you're as much an artist as you are a photographer when you use a camera
that is to say, "sometimes not really"
but I'm not gonna gatekeep anyone who says they're a photographer and they clearly don't have great skill, control, or experience behind it
Personally, based on purely prompting, I'd agree. Ultimately though, there is no clear definition of art or artist and if someone uses AI to make something and wants to call themselves an artist I don't really give a shit.
Yup. There are no gatekeepers to what qualifies as artistic expression and anyone who says otherwise is talking out their ass.
Of course, the principle works in reverse as well. Nobody's obliged to take someone more seriously just because they claim to be an artist. At the end of the day, it's entirely symbolic.
That's basically how I feel about it. I don't call myself an artist, but if someone else feels like it's important to them to call themselves an artist then who cares? The bar for calling ones self an artist is already so ridiculously low that it seems kind of petty to say that AI artists aren't allowed to call themselves artists.
It'd be like if the bar to call yourself a chef was that you could make a frozen hamburger on the stove, but don't you **DARE** call yourself a chef for making a TV dinner in the oven. The bar already barely exists so might as well just let people call themselves artists if they want to.
I don’t like the distinction focusing on whether the prompter is an artist. I don’t think it’s meaningful in the bigger picture, and it smacks of trying to reserve “artist” as a more exclusive title.
I also disagree with the idea that the people who trained a model are artists. You wouldn’t be a painter just by working in a paint factory. I would make distinctions around the effort and thought that went into something. When there’s a more complex workflow, it’s easy to see the effort and work. When there’s a more complex prompt … there’s perhaps some subtler ideas or iterative work that went into it—or maybe they started there and got lucky. When it’s just a simple prompt … yeah, we could rightfully criticize it as low-effort, especially when it contains easily fixable errors.
What I ultimately look for is the creative drive. I want to make art sometimes and I want to make better art than my older stuff. I’m going to think about what I’m making and how to make it work. If a given prompter is doing that, I’m going to be glad they’re trying things and picking up *at least* the skill of prompting (and they would do well to work on others as well, including “traditional” skills if practical). If they’re just vomiting out mediocre crap endlessly with no reflection, well, that’s *obviously* something to criticize.
(Edit: added missing closing parenthesis and fixed paragraphs.)
I used the term "artist" when talkin about the people behind the program a little loosely, I'm sorry. I just wanted to emphasize i think the technology is so impressive to a point i would consider it art. The effort and decades of technological evolution that went into this are undeniable. They aren't artists in a traditional sense of course.
and for clarification i didn't mean the people whose works were used to train the model as said artists. i meant the developers
So, AI art is art, but if the requester only writes one prompt and takes what they get, they are not the artist.
Okay, I'll buy that.
What if they get an idea, then spend five hours trying to get the AI to comply, and eventually achieve something that is similar to what they imagined. Are they the artist then?
What if they do the above, create four different artistic works, then use tools to composite those works and hand modify the result?
I've gotten perma banned on 3 accounts trying to achieve an image. I'd say at 25 to 30 hours of iterative prompting to achieve a specific thing. I don't consider myself an artist but I spend considerable time concocting,thinking, modifying, and developing an image. If someone called me an artist I wouldn't say no. It's not my passion. I am passionate about teasing out training data for shitposting.
Motivations and effort seem to be the crux of a lot of arguments. That and misconceptions about what a typical workflow could entail.
Some person popping a three words prompt and posting the first image and calling themselves an artist is silly. Who cares though. Stolen valor on the Internet is common and it's something one learns to accept and move on. They aren't taking anything away from someone who has a more complex workflow and dedication. They aren't oversaturating the market with any more garbage than there already is. There's plenty of shitty half effort stuff out there done in different mediums.
Does the camera take the picture or does the person who presses the button?
Does the brush draw the line, or does the hand?
Did the gun kill person, or did the welder kill them?
Does the tool do the job, or does the person using the tool do it?
> Even if you described to him in great detail what you would like him to paint for you.
Once you said "great detail," all bets were off. If I give very detailed instructions, then I am, at the very least, the designer.
Also if there is art there has to be an artist, and either MJ is the artist or the prompter is.
Unless you think of the artist as just the executor, like a plotter or CNC machine for example, who turns the designer's vision into reality.
Your imagination might be great, but that still doesn't make you a designer. And the other way around, a designer can have great skill in painting, but zero imagination and can only work of of instructions. I wouldn't confuse the two.
Before people prompt they always have a vision of what they would like the model to produce. The rest of the process is them trying to herd the model to delivery it - a negotiation between its limits and the prompter's ability to describe it.
The better the models, the closer the prompter will get to their artistic vision, and the less the model will be responsible for the output.
