people said the same thing about photography. And that was before digital photography, back when some level of knowledge of photochemistry was required, and you needed a dark room to develop in, etc. People said that it was just an imitation of painting. That turned out to not be quite the case and photography developed into its own art form, and painting became less focused on realism and documenting reality since that became the domain of photography. What photography really accomplished was reducing the amount of time and technical ability required to produce art. Same with AI stuff even if it’s reactionary junk a lot of the time, that says more about who’s writing the prompt and who’s curating the database that the model is trained on. I imagine sculptors were also upset when 3D modeling and 3D printing showed up.
I go with Marx on this and stress that the problem isn’t the means of production but who controls it. Even in the context of AI generated art, the labor is reduced to the amount of time needed to think up and write a prompt (the labor of thinking of and writing a prompt is very small) but you can then take the output and manually refine it using traditional methods if you’re capable, or refine/iterate the prompt etc. So there is some creativity going into it. And then of course AI models usually have a database of art that has already been created to draw statistical data from when generating new art. The process of curating/maintaining/labelling that database requires a huge amount of labor, as does the process of writing and maintaining the model itself. Technology is what Marx called constant capital. Constant capital is just dead labor. i.e. labor that was already performed in the past. When you generate AI art it’s not that there’s no labor going into it, it’s just that the labor was performed in the past by countless people. Same as when you use a hammer you bought from a store. You still exercise labor power to use the hammer, it’s just that the labor of making the hammer was performed in the past for you by different people.
It’s also not only prompt writing but also image-to-image. So you can take a crudely drawn input image and have the AI refine it. So that still requires creativity on your part, as well.
is AI generated but I also think it’s creative and it’s not just reactionary slop like the pilgrim shit in the OP.
I think we need to just start calling it “content” AI generated content is not art, especially in a context like this
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Made printing imitations of art easier. Sure, those imitations can be used as part of a larger work, but the point still stands.
people said the same thing about photography. And that was before digital photography, back when some level of knowledge of photochemistry was required, and you needed a dark room to develop in, etc. People said that it was just an imitation of painting. That turned out to not be quite the case and photography developed into its own art form, and painting became less focused on realism and documenting reality since that became the domain of photography. What photography really accomplished was reducing the amount of time and technical ability required to produce art. Same with AI stuff even if it’s reactionary junk a lot of the time, that says more about who’s writing the prompt and who’s curating the database that the model is trained on. I imagine sculptors were also upset when 3D modeling and 3D printing showed up.
I go with Marx on this and stress that the problem isn’t the means of production but who controls it. Even in the context of AI generated art, the labor is reduced to the amount of time needed to think up and write a prompt (the labor of thinking of and writing a prompt is very small) but you can then take the output and manually refine it using traditional methods if you’re capable, or refine/iterate the prompt etc. So there is some creativity going into it. And then of course AI models usually have a database of art that has already been created to draw statistical data from when generating new art. The process of curating/maintaining/labelling that database requires a huge amount of labor, as does the process of writing and maintaining the model itself. Technology is what Marx called constant capital. Constant capital is just dead labor. i.e. labor that was already performed in the past. When you generate AI art it’s not that there’s no labor going into it, it’s just that the labor was performed in the past by countless people. Same as when you use a hammer you bought from a store. You still exercise labor power to use the hammer, it’s just that the labor of making the hammer was performed in the past for you by different people.
It’s also not only prompt writing but also image-to-image. So you can take a crudely drawn input image and have the AI refine it. So that still requires creativity on your part, as well.
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Fair point; my bad
I was just thinking about the original reaction painters had to photography and extending that to other fields which was lazy on my part.
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Nah you didn’t sound like an ass, no worries
glad to hear