AI art is bittersweet: manton.org
@manton Manton, excellent post! I believe there will always be a prized place for human-made art. What AI art does, in my view, is give people like me who aren’t artists or coders and don’t have artists or coders to help an opportunity to bring our thoughts and ideas to life.
By the way, you’re both an artist and a coder in my book, and Micro.blog is a great piece of code an art form in itself.
@manton This is in my opinion a very sane and practical approach to gen-AI. 👍 It's just a new tool, basically. Computers (the analog and digital ones) replaced computers (humans doing math); tractors replaced oxes and horses on the fields; steam and combustion engines replaced horse-drawn carriages, etc, and now AI might similarly be replacing something while also opening up some completely new avenues.
@manton As someone who works in the film industry, perhaps I am too close, but I don't see anything to celebrate here. So many of my friends who work on VFX are out of work, and the trend of VFX houses laying off artists or closing altogether seems to be accelerating. The idea of using gen-AI tech creatively sounds nice on paper, but in practice it only seems to be leading to a reduction in quality, a loss of jobs and the growth of a class of "artists" with no technical skills. Maybe I'm just too old and there will be future generation who thrives on this tech. They can have it - I want no part of it.
@crrrack.bsky.social Sorry to hear about your friends in VFX. Reduction in quality is a concern for sure, maybe similar to how anyone can now "build an app" but it's still going to take a developer writing code to make something good. I honestly don't know how this plays out for art and visual effects.
@manton I certainly believe that from a technical point of view good work could come from gen-AI, but I just don't see it happening because of socio-economic factors. In our industry- like many others - the money guys are salivating at not having to pay for labor any more, and they really don't care whether the product is any good or not, as long as they can sell it.
There is so much more I dislike about generated images and I don't think this is the place for a manifesto, but I will just mention that I hate the way the proliferation of AI slop has made me look at art and images. Like someone will share a short video or photo of an amazing insect, human endeavor and my first reaction is to dismiss it as fake (as it usually is these days). I know that I'm losing my ability to be awed by images which as an artist feels like a much greater loss than any benefit I could possibly get from even perfect machine-generated images. It just makes me sad.
Anyway - my ire isn't directed at you (I save that for the "artists" filling up my LinkedIn timeline with slop) and I'm sorry for bringing down the mood. Hopefully at least I've left a coherent enough sense of my perspective to be worth contemplating!