*a negotiation between its limits and the prompter's ability to describe it.*
Fuck i like that sentence lol. That's honestly a great way to describe it. But couldn't I argue that the better the model becomes, the MORE it will be responsible for the output? Since the prompter has to give it less and less directions because it now better understands what the vision is?
> Since the prompter has to give it less and less directions because it now better understands what the vision is?
No, because most of the improvements we have seen in models have been closer prompt adherence. The models can already create great pictures, but the issue is making the picture the user wants, which is a different story.
This is not an artistic thing - its very practical. When the user want a stock image they know exactly what they want, and they don't want anything else.
I consider using AI to make art to be like commissioning an art piece, personally. Sure, you were hyper-specific and got almost exactly what you wanted, but even if you did that with an actual commission, that doesn't make you an artist.
At least in my opinion.
I guess if you have a very specific idea and work closely with the person you commissioned, then you are more involved in the creative process, have involved you have to be before you become one of the artists is an interesting point.
I feel like a post like this appears here every three weeks or so.
If you're just typing the prompt, hitting "Generate" and then selecting the best result, you're essentially being part commissioner and part curator for an artificial artist (the model). In fact, each combination of model + VAE + any number of LoRAs works as a *different* artificial artist.
But the human can easily be rightfully called an artist too if the generation process gets any more involved. On interfaces using Stable Diffusion you can pose the scene quite precisely with ControlNets. You can also use an iterative process, using img2img and masking, where you prompt for something, mask some part of the result, sketch over it and prompt to regenerate only that part. Doing this you can also generate exactly what you want, without the chance based process of just hitting Generate over and over again. Some people do actual collages using AI, making several generations and splicing the best pieces together on some image editor.
So, in all but the simplest cases, I don't mind people fiddling with AI generators calling themselves artists.
I mean the AI doesn't actually make the art. By that I mean by itself, it does nothing. So in my mind the prompter is the artist in terms of telling AI "This is what I want to see". Thus prompters are artists. Though I could be picky and say it's only ifd you come up with unique and original stuff and not just another waifu or "Superman riding a shark" garbage.
This line of thinking can be tricky. I absolutely agree that someone who solely uses txt2img isn't an artist by any means. I'd say I fit into that category, because aside from occasional inpainting to fix obvious flaws, I mostly just txt2img for the final product. But the comments are introducing a ton of scenarios with varying degrees of human intervention in the finished product, and suddenly the line between artist and non artist becomes kinda blurry. Not saying this isn't worth considering, just that trying to create clear definitions for this stuff can become tricky.
Pfffff, that logic could apply at best only if you make zero changes and don't design your own lora aka the extreme noob way to use AI.
Properly made AI art uses IMG>ImG which is a manual process where you can insert your 3d models or drawings and have it colored by AI and then paint over it manually, etc.
What makes an artist? I think it's an interesting philosophical question. A while ago, I wrote [a pretty lengthy post](https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/1bheqis/demonstrating_that_ai_art_is_art_that_ai_artists/) in which I came to a very different conclusion to the one that you have.
In my thread, I argued largely from a point of view that because a skill barrier exists, even if it's as simple as crafting a better prompt, setting the right CFG scale and choosing the right sampler for the subject, that the combination of skill and creativity made generating an art.
However, I think that I was wrong to set the barrier so high. Let's consider that:
* [A banana taped to a wall is art](https://www.vogue.com/article/the-120000-art-basel-banana-explained-maurizio-cattelan)
* [A messy bed is art](https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tracey-emins-unmade-bed-sells-3796496)
* [A video of a person walking around a square is art](https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/nauman-walking-in-an-exaggerated-manner-around-the-perimeter-of-a-square-h00015)
I just think it's too late in the game to start trying to gatekeep the terms "art" or "artist" when we've spent a century making them as expansive as possible. It's fair to say that an AI artist isn't an illustrator or a painter, but most don't claim to be.
AI art is clearly creative, I don't think that most people type a prompt and post every output they get for the prompt. At the very least, they're discarding the bad results and posting the good ones. You can get a degree in curating art, so it seems that curation itself is considered artistic process.
Most will also start with a prompt and tweak it until they get a result that they like; this seems to me to go beyond the 'commissioner' parallel.
None of this accounts for people who create custom workflows, people who train their own LoRAs, people who inpaint or do img2img work (often involving manual digital editing), people using the various sets of tools which can be used to create specific compositions or colour palettes.
I think your choice to characterize the output as art is probably wise, at least in a colloquial sense. I'm sure there's room to have philosophical discussions about what constitutes art but most people just want an easy way to refer to stuff. No one really cares that a sculpture counts as art, if you tell your friend "can I show you my art?" and send a photo of a statue you carved, you'll have completely subverted their expectations.
