Ai 'ART' will get WORSE not better

human artists have come to an impasse many are about to lose everything to AI and that's their own fault you may say it doesn't make real art well anything is Art the word means nothing anymore so yeah it does and I think it actually makes art better than us not because it's technically got the edge all because it's faster or smarter than us which it is it's a better artist because it acts like a real artist it makes human art better than most humans do why because on its baby legs it's making lots of mistakes it's new and that's why it's fun I go as fast to say it makes the first true form of digital art that I've ever actually seen see the problem with digital art as I see it to this day is Ctrl Z undo as soon as you see something you don't like you can totally reverse time you can even explode your image out into layers and see every element of your artwork you have infinite control and in the area of Commercial Art that's perfect because the last thing you want is to do a whole book of illustrations and then on the last day the client comes back to you and says maybe the main character should have a bigger hat you don't have to redraw everything from scratch and in animation you can do 3D reference models to reuse in scenes it's amazing the controls that digitalize given to artists for the last generation is incredible but with every element of progress something is lost and artists who are not forced to work through their mistakes do not break into new ground AI is currently making wonderful crazy errors and that's why it's interesting Plus if you do art for hire you are a tool for that company a tool used to achieve a goal and all tools eventually get automated artists dare I say it sometimes arrogantly think our industry is immune to automation or no other is efficiency wins the Romantic idea of an artist is as commercially inefficient as the Romantic idea of a fly fisherman to a seabed trawler morality aside what works best is what people pay for and artists deserve this we've handed over the risks of creativity and mistakes for ultimate control and those very tools that allow it are pushing us out imagine if you were into visual art 100 years ago a budding watercolor artist you go see a famous exhibition by a master you have no camera to record it if you're lucky you might get a black and white book rush home pick up your palette and try to replicate it you won't be able to because your memory will fail and your line your shading your ignorance your mistakes will take over and eventually once they're refined you'll develop your own unique style now it might not be completely original but it'd be original to you and it'll be a new direction for you and you have no idea what anyone else is working on until the next show now we have a bank of images full of every image ever created on a screen in front of us to cross-reference mix and merge together we are never left completely in the dark Along Comes an algorithm that can scour all the knowledge much like a fishing trawler and collect all of those image images in a much better way than you that's just natural progression to me but those skills are not what makes someone an artist it's perhaps important here to break down our into two categories and I'm talking about art can often be pointless but on one hand we have our as I will define it food for the soul the type of art we enjoy personally born from a love of our a communication tool for the more intangible things in life and in rare cases it can also lead people to commercial success but the more common form of Commercial Art is this second category art that goes into the Collective economy that can be in the commercial Industries Graphics gaming any visual element within a larger project that your services as an artist are hired out for and it's this second category that the risks of AI are mainly framed at taking people's jobs it's actually this category that will benefit the most from AI but I'm also going to argue that AI art is going to dominate the first category the one close to my heart the food for the solar that makes art for humans better than humans but the most interesting part in all of this is I don't think it will for long now I personally straddled both of these categories I make and sell my own individual artworks paintings woodcut sculpture but I also work for clients and just last year I did a project that can already be done better by AI I designed some chapters and a cover for a book that were done in a single continuous non-crossing line much like a snake on your old phones and six months ago when I first played with air it could get nowhere near this now with the right prompts is better than me so do I feel threatened well yeah my ego doesn't like it but while I may not get many more gigs like that the client will still require those images and to get them from AI someone who can use AI now will the value of that work go down yeah new work will also be invented though and creative jobs that are unfathomable to us now already The Prompt artist is a thing that people are laughing at is not being a real artist hmm now when I say that word artist what do you think of in the most like traditional sense I think of painting pictures with a paintbrush well I do that and there was a time when I wouldn't have been called a real artist as I don't mix my own pigments some machine makes them and I buy them I don't collect and bind hog hairs for my brush so you don't have to create the tools to use the tools to make the art and while prompt artists may not seem creative now they are using AR like a tool and that tool will be wielded and how it will be wielded in future is yet to be determined and what the AI is trying to do well it can't say thankfully it doesn't write dreams of Modern Art bollocks about why it's profound most artists don't know and cannot say what they are doing if you can say what you were doing you were not producing art this is where the Artisan the craftsperson and the commercial artists just have to wait at the door you can tell a story about what you understand or what you think you can tell someone else's story great you can use your artistic tools to do that but good art tells a story about something you don't understand good art exists just beyond what you can comprehend in words but that you know has some truth in it this is why a lot of conceptual art cannot stand alone because it sets out a statement to decide what it's going to say before it's even