Did AI fix art and when will we see it being used for Creation in secondlife.

[Sprout Evergarden]

Look at the picture below the scary fact that it was not made by a Human.

But it shows more understanding of Beauty ans aesthetics than "Dunchamp's Urinal" which was lauded on art websites of having changed art in a positive way

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-duchamps-urinal-changed-art-forever

Questions i have is Do you thing that AI will effect Art in a positive way by returning Beauty? and how long before we see technologies Like Stable Diffusion being used creating items in Secondlife?

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Oh dear.

First of all, can we be careful not to conflate terms here? Not all that is "beautiful" is "art." And not all that is "art" is beautiful. Beauty is often a component, a tool of art, but it's not a necessary requirement, and never has been. Caravaggio's "Judith and Holofernes" (ca. 1600), which features a gruesomely graphic decapitation, is hardly "beautiful," but it is most assuredly art. I could produce hundreds of similar examples harvested from several thousand years of art history.

You don't like Duchamp's "Fountain." Fair enough! I am going to assume you don't like much of Cubism, Dadaism, or modernism and postmodernism either, for the same reason.

But I could (given enough time to research it properly) write a very lengthy paper on the meanings produced by Duchamp's piece.

The AI you've presented here, on the other hand . . . not so much. And that's because, while it is very "pretty" and impressive looking, it has literally been generated by pulling cliches and stock motifs from existing work of art. It is a tissue of "this has already been done." That's how this kind of AI works: it generates images created from a pastiche of existing art, and in so doing simply reproduces stock tropes and motifs. It is incapable of innovation: it can only recycle.

And because of that, it really isn't great at producing "meaning," except (ironically) in a way that interrogates the pretensions of art itself in almost exactly the same way that Duchamp does. Accepting your AI work as "art" represents a kind of satire or critique on the very concept of art -- which is, oddly enough, in part what the Dadaists were doing.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with liking things that are beautiful or pretty even if they don't produce meaning, and aren't "art."

But reducing the value of art to mere aesthetics is a different matter.

Edited September 14, 2022 by Scylla Rhiadra

[Maitimo]

Art is something that has been deliberately created for the purouse of eliciting an emotional response in the viewer (or listener). Even if the emotion is a negative one. Damian Hurst's cow, or Tracey Emim's bed, for example. The urinal is art because it intentionally makes us ask questions. It makes us want to know the story behind it. 

The AI creation is pretty, I would even be happy to hang it on my wall. But it's not art any more than a sunrise is art.

[Ayashe Ninetails]

As a massive art lover, I'll go ahead and be the first to say it. 

It doesn't look like it was made by a human. Not in traditional mediums, anyway. In Photoshop/Painter/Krita, perhaps.

Now to answer the questions:

"Do you thing that AI will effect Art in a positive way by returning Beauty?" - I'm not sure what this means. There is beautiful art being made in all mediums. Sculpture, paintings, pottery, textiles and fabric arts, illustration, 3D, etc. I haven't seen a lack of it anywhere. And of course, not all art needs to be beautiful. I tend to prefer the pieces that aren't.

"and how long before we see technologies Like Stable Diffusion being used creating items in Secondlife?" - Probably a long time.

[Rat Luv]

I like AI art  I think it's great that you can enter keywords and be really precise, and actually get an image of what you're thinking, even if you're not a skilled artist. Some of them can be really spooky  Though it can take a while to get a decent image if you're on a cheaper laptop...( ETA Stable Diffusion is really good)

When people were really into DALL E Mini a few months ago, there were some funny ones...I wish I'd saved one I saw on Twitter called "Donald Trump dancing in a Bollywood movie", which made me lol...so it's not all beautiful classical pictures 

Edited September 14, 2022 by Rat Luv

[Rick Nightingale]

No.

Every AI created, supposedly artistic image I've seen looks wrong. Sometimes it takes a moment to see where and why, but it always looks wrong. I don't care if it has pretty colours and some fancy bits pulled from elsewhere and merged into a conglomerate of rip-offs.

Art is something created by humans (and maybe other sentient or nearly so beings). And no, I don't think typing a handful of key words into an AI pool classes as creation. Beauty is something that's in the eye of the beholder so I guess someone might find an AI produced image beautiful, but I don't. I'm happy for pictures of urinals and welded-together bits of scrap to be called art, even though I don't generally appreciate it myself. But I draw the line at something produced by an algorithm out of a database.

