Artists don't understand Ai art... yet

artists who are adopting air sound a lot like the artists from an art movement that happened a hundred years ago back then was the birth of futurism and futurism stated that the world had been enriched by a new Beauty a beauty of speed a racing car adorned with great pipes like serpents of exploding breath it's more beautiful than the victory of the samatharis they said and how's this for a quote from the manifesto of futurism in 1909 just apply it verbatim to Art made with air Platforms in the mid-2020s what is there to be seen in an old picture except the laborious contortions of an artist throwing themselves against the barriers of a medium that thwarts their desire to express their dream completely that's a really powerful quote in defense of AI art the problem is it's not true the barriers are still up the medium is thwarting your desires the developers of these tools are not producing just the medium they are the moral Arbiters of how you can use them all of the AI models I play with are very very safe very careful that's the problem and don't get me wrong I know if it was open we would be flooded with horrifically explicit and violent imagery and people wouldn't be ready for it I'm not saying that it should be open it seems people have at least learned that from photography where there was much more initial demand for pornography than there was classy portraiture and I think the development is going just fast enough but you know there are unlocked versions behind the scenes what's happening with them who has access to them what are they making that we can't see and while there are a few examples of it shaking up the art world the majority of discussion and disruption is coming from the commercial Art Space art jobs and this is obviously because as an art form we're still accessing it with an old Media frame of mind how it can do things that we know you can after all only comprehend any new idea with reference to an idea that you're familiar with so people who've never come across air before first find out about it by seeing it mimic a Picasso that's how you sell the potential idea of a new tool to a market who doesn't understand it the concept of this has quite a lot of history in all areas of human development and it was a phenomena best described by an old designer called Raymond Lowry and he coined the term mayor not the 3D software this stood for most advanced yet accessible and I'm sure that those creating these AI tools have a lot in common with his ideas he stated the adults public taste is not necessarily ready to accept the logical solutions to their requirements if the solution implies too vast a departure from what they have been conditioned into accepting as the norm Mayer has continued into this Century in all areas if you remember the first iPhones the idea of the App Store was really Advanced so people needed a way to access it the app for taking notes used to have a faux leather effect at the top and torn paper edges just like a notebook to help people transition to understanding that they can make notes on their phone but here's a better example the icon for YouTube in 2008 was a 1950s Style tube television telling you you watch what you understand to be TV here now but even the first Motor Cars had to look similar to the carriages that were before pulled by horses there was no need to be so high up and look over the horse anymore but that's how people were sold it look at this Carriage that doesn't need a horse humans can only think from the database they already have then with time we look back at these things and they seem almost hilariously silly for me as an artist this most interestingly plays out between visual artists and mainstream advertising commercial culture has always adopted ideas from these Visionaries or the artists would say steals Alters them to make them more palatable and then reissues them to the public with a product attached the shock of the new becomes the schlock of the novel commercial artists find what's radical take off the spiky edges smooth it out and repackage it for a consumer class the best example of this it's probably the punk aesthetic it was a total literal tear up of all the rules of Art and Design of Music a complete anti-establishment aesthetic now on British biscuit Tins in Asda I'm not saying this is good or bad I'm not blaming it on any economic system I'm just saying it happens there is this cycle and it plays over and over that Fringe art if presumed to have any influence will gravitate to or be pushed towards the center become common get overused and drained of impact and then seem harmless with little cultural memory of how powerfully it came into the world but few of the founding artists and designers choose to be on the outside forever marginalized until they are forgotten or the mainstream celebrates them as unsung geniuses this linking of artists and commerce has carried artists to professional Heights but left them dependent perhaps troublingly upon the client's societal values and needs and a similar example that often gets no nuanced discussion is that this also applies to how we access new ideas and this is an important one but a very sensitive one often old artists or books or even Disney cartoons that explored other cultures are in time retrospectively criticized for simplification appropriation and tokenization often a character from the culture that produced it too easily becomes the hero in the culture it's exploring but the only way that you can access anything new is through what you know so of course they are overly simplified with crude stereotypes as they were the very first access point they cannot be made with the alien values of the culture they highlighted or they would be inaccessible to the culture of Their audience but with time as education about these other cultures proliferates as voices can talk about the ideas of their culture and find exposure Often by the resistance provoked by The Works of these old artists that their output starts to look astonishingly ignorant and totally inappropriate but in that time they were often celebrated for opening up a world that people had no idea about or no way of accessing history is also a foreign culture and it's important to remember