been made and it's like putting the cart before the horse artists work best when they are just out of their comfort zone just unable to get their footing exploring them unknown trying to work something out and pulling people along for the ride how can they possibly do that if they're in full control of their images if they can comfortably pull back control Z every time they want to undo something visual art in the digital world in the digital world was going nowhere new that was until AI came along and does not quite what you expect of it it makes glorious mistakes and therefore makes glorious art I'll give some examples in a minute but for the people who do not see any artistic validity in AI because it's a machine or something in my opinion focusing too much on its current lack of technical skill I mean they're probably worried about the AI becoming a robot that overtakes us all but just for now the technical skill how it can't do hands very well but that's where true creativity is born even with people you have to stretch beyond what you can do to do things that you can't and that's when things get interesting The Prompt when prompts in AI are so loose that it's just able to explore this unknown this this novel it it's producing art on a scale that people real humans have not allowed themselves to do in a digital space for the last decade if you look at the human faces created by AI they are accidentally surreal in a way that reminds people of Salvador Dali he would have been fascinated by this he's a man who famously didn't sleep until he hallucinated to try and see things differently and or he famously say he said the mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature never try to correct them on the contrary rationalize them understand them thoroughly and it's fascinating to me how recognizing exact faces and perfectly what our hands are doing is so important to us on a daily function that when the AI makes errors in it it's devastatingly wrong to us but even when we draw people we often over emphasize hands or oversimplify faces normally we get the right amount of digits I'll give you that which I can't but I love seeing how something technological programmed by us makes the same mistakes as us but in a totally unexpected way seeing us through this new lens one that's as detached from us and our human biases has ever been available before I think of it as like what aliens might draw of us if they were to see us fleetingly so what are some of the best mistakes in AI well the morphing images that come out of stable diffusion look more like any dream than anything I've ever seen done by a person the AI loses the image it's meant to be tracing and guessing badly it mimics the unconscious flow of a dream perfectly my very last video that I made was an Arty farty attempt to show what my dreams were like and it's not a touch on this hasn't got that random synapse feel where your dreams can suddenly and incomprehensibly just change complete location or people but you don't question it it seems real in this unreal way and then another example is the wonderful idea of minus one a command code that tells the AI to look for the opposite of what precedes it now considering the AI has a bank of pretty much every image uploaded to the internet with knowledge of each reference as to what that image is that's a fun idea what is the opposite of scissors or what is the opposite of a pair of set of keys you know when you have the whole of every single image ever created to truth it's amazing and then there's a great video that talks about this accident called lobe and this was this woman created who's really creepy and when you try and mix her image with others she would always remain and something about her was always Associated to the most grotesque and disturbing images she would not go away why no one knows it's a mistake but it's a great story and you should watch the video I'll link it she is very resilient and draws on all of these great parallels about AI maybe understanding our morbid Fascinations better than us to complete algorithmic mistake and when you think it looks like a bit like Francis Bacon paintings then you've got to think about what he said about mistakes he said all art is an accident but it's also not an accident because one must select what part of the accident you choose to preserve well if art is allowing yourself to make mistakes perhaps the artist decides which one to keep AI here is making mistakes it's still people deciding which one to keep but to learn from your mistakes to have to let them happen you have to work with the mistake you have to go through it back into the real tangible world this is why I love painting in oil paint or charcoal because once the Mark is made you have to live with it you never paint the picture you plan to paint and I'll use digital work to fill a brief but here in the studio never artists can get way too in their own way and I struggle with this all the time but limitation is what breeds creativity and AI is currently very limited that's why it's exciting and I can't remind myself enough how much being stretched to produce something makes it more interesting not less many artists who bemoan not having time or resources to make their art are suddenly hit with a real bump when they are given both too much freedom to focus on what they're aiming for in their head they are liberated from having to face their mistakes which can often springboard them somewhere greater what will the mistakes of AI lead to I don't know but art just like any field of science or engineering often only makes these great leaps by accident imagine if Fleming couldn't could indefinitely repeat his experiments he'd one day go in see that growth has stopped the mold hasn't continued and rather than confront what's happened just controls Ed I'm not going to invent penicillin today just new batch come on Alex stay on task or the invention of the microwave that guy Spencer chocolate bar melting that story just below Ctrl Z start again still got my chocolate bar new directions are found from having to salvage mistakes from the dirt because you don't have the time resources or ability to start a new so AI is opening lots of interesting doors it's in its early days and it's making lots and lots of mistakes these are the days of AI being a good artist once it gets too good at doing what it was designed for it will no longer make mistakes technological advancement will force it to be too proficient great for