Frankly I'm sick of seeing it on DA etc. They should have a filter so it can be excluded. It isn't art. Fine if others like it and want to see it, but it isn't art and shouldn't be presented as such.

Edited September 14, 2022 by Rick Daylight

[ValKalAstra]

The thing about AI Art is that it does not technically create, it remixes. Very simplified: It is based on a wide array of images taken from the Internet. These images were tagged and used to build a machine learned dataset. 

The reason you're getting a "beautiful" image is because hundreds of artists have painted images just like that. It's also because the dataset was created with inherent biases about what beauty is.

For example, this was created by Midjourney with the simple prompt: Beautiful Woman.

Okay but let me try that again, maybe this time it will produce a more diverse result.

 Oh. Oh no. Sure I can add additional descriptions but there is already a default understanding within the dataset. Beauty is, apparently: pale white, slim, dark haired.

That's a bit of an extreme example but it should underline the weaknesses of ai generated art. It can remix existing things in surprising and amazing ways, no doubt, but it can't create new things. The reason it understands colours and image composition is not because there is an actual understanding but because over a thousand images were created a certain way.

It can perfectly mimic everything with some cultural spread. Giger? Easy! Luis Royo? You better be prepared to get whacked by the moderators over nudity. But if you want an image in the style of a lesser known artist it falls apart.

It is art because it was given meaning by the user that made the prompt. Yet the art made is essentially a popularity contest. It wows but never surprises or changes.

Edited September 14, 2022 by ValKalAstra

[Crim Mip]

Well the art that was sampled and used as a training set was certainly made by humans. So were the components in the image. It's a nice enough image, but I wouldn't call it art. It can't hold a copyright either. As for using it in SL? Why not?

[StarlanderGoods]

2 hours ago, Vanessa Amethyst said:

Look at the picture below the scary fact that it was not made by a Human.

But it shows more understanding of Beauty ans aesthetics than "Dunchamp's Urinal" which was lauded on art websites of having changed art in a positive way

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-duchamps-urinal-changed-art-forever

Questions i have is Do you thing that AI will effect Art in a positive way by returning Beauty? and how long before we see technologies Like Stable Diffusion being used creating items in Secondlife?

No, AI art is definitely going to impact art and artists in a negative way.

Nott only it needs to be "taught" by using millions or billions of images that were created by humans, the current models have used those images without the consent of the artists, AND included the metadata ABOUT the artists.  So you can use the artists name in the prompts, to imitate their style, denying the artists what could have been a comission, and denying the artist the choice of participating in this venture or not.   Prompts like "trending in artstation" have been used, wich means this models hace scraped huge ammounts of images indiscrimintaly.

Basically, the current models are tainted, they might be a nice toy, but it is unethical to use them, id like to compare them to blood diamonds, or shoes made by child labor.

[Dream Starchild]

I didn't know art needed to be fixed. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Art is largely subjective, and so are things like "beauty" and "aesthetic."

I find AI "art" interesting, because I like new technology. I do think it's a problem, as stated by @StarlanderGoods, for the human artists these algorithms uh...borrow from. I don't think that's a net positive for art in general, no.

[StarlanderGoods]

8 minutes ago, Dream Starchild said:

I didn't know art needed to be fixed. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Art is largely subjective, and so are things like "beauty" and "aesthetic."

I find AI "art" interesting, because I like new technology. I do think it's a problem, as stated by @StarlanderGoods, for the human artists these algorithms uh...borrow from. I don't think that's a net positive for art in general, no.

There is also the "other" conversation, about what even is art.  And some people hate that, and claim that everything is art, but I belive that art, or fine arts are a specific subsection of visual content, like not every graphic, picture, painting is art, there are a lot of classifications for manual/digital crafts, for different purposes.  Artisans, illustrators, masters of their craft dont necesarily deal in art and it has nothing to do with the skill, but the purpose.

Having said that, I dont think there can be "art" without the human element, because art is a human expression, I mean, fine arts, people use the word art to describe any visual media and that sometimes muddies the conversation when something new like this image generators pop up.  They excel at ilustrating concepts (midjourney at least), but lack the purpose of the human composition.

 

 

This arent just pretty images, this are parts of the artists experience, they tell a story of the time and place where the artist lived, this are events real or imagined (real in this cases) as seen through the eyes of an artist of its time, picked with a purpose, composed for a reason, lit with intent.

