faster than using stock images and talented graphic designers, which is what we've been doing for the past few decades.
All our media channels, in both physical and digital spaces, will be flooded with this low-effort AI garbage from here on out. This is only the beginning. We'll need to use aggressive filtering and curation in order to find quality media, whether that's done manually by humans or automatically by other AI. Welcome to the future.
I don't understand why you see a distinction between models that generate text, and those that generate images, video or audio. They're all digital formats, and the technology itself is fairly agnostic about what it's actually generating.
Can't text also be considered art? There's as much art in poetry, lyrics, novels, scripts, etc. as in other forms of media.
The thing is that the generative tech is out of the bag, and there's no going back. So we'll have to endure the negative effects along with the positive.
Simple: I am equally offput when LLMs are used for generating poetry, lyrics, novels, scripts, etc. I don't like it when low-effort generated slop is passed off as art.
I just think that LLMs have genuine use for non-artistic things, which is why I said it's dangerous but may be useful if we play our cards right.
I see. Well, I agree to an extent, but there's no clear agreement about what constitutes art with human-generated works either. There are examples of paintings where the human clearly "just" slapped some colors on a canvas, yet they're highly regarded in art circles. Just because something is low-effort doesn't mean it's not art, or worthy of merit.
So we could say the same thing about AI-generated art. Maybe most of it is low-effort, but why can't it be considered art? There is a separate topic about human emotion being a key component these generated works are missing, but art is in the eyes of the beholder, after all, so who are we to judge?
Mind you, I'm merely playing devil's advocate here. I think that all of this technology has deep implications we're only beginning to grapple with, and art is a small piece of the puzzle.
You make a good point. I'm just spitballing here, but I think what sets generative art apart for me is the element of deception.
I'd be perfectly fine with a hypothetical world in which all generated art is clearly denoted as such. Like you said, art is in the eyes of the beholder. I welcome a world in which AI art lives side-by-side with traditional art, but clearly demarcated.
Unfortunately, the reality is very different.
AI art inherently tries to pass off as if it were made by a human. The result of the tools released in the past year is that my relationship with media online has become adversarial. I've been tricked in the past by AI music and images which were not labelled as such, which fosters a sort of paranoia that just isn't there with the examples you mentioned.
the offensive part is that it's creative theft by digesting other people's creative works then reworked and regurgitated. It's 'fine' when it's technical documentation and reference work, but that's not human expression.
So pre-LLM were you offended when someone posted their personal poetry or artwork on internet if it was clear they had put little effort into it? Somehow I doubt it.
You don't have the same paranoia with LLM? So often I find myself getting a third of the way into reading an article or blog post and think: "wait a minute...".
LLM tone is so specific and unrealistic that it completely disengages me as a reader.
I have found a channel that curates and cleans some AI generated music. I really enjoy it, it's nothing I heard before, it's unique, distinct, and devoid of copyright.
I understand your take but it's only going to get better and incredibly fast.
I'm a huge film nerd and I can only dream of a future where I could use these type of tools (but more advanced) to create short films about ideas I've had.
There's some of that but it produces some cool stuff too. I mean you have these new virtual worlds like this that didn't exist before https://youtu.be/y_4Kv_Xy7vs?t=13
The video there is kind of a combination of human design and AI which produces something beyond that which either would come up with on their own.
That's the optimistic version and in theory I would agree - it will be a great enhancer of creativity for some poeple.
But mostly it will end up like the smartphones - we carry more computing power in our pockets that was used to send man to the moon, and instead of taking advantage of it to do great things, we are glued to this small screen several hours / day scrolling social medias nonsense. It's just human nature.