Commercial Art purposes and whatever else will happen but AI will die as an artist every new technology when it first comes out is always touted as the death of something because it is think of your job now did it even exist 30 years ago if it did say you're a teacher or a doctor or a lawyer is the daily practice of your job the same I'm sure the internet is revolutionized your industry in some way try explaining the internet to someone 30 years ago the jobs like software Engineers or digital marketers or SEO experts web people who are experts in code a language as alien as Martian if you were to show it or to someone that these jobs exist purely within it these jobs pay into your bank on it spend your earned money on entertainment within it connect with friends fire it your first meet up with your future partner using it but what is it they would ask and you'd play your phone and you'd show them imagine them asking where it's coming from you just look up at the stars and satellites you'd be like a god where is it unimaginable access to all of human created content and knowledge at your fingertips now imagine your time travel device glitches and it goes the other way forward 30 years Time Imagine now you were the backwards old timer and just how unbelievable you will find things that have become very common it is guaranteed that there will be full-time careers in fields that you cannot even fathom now take me to your artists you will say and I truly believe they will take it to more people who are defined as artists than are working today will they be doing the same thing absolutely not what they will be doing will have been replaced but I also believe that the birth of AI art will lead to a revolution in the classical term of artists Not What It generally means today there is no word more watered down than the words art and creativity the word artist is totally disconnected from Curiosity about real world function and is left purely on this sacred realm of concept emotion and expression and as a function and the function has been completely taken out of art of the word artist and it's as it's come closer and closer to the definition of nothing in a death rattle it insists instead it's about everything that heart can be anything hopefully AI will choke the last air out of its lungs now I love art I live it and I Breathe It art is now seen as something very different from technology and science but it didn't used to be it's now been lifted to this holy level as something greater something profoundly humor I did an engineering degree something wrongly considered to be done by very uncreative people but if you don't think that creativity is making a 400 tons of metal with 400 people in it fly across countries a hundred thousand times a day and instead think great creativity is limited to those who can hand draw Marvel characters on command first nothing wrong with that but we need to get on the same page in my opinion the code is working on AI better artists than the people using it and the greatest artists of old were not artists in any of the weak modern sense of the word the great painters and sculptors were also technicians Architects Engineers scientists they were creative curious explorers and that's what it means to be artistic to me it means to be naturally curious about how everything works how things could work differently how they could work better they create they do not destroy they would think about how flying 400 tons of metal to the sky might be a causing problems now and not how to stop it not how to cease and Destroy but to solve to actively create something better even old old doctors with no interest in art would have been artists by our modern sense of the word before scans and film the only way they could reference something was to anatomically correctly draw it so what happened well the tools for the job got better once they could take a snap the art as we now call it which they wouldn't have was discarded like I said my favorite thing to do is oil paintings and that used to be the only way to get your portrait the film camera destroyed it that's also when painting got interesting again without straying off topic at the time photography was considered by many as totally inhuman evil it even took your soul or it was argued that it had no soul this was at the same time as Motorcars were replacing horses to transport everywhere and it was said that they had no soul and this disconnect and what it means to be human and connect with other people and loving things around us is a real valid concern but even those people who adopted photographic film three four five generations later moan about how digital now has no soul just remember that when you think AI has no soul we should also remember that it was seen that the word the invention of digital would destroy the field of Animation because animation was defined as live whole careers of people doing 2D drawings on cellophane converted into reels of film they were animators they did not exist anymore is animation dead no there's more animators now than there ever have been before and more jobs many of whom are now 3D animators bemoaning AI because it's the computer doing their work too young to remember the live lighting sets of real world models being dismantled as digital rendering of light effects improved death to the cries of but you're not doing it anymore a computer is the definition of animator evolved and it's about to evolve again as for the broad field of artists well it's a word anyway now in its Last Stand hold this final Bastion the AI is about to smash the gate down of and that's all right the word is vapid look at the art world in its purest form art boiled down to such little real world function that I'm trying to say it can be anything it's actually nothing if you see something intelligent in most modern or conceptual works over the last 20 years then you as an intelligent sense-making creature you were the artist not the maker of that art and I have to say I am what I call an artist but I don't want anything to do with that definition AI is going to save me and however that looks it won't stop me enjoying art as I understand it now I can't keep rambling on without some form of definition about the visual art that AI will not replace so take old sea creature drawings from when sailors came ashore having seen these terrifying things that we now know are just curious whales largely harmless they would conjure these images up of their memory and Imagination and