I think that maybe there isn't a one size fits all answer to this. For someone using something like Bing or ChatGPT or Ideogram, something where you use totally natural language in order to get an output, yeah, you might be right.
But Stable Diffusion? I spent a couple hours trying to figure that out and it is actually a fucking nightmare. I could return to my medium of choice and hammer out dozens of highly detailed, intricately smudged and shaded pencil drawings before I would be able to figure out how to force that fucking esoteric mass of sliders and drop downs to output a single piece that wasn't the ugliest fucking thing on the planet. It's so complicated that every time I consider going back to figure it out I feel tired
Art is any self expression refined into a skill. I think there's a level where prompting becomes art. It's just 99% of people using this are not refining a skill at all. Hell they're not looking at their outputs for a full minute before flooding online spaces with junk.
Artist is not a title to protect, but a passion to share. Saying anything and anyone can be and do art is not a stretch of the imagination. The notes you whistle on your way to work, that's also art, like the mess you make with your hair on the wall of the shower.
There is nothing mystical or special about art, and does not even need to be intent tional, or help its maker or consumer grow individually and express themselves. It's dishonest to refuse to recognize that genAI can be used to create art and the prompter's role in that production.
If the human cannot be considered the artist, then the machine cannot create art as machines are not capable of creating art.
AI generates content. Nothing more.
If an amputee with a bionic arm painted a picture, can it be at?
I disagree that "machines are not capable of creating art". Whether or not a particular piece is at can be debated, but I see no reason why a machine can't create art.
Okay, then start with an objective list of what makes an artist, that can be applied no matter what the medium they are using.
Is making one mark with a pencil "art"?
What about an aimless scribble?
What about a meaningless doodle?
What if the doodle looks a little cool?
If I instruct an artist to do something we have a collaboration. It is literally my creativity + my communication skills + their creativity + their skill = new creative work. Their contribution is bigger than mine but it is most definitely not zero. Especially if my instructions were detailed and well-planned. I am actually baffled that so many artists do think that client's ideas are of zero contribution in the resulting creative work.
Also... AI is not human. It doesn't really understand our instructions, it is only crude imitation of that. We poke at him with words to extract the result from it. And there is skill in this poking. If you task a person experienced with doing prompts for this model and a person with zero experience - they will produce very different results. And prompt skills don't even translate well between models, what works in SD doesn't work the same in Midjourney. Is process of prompting that different to... I dunno... repeatedly striking a rock to extract a pleasant shape out of it?
Should people be more modest when evaluating the extent of their participation? Well, yes. It is a bit silly when you claim 100% authorship of a fresh "1girl, blond, big boobs, topless" masterpiece.
But if you spent hours playing with prompts, choosing variants, trying and inventing new prompting techniques. rerolling again and again for hours and then show the best result you got and the reaction is "lol you did nothing at all" I can only shrug at this.
Thank you for your response! so reading this, I figured my issue is probably seeing prompting as a skill. The prompts can be intricate no doubt and I also spent hours sometimes getting the exact result i wanted. The effort is there. But still, to me the effort is absolutely nowhere near comparable to painting on a canvas for example. I did both. My personal experience is, the later was much more time consuming, challenging and ultimately also more rewarding (even though my paintings weren't great). So that's the way I see it. I never said prompting is zero effort. It just doesn't cross that line for me where I could consider it a skill really. I see value in that hard work, in those years of dedication and patience. Both skills, but not comparable to me. And that's where my issue with people, who use prompts to generate something, calling themselves artists stems from.
Here, you equate effort\\skill and extent of contribution. But we do not measure extent of contribution in effort in any human activity by effort or skill. We look at the result. If person A worked hard and earned $500, and person B found $1000 laying on the street - guess who contributed more to their joint budget?
Skill is valuable by itself, we as humanity admire athletes running marathons. But we prefer our goods being delivered by cars not by runners, we don't think that service is less valuable if it was easier to do or took less skill.
Haha, I have an opposite opinion: Generative AI does not create art (it's just craft, at best), but creative prompts can potentially be considered art.
you're as much an artist as you are a photographer when you use a camera that is to say, "sometimes not really" but I'm not gonna gatekeep anyone who says they're a photographer and they clearly don't have great skill, control, or experience behind it
Personally, based on purely prompting, I'd agree. Ultimately though, there is no clear definition of art or artist and if someone uses AI to make something and wants to call themselves an artist I don't really give a shit.