[Katherine Heartsong]

As an artist .. someone who once made a good living painting in my early 20s, and hopes to return to that full time in retirement and has 200+ RL works online right now (and more quick scribbly sketches in world gallery go visit!!! shameless plug)  ... art is very much anything visual (ignoring performance art, installation pieces etc) including photography and sculpture for the sake of this discussion, that makes the viewer feel an emotion. The bigger the emotion, the better the art.

That's why it's subjective ... two people can look at the same piece of art and while one can be completely unmoved by it (the classic "Meh!" response), the other person could be in tears feeling moved to raw emotion. A perfect example is 1950s and 1960s Abstract art. Are Pollock's drip works (done over a very short timer span btw) art? Rothko's work? Kline's dizzying broad dark lines? If Auguste Rodin is a genuinely brilliant and perfect sculptor, why does the "ugly" work of Alberto Giacometti garner such admiration (i think Alberto Giacometti is a genius btw). If they make you feel an emotion, then yes.

Ignoring my earlier admonishment, is the work of someone like Christo and Jeanne-Claude art? I was never moved by their work but others find them dazzling.

What about artists who direct other artists to create stuff? If they're merely directing, are they really artists (Jeffrey Koons is one of the world's richest artists, for example).

This all sounds familiar to any artist, btw. It was less than 100 years ago we were all arguing if photography can be art. It's still a debate for some. Try telling anyone Ansel Adams didn't create art and I will have to simply move on from the discussion. Even those of us who create it using traditional methods (my garage studio) or digital tools like Painter, Krita, etc get told all the time that's not art because why ... I didn't hold a brush in my hand, I was using a tablet? Try telling that to someone like David Hockney.

(Aside .. this whole "is it art" came up what 30 years ago with Ebert and his suggestion that video games could not be art. Are movies art?)

How art is interpreted or even acknowledged as art is further clouded by cultural and contemporary expectations and mores ... why someone loves Monet for example, but fails to see the beauty in the art of an African painter, or the genius of Cy Towmbly, or the sheer beauty of the geometric minimalism of recently deceased (at 104!) NY artist Carmen Herrera. Art can also be deliberately provocative or subconsciously so (I despise artists who set out with the sole purpose of offending, though blasphemy is a false crime so I have mixed views on some things.).

Art = emotions felt is, for me, the best way to tell when I see "art".

Now, addressing the whole "can AI/ML algorithms" make art? I have to say yes because of how I define what art is. If I feel an emotions looking at a visual image regardless of how it was produced, that's art to me. Can an AI/ML thingie do it? Yes. Does it have a human touch? If you mean brushes etc like in my hand? No? Directed by my vision (ala Jeff Koons) and cultural upbringing and things I like and admire .. the idea that I produce things based on my human experience regardless of tool? The tool I use is just a method of expressing my vision and expereince. Prompting and making of hundreds of variations until it's right? Then I'd suggest it does have a human touch because I created the vision for it.

Great debate, happy to talk in world anytime.

Edited September 15, 2022 by Katherine Heartsong

[StarlanderGoods]

I think that the prompts used in an ML are more like comissioning a work, not so much directing, since you have no reliable way to affect the outcome, other than through entering new prompts and selecting wich output to use.   I guess we define art in a different way, since for me it´s about expression, wich the AI is incapable of, by nature of being a very rudimentary program, Ive heard them called weak AI, to diferentiate from what a true AI would be if it is ever created.

Now, I belive that computer generated images CAN become art, the same way a urinal can become art, or a canvas painted in two tones can become art, through the intervention of the artist, giving them a context and a message.  But I wouldnt consider the output of the AI/ML itself to be art, I think the word Illustration describes it better.

[Katherine Heartsong]

1 hour ago, StarlanderGoods said:

I think that the prompts used in an ML are more like comissioning a work, not so much directing, since you have no reliable way to affect the outcome, other than through entering new prompts and selecting wich output to use.   I guess we define art in a different way, since for me it´s about expression, wich the AI is incapable of, by nature of being a very rudimentary program, Ive heard them called weak AI, to diferentiate from what a true AI would be if it is ever created.

Now, I belive that computer generated images CAN become art, the same way a urinal can become art, or a canvas painted in two tones can become art, through the intervention of the artist, giving them a context and a message.  But I wouldnt consider the output of the AI/ML itself to be art, I think the word Illustration describes it better.

I define that bolded part as directing. And the second bolding, expression, we also are not aligning on since I would define the long lists of prompts I've seen on the various GAN art "AI" sites expressions. So we have a basic difference of definition there, which is cool.

But that's a perfect segue then back to the (annoying) artist Jeff Koons. I could argue that he's merely commissioning an artwork from his underpaid art flunkies, and his direction is at best, minimal.