today they seem funny ignorant innocent Over the Top If you were good at drawing from observation you could draw a better whale breaching close to a ship right but very few of us have actually seen a whale we've seen representations of them through technology we've never seen one but we know what they look like so if you're an artist right finding the appropriate images online and just use them as reference take a leaping whale an old ship water splashes or you amalgamate them yeah you're an artist why not you drew a whale crashing next to a ship but you don't know how it feels to see a leaping whale so that emotion will never come through in your art what certainly won't come through is the utter fear of seeing a whale having never seen anything like that before knowing that you are on a very sinkable vessel in the middle of the ocean that's real that's what I love about ah these drawings are not correct but they translate a feeling a human feeling that you can empathize with the whale you drew the one from images you looked up on Google of static photographs well now the AI is just doing the final part of that drawing pulling those things together for you and it's not doing it perfectly so it's creating its own sea creatures and they are marvelous now I know I sound like Frankenstein not seeing the dangers of his own monster but if you were to play with these tools these early AI systems you'd realize how human they really are being made of banks of human data and if you are or if you consider yourself an artist and you're curious go and have a play create some images or you could say not for me I like to draw hyper realistic whales well in my book great I also love observational drawing and the fact that cameras exist doesn't stop me and that's why true art for what it means to me or you will always survive whatever AI does computers beat the best chess player in the world in 1997. you would have thought that that meant the game would become extinct extinct what's the point in playing it but now it's more popular than ever and people don't play computers they play other people online the same with computer games and the same with making art the technology just allows us to connect in new ways and yes we are stumbling across something that opens up the most wonderful discussion about what it means to be human artists by temperament are meant to love that stuff if you own any art having a computer generated thing hanging on your wall versus someone else's human hand and story well you're more like a robot to me anyway now we get everything we want to know from a device in our pockets you want to know something about anything ask Google I had to look up that Salvador Dali quote about mistakes just before this you can say that's not the same as AI that Google is just a repository of human information that is digitally collected and synthesized through keywords and algorithms to give you what you ask for to the visibility is air not the same then there's the elephant in the room of morality is it stealing is it breaching copyright perhaps maybe probably it doesn't even matter it's coming early technology loses every moral argument the Industrial Revolution taught us that the tractor ultimately meant more food for everybody but in the short term huge labor force out of work morality shifts as easily as the soil as much as people don't want to admit and while the purest form of artistic Endeavor have been really hard to mechanize this idea that it has some magic in it that will be lost is absurd to me and when it comes to AI there's a quote from a farmer during the Industrial Revolution talking about tractors and he says it makes farming so easy that the Wonder goes out of the work so efficient that The Wonder of the land is lost the connection to it and with it the Wonder of a deep understanding and natural human relation to the soil and how connected we are to it and it's true we are increasingly disconnected but the frame keeps on shifting art will always bring us back the same critique was made of the moving picture Cinema 100 years ago they said there's no humans in it unlike the theater there's no human relation you can't connect to a person by A reproduction of a person that's why Cinema will never replace live-action theater but it did mostly and I just I keep taking this further in my head and thinking of millions or no sorry thousands of years ago of Stories being told in caves passed down to Generations remembered and retold then someone invents writing and teaches people to read oh it's not the same hasn't got that human connection you can't get the humanity without the telling by a human and then years later the Press is invented or it hasn't got that same human hand the connection to an actual person who wrote it and then comes the Kindle and so on ultimately none of it matters it's a tool and a new vessel to make art soon you will have ai stories read to you in an AI voice and is that not the same as the first caveman recounting the stories of his elders just this time it's infinitely wiser as it has recounted the whole of the whole of Humanity's stories and filtered them uniquely for you and your life a question then comes down to a gender it's not the AI it's the motivation of those programming it that is the scary bit will it be a problem yeah will more AI evolve yeah but people and artists are problem solving score message people are problem solvers that's what they do and artists used to be at the brink of this and like everything every world problem from climate change to every perceived Injustice is so incredibly easy to on things that and tear things down to criticize the way things are done it's so easy to Virtue signal and protest it's very hard to build to create so if you have a problem with AI art or the fear the Arc of AI you can hide away and you can bemoan it if you want to but I say get in there and get involved and if you really are worried about it get onto these early platforms and look into the prompts and probe around and get into the Vortex grab it and help curve the arc to what you think is best I've got to check this message and go now but that's your only option you don't have to be a programmer just have to be an artist

Channel: Sam Hamper

Views: 131,904

Keywords: ai art, ai art controversy, artificial intelligence, ai ethics, ai philosophy, artists vs ai, what is art, how to be an artist

Id: dGxPfb261C8

Length: 29min 51sec (1791 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 27 2023