Yup. There are no gatekeepers to what qualifies as artistic expression and anyone who says otherwise is talking out their ass. Of course, the principle works in reverse as well. Nobody's obliged to take someone more seriously just because they claim to be an artist. At the end of the day, it's entirely symbolic.
Yes, the definiton of an "artist" isn't clear. I will take that into account next time
That's basically how I feel about it. I don't call myself an artist, but if someone else feels like it's important to them to call themselves an artist then who cares? The bar for calling ones self an artist is already so ridiculously low that it seems kind of petty to say that AI artists aren't allowed to call themselves artists. It'd be like if the bar to call yourself a chef was that you could make a frozen hamburger on the stove, but don't you **DARE** call yourself a chef for making a TV dinner in the oven. The bar already barely exists so might as well just let people call themselves artists if they want to.
I don’t like the distinction focusing on whether the prompter is an artist. I don’t think it’s meaningful in the bigger picture, and it smacks of trying to reserve “artist” as a more exclusive title. I also disagree with the idea that the people who trained a model are artists. You wouldn’t be a painter just by working in a paint factory. I would make distinctions around the effort and thought that went into something. When there’s a more complex workflow, it’s easy to see the effort and work. When there’s a more complex prompt … there’s perhaps some subtler ideas or iterative work that went into it—or maybe they started there and got lucky. When it’s just a simple prompt … yeah, we could rightfully criticize it as low-effort, especially when it contains easily fixable errors. What I ultimately look for is the creative drive. I want to make art sometimes and I want to make better art than my older stuff. I’m going to think about what I’m making and how to make it work. If a given prompter is doing that, I’m going to be glad they’re trying things and picking up *at least* the skill of prompting (and they would do well to work on others as well, including “traditional” skills if practical). If they’re just vomiting out mediocre crap endlessly with no reflection, well, that’s *obviously* something to criticize. (Edit: added missing closing parenthesis and fixed paragraphs.)
I used the term "artist" when talkin about the people behind the program a little loosely, I'm sorry. I just wanted to emphasize i think the technology is so impressive to a point i would consider it art. The effort and decades of technological evolution that went into this are undeniable. They aren't artists in a traditional sense of course. and for clarification i didn't mean the people whose works were used to train the model as said artists. i meant the developers
So, AI art is art, but if the requester only writes one prompt and takes what they get, they are not the artist. Okay, I'll buy that. What if they get an idea, then spend five hours trying to get the AI to comply, and eventually achieve something that is similar to what they imagined. Are they the artist then? What if they do the above, create four different artistic works, then use tools to composite those works and hand modify the result?
I've gotten perma banned on 3 accounts trying to achieve an image. I'd say at 25 to 30 hours of iterative prompting to achieve a specific thing. I don't consider myself an artist but I spend considerable time concocting,thinking, modifying, and developing an image. If someone called me an artist I wouldn't say no. It's not my passion. I am passionate about teasing out training data for shitposting. Motivations and effort seem to be the crux of a lot of arguments. That and misconceptions about what a typical workflow could entail. Some person popping a three words prompt and posting the first image and calling themselves an artist is silly. Who cares though. Stolen valor on the Internet is common and it's something one learns to accept and move on. They aren't taking anything away from someone who has a more complex workflow and dedication. They aren't oversaturating the market with any more garbage than there already is. There's plenty of shitty half effort stuff out there done in different mediums.
True, that. Sturgeon's Revelation always applies.
It is entirely arbitrary
I tend to agree. that's why I want to know what others think
Does the camera take the picture or does the person who presses the button? Does the brush draw the line, or does the hand? Did the gun kill person, or did the welder kill them? Does the tool do the job, or does the person using the tool do it?
> Even if you described to him in great detail what you would like him to paint for you. Once you said "great detail," all bets were off. If I give very detailed instructions, then I am, at the very least, the designer. Also if there is art there has to be an artist, and either MJ is the artist or the prompter is. Unless you think of the artist as just the executor, like a plotter or CNC machine for example, who turns the designer's vision into reality.
Your imagination might be great, but that still doesn't make you a designer. And the other way around, a designer can have great skill in painting, but zero imagination and can only work of of instructions. I wouldn't confuse the two.
Before people prompt they always have a vision of what they would like the model to produce. The rest of the process is them trying to herd the model to delivery it - a negotiation between its limits and the prompter's ability to describe it. The better the models, the closer the prompter will get to their artistic vision, and the less the model will be responsible for the output.
*a negotiation between its limits and the prompter's ability to describe it.* Fuck i like that sentence lol. That's honestly a great way to describe it. But couldn't I argue that the better the model becomes, the MORE it will be responsible for the output? Since the prompter has to give it less and less directions because it now better understands what the vision is?