I still think that the prompts are expression, and a form of giving the output context and message by the user, but here again we'll just have to admire and agree to disagree. But we do seem to agree that the output can become art, ala Rothko or DuChamp. That, as I noted, seems to be in the eye of the beholder, since not everyone agrees that Marcel's urinal is actually art. Is it?

Aside .. the part I italicized? I sometimes have no real way to affect the outcome of my work (traditional or digital tools) because what I start with sometimes takes its own direction. It's me controlling the technique and method which I think you'd say is affecting the outcome, but sometimes the art itself drives itself to a place I had no idea it was going, if that makes sense. So I'm controlling the tools, but not the outcome sometimes.

Edited September 15, 2022 by Katherine Heartsong

[Bree Giffen]

When I first read about these A.I. generated images I was extremely negative about it. As an artist I hate to think that a bunch of one's and zero's could produce works of art. I recall the saying that an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters would reproduce the complete works of Shakespeare. It seems that we have reached that point in the world of art.

But... what if we think of these A.I. images not as art but simply as nice images? Like driving to a park and seeing a lake, trees and mountains in the distance. The scene is beautiful but it's not art. If we remove the comparison to human creations the output of A.I. no longer competes and perhaps we can accept it that way. 

[Love Zhaoying]

Art wasn't broken.

The urinal is sometimes shown along with works by Salvador Dali, like it was in our local (acclaimed) Dali museum for a special exhibition. The urinal was a scandal when it was created many, many years ago - but it's just a urinal. Nobody cares, that was many years ago during that period coinciding with Dali and the Surrealist movement. 

The picture above the urinal is a bad ripoff of Maxfield Parrish. Parrish's work was much better than that, and the influence is sadly obvious. 

AI fail.

 

[Rowan Amore]

AI doesn't have the intent to provoke emotion.  It just performs a function.  It also doesn't have emotions to portray.  Again, it's merely performing a function.  Absent those two fundamental aspects, how can it be art?

[Love Zhaoying]

I scrolled through the replies and had trouble finding any that addressed the Second Life aspect of the OP. Not surprising, since it's irrelevant.

[Katherine Heartsong]

2 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:

AI doesn't have the intent to provoke emotion.  It just performs a function.  It also doesn't have emotions to portray.  Again, it's merely performing a function.  Absent those two fundamental aspects, how can it be art?

I'm still having to disagree.

In my mind, the AI/ML/programming is the tool (i.e., the brush), the intent to provoke emotion comes from the artist's specific intentional input and the working of variations, colours, atmosphere, and purposeful goal.

This isn't really artificial intelligence, though, as was pointed out earlier. First off, these things don't generate art on their own. Second, a true, thinking AI in Asimov's kind of sci-fi tradition, would be able to be emotional.

PS. I hadn't actually used any of these things before, though I'd heard of Google's Deep art thingy. I am surprised at the number that now exist and some of the output that people can direct and use them as tools them to create. The community gallery of one I looked at just before I headed out this evening was amazing. Mostly from a "wow, that's pretty well done" reaction, to a few that actually did affect me emotionally due to some specific factor, ergo, art.

Edited September 16, 2022 by Katherine Heartsong

[StarlanderGoods]

9 hours ago, Bree Giffen said:

When I first read about these A.I. generated images I was extremely negative about it. As an artist I hate to think that a bunch of one's and zero's could produce works of art. I recall the saying that an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters would reproduce the complete works of Shakespeare. It seems that we have reached that point in the world of art.

But... what if we think of these A.I. images not as art but simply as nice images? Like driving to a park and seeing a lake, trees and mountains in the distance. The scene is beautiful but it's not art. If we remove the comparison to human creations the output of A.I. no longer competes and perhaps we can accept it that way. 

Yes, this is cool and it´s how I view them.  HOWEVER!  There are already publications using AI generated images instead of hiring an illustrator or paying a licence to use an image, art sites are already being flooded with AI images, drowning human artists.  And lets not forget this ML has stolen the works of millions in order to output the results it does.

There was this news also, about a guy that won an art competition (digital manipulation cathegory) with an AI generated image that he then photoshopped, and made $300 from the prize.  It doesnt sound bad, because its the right cathegory and he did retouch the image afterwards, but when pressed for comment, his answer was “This isn't going to stop. Art is dead, dude. It's over. A.I. won. Humans lost.”

Is the technology cool ? absolutely, it´s a great toy.  But the negative effects in it´s current state far outweight the positives.