that when we're judging artists from then by the values of now why do I say this because we are currently only able to access the world of AI and AI art by what we already know comparing it to how art is made today using examples that will soon make us look hilariously silly it will become its own medium and be used in its own way one issue is that we are also now having to navigate a culture that has become very sensitive to new and nuanced ideas my problem is I can't see The Fringe artists that are stress testing the system anymore trying to move it in interesting directions each generation each new medium should push against the ideas of the culture before it see how it comes up wanting against the ideas of a new age however the Cozy cafes and Corner Community conversations the The Fringe art shows if you like of the digital space don't seem to exist crowded out modded out and Community guidelined out if you want to share interesting Art Online you have to go through platforms like Instagram deviantART art station Reddit Discord YouTube twitch all of which immediately censor and silence or dump into the darkness of the algorithm anything that pushes against the current moral consensus you may say good morality on what's appropriate will shift again and it shifts always it always has by exposing new ideas having light Shone on them in public being openly tested pushed and resisted re-stabilized or toppled if you don't do that then things grow in the shadows and then a culture is shocked when a quiet unseen majority finds an outlet often via a very outspoken personality or more simply and powerfully at The Ballot Box normally artists have been quite involved in these cultural shifts but I don't really see them involved now young digital artists or traditional artists trying to get Traction in the digital space need to have already adopted the ideas of Maya to even share their art because they get seen in the digital space you have to already be Advertiser friendly there are also few cross-generational spaces online the younger generation the digital natives that dominate the spaces have developed a frame set of morals and rules in spaces that they have founded not inherited spaces where Generations before them have had a chance to make mistakes and learn these online ideas are untested by time and unquestioned by their predecessors because there are no predecessors and after all it's their space and more power to them they encourage safe spaces and it doesn't seem to resemble Lord of the Flies to me but these spaces are considered sanitized by many outside them big business agrees it Dons its moral cap and joins in with these ideas not because they give a about anyone's safety but because ad money is magnetized to Safe content every single artistic movement has shocked in its origin but to shock is the trigger and the trigger is to have to have a warning so the only art that really does explode online is a literal world of fantasy now traditional art lovers do enjoy fantasy art and surrealism I do however as a collective they are not as interested in the hyper realism or the hyperhuman Fantastical Aesthetics that dominate digital art as they don't see how they represent much of the Human Condition it is argued that it's the digital version of paintings of the Renaissance period just replacing the Superhuman Gods with new Supernatural characters but art historians will fight strongly to deny that idea you can't please everyone and if you are making up like that you shouldn't care about what they think you do you but it does seem ashamed to me as unlike before the mainstream is so fractured now into small pocketed communities that the possibility of really interesting art looks more possible than ever but you do have to risk hurting sentiments and while the comment sections are as free from Fear as ever the content made simply isn't so there is no pool where artists can stress test the system where they can work to tear against the fabric of what is to make what will become that's the problem I see with art spaces in the digital space now enter AI many art mediums have existed before from oil paint to Ms paint from film camera to digital camera from casting iron to 3D printing clay and Play-Doh and plaster scene to blender and Maya this time not the acronym but the 3D animation software never before have these tools been limited by moral guidelines on how you can use them by the very people who make the tool in the past if you made something testing boundaries that went too far on the scene is way too outrageous The Establishment just wouldn't go behind it but Savvy people knew what was going on and those really interested in the Arts knew where to find it you could as an artist create and explore these darker but important elements of human nature in private communities if you wished we are not trusted to do that now but realistically no I do see why the open AI is limited why it's different to those mediums the ability it has to so easily make work that could confuse offend manipulate pit religion against religion make Arguments for horrific acts is so strong if open and pushed by provocative artists the output will be so combustible that no philosopher of any age trying to explain how there is no objective good or bad in the world would be able to put the fires out however something will break out and it may not be pleasant my fear is that without these darker elements these private experiments being explored publicly just what is going on in the shadows we will find out it's just a matter of time and if AI is too overwhelming I want to try as best I can to explore ideas about how art AI or not has historically helped at times like this why it's so dismissed now and why people and why people's ideas about art are so confused and watered down and why I think we need a Renaissance perhaps more than ever and I do think one is coming the discussions are just beginning so I hope you join me for them cheers

Channel: Samuel Hamper

Views: 100,979

Keywords: ai art, artificial intelligence, artist life, ai art generator, ai art controversy, ai artwork, ai artist, ai debate, ai news, ai morality, ai philosophy

Id: nIheonA5Ip8

Length: 14min 57sec (897 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 29 2023