[Bree Giffen]

I just read this article and it reminded me of this thread. I looks like this is the answer to the 2nd question by  @Vanessa Amethyst on AI being used for 3D creation.

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2022/09/23/3d-generative-ai-research-virtual-worlds/

[Chaser Zaks]

Here is my take on A.I. art. In my opinion, games are a type of art, so I'll be using that for reference.

Some have said A.I.s will be making games in the future. I'm all for it, but it will never be the same as a game made by a human.

When I say I am for it, I am interested in seeing wacky stuff made by games. But I am unlikely to find myself constantly playing it, and will not buy a game made by an A.I. But that doesn't mean use of A.I. in games isn't off the table.

When a game(or other medium) is made by an A.I., no matter how human it feels, it will not be the same to me, because people putting work, effort, and love into it. If you were to ask me if I would want a game that looks slightly better and is made by an A.I., over a game that was made by a human, I'd choose the one made by a human.

But I think a lot of people are taking the concept of A.I. and mis-using it when they could use it to enhance a experience, rather than create a sub-par one automatically.

Take the following example: Say you have a game like Skyrim, something very big and complex. A.I. can be used in various forms here to enhance the experience rather than automatically generate it. Such use cases would be better terrain creation. Imagine someone making a world map, it's going to be all smooth and stuff, normally people have to go through and add finer details, but A.I. can be used here to add those finer details such as simulating thousands of years of rainfall creating small details that humans would find too tedious to make.

It can also be used to create or solve scenarios a developer didn't put in. Imagine going around and asking NPCs questions they weren't programmed to know, or NPCs actually having simulated lives, or even say for example, a NPC murders another NPC in a alley, thinking they were alone, but another NPC just so happened to be watching, and you need to talk to the murdered NPC only to find out they are dead, but you can solve the murder by asking around and maybe finding the NPC who was witness to it.

There is even a game out there called A.I. dungeon, and it is pretty fun because it tailors the story to you. Games that can shift their direction to tailor to the player would be amazing. Even though A.I. dungeon is more of a "generated on the fly" game, I can see it used in games with pre-defined stories, but taking the story off course for a detour for the player.

 

A.I. is powerful and can be used to enhance the experience of stuff, and it can be used in art to deal with tedious task or fix errors humans made(EG: perspective correction). I see A.I. as a good thing, but people are using it in the wrong ways. Or at least, what we are seeing is people creating proof of concepts of different types of A.I.s to see what they can do, rather than applying A.I. to actual uses.

Edited September 24, 2022 by Chaser Zaks

[Ceka Cianci]

On 9/14/2022 at 5:18 PM, ValKalAstra said:

The thing about AI Art is that it does not technically create, it remixes. Very simplified: It is based on a wide array of images taken from the Internet. These images were tagged and used to build a machine learned dataset. 

The reason you're getting a "beautiful" image is because hundreds of artists have painted images just like that. It's also because the dataset was created with inherent biases about what beauty is.

For example, this was created by Midjourney with the simple prompt: Beautiful Woman.

Okay but let me try that again, maybe this time it will produce a more diverse result.

 Oh. Oh no. Sure I can add additional descriptions but there is already a default understanding within the dataset. Beauty is, apparently: pale white, slim, dark haired.

That's a bit of an extreme example but it should underline the weaknesses of ai generated art. It can remix existing things in surprising and amazing ways, no doubt, but it can't create new things. The reason it understands colours and image composition is not because there is an actual understanding but because over a thousand images were created a certain way.

It can perfectly mimic everything with some cultural spread. Giger? Easy! Luis Royo? You better be prepared to get whacked by the moderators over nudity. But if you want an image in the style of a lesser known artist it falls apart.

It is art because it was given meaning by the user that made the prompt. Yet the art made is essentially a popularity contest. It wows but never surprises or changes.

That reminds me of artbreeder.. it does the same thing  where we can combine rl and sl images together and get a bunch of results.

[Lyssa Greymoon]

On 9/14/2022 at 4:54 PM, Vanessa Amethyst said:

Look at the picture below the scary fact that it was not made by a Human.

But it shows more understanding of Beauty ans aesthetics than "Dunchamp's Urinal" which was lauded on art websites of having changed art in a positive way

Computer, make a Thomas Kinkade painting.

[diamond Marchant]

Getty Images no longer accepts AI images as stock photography as they fear potential copy rights issues as AI reuses existing works. Is a regulatory climate appearing?