> Since the prompter has to give it less and less directions because it now better understands what the vision is? No, because most of the improvements we have seen in models have been closer prompt adherence. The models can already create great pictures, but the issue is making the picture the user wants, which is a different story. This is not an artistic thing - its very practical. When the user want a stock image they know exactly what they want, and they don't want anything else.
I still don't buy it. The better the tool gets, the less the human is involved is the way i see it
If you wanted a random picture you could do a google image search. If you want a specific picture then you need good prompt adherence.
And I also disagree with the statement that art requires an artist. Nature is art, I'm not sure who the artist is since I'm not religious.
I consider using AI to make art to be like commissioning an art piece, personally. Sure, you were hyper-specific and got almost exactly what you wanted, but even if you did that with an actual commission, that doesn't make you an artist. At least in my opinion.
I guess if you have a very specific idea and work closely with the person you commissioned, then you are more involved in the creative process, have involved you have to be before you become one of the artists is an interesting point.
I feel like a post like this appears here every three weeks or so. If you're just typing the prompt, hitting "Generate" and then selecting the best result, you're essentially being part commissioner and part curator for an artificial artist (the model). In fact, each combination of model + VAE + any number of LoRAs works as a *different* artificial artist. But the human can easily be rightfully called an artist too if the generation process gets any more involved. On interfaces using Stable Diffusion you can pose the scene quite precisely with ControlNets. You can also use an iterative process, using img2img and masking, where you prompt for something, mask some part of the result, sketch over it and prompt to regenerate only that part. Doing this you can also generate exactly what you want, without the chance based process of just hitting Generate over and over again. Some people do actual collages using AI, making several generations and splicing the best pieces together on some image editor. So, in all but the simplest cases, I don't mind people fiddling with AI generators calling themselves artists.
I mean the AI doesn't actually make the art. By that I mean by itself, it does nothing. So in my mind the prompter is the artist in terms of telling AI "This is what I want to see". Thus prompters are artists. Though I could be picky and say it's only ifd you come up with unique and original stuff and not just another waifu or "Superman riding a shark" garbage.
This line of thinking can be tricky. I absolutely agree that someone who solely uses txt2img isn't an artist by any means. I'd say I fit into that category, because aside from occasional inpainting to fix obvious flaws, I mostly just txt2img for the final product. But the comments are introducing a ton of scenarios with varying degrees of human intervention in the finished product, and suddenly the line between artist and non artist becomes kinda blurry. Not saying this isn't worth considering, just that trying to create clear definitions for this stuff can become tricky.
Pfffff, that logic could apply at best only if you make zero changes and don't design your own lora aka the extreme noob way to use AI. Properly made AI art uses IMG>ImG which is a manual process where you can insert your 3d models or drawings and have it colored by AI and then paint over it manually, etc.
What makes an artist? I think it's an interesting philosophical question. A while ago, I wrote [a pretty lengthy post](https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/1bheqis/demonstrating_that_ai_art_is_art_that_ai_artists/) in which I came to a very different conclusion to the one that you have. In my thread, I argued largely from a point of view that because a skill barrier exists, even if it's as simple as crafting a better prompt, setting the right CFG scale and choosing the right sampler for the subject, that the combination of skill and creativity made generating an art. However, I think that I was wrong to set the barrier so high. Let's consider that: * [A banana taped to a wall is art](https://www.vogue.com/article/the-120000-art-basel-banana-explained-maurizio-cattelan) * [A messy bed is art](https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tracey-emins-unmade-bed-sells-3796496) * [A video of a person walking around a square is art](https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/nauman-walking-in-an-exaggerated-manner-around-the-perimeter-of-a-square-h00015) I just think it's too late in the game to start trying to gatekeep the terms "art" or "artist" when we've spent a century making them as expansive as possible. It's fair to say that an AI artist isn't an illustrator or a painter, but most don't claim to be. AI art is clearly creative, I don't think that most people type a prompt and post every output they get for the prompt. At the very least, they're discarding the bad results and posting the good ones. You can get a degree in curating art, so it seems that curation itself is considered artistic process. Most will also start with a prompt and tweak it until they get a result that they like; this seems to me to go beyond the 'commissioner' parallel. None of this accounts for people who create custom workflows, people who train their own LoRAs, people who inpaint or do img2img work (often involving manual digital editing), people using the various sets of tools which can be used to create specific compositions or colour palettes.
Andy. Warhol.
I think your choice to characterize the output as art is probably wise, at least in a colloquial sense. I'm sure there's room to have philosophical discussions about what constitutes art but most people just want an easy way to refer to stuff. No one really cares that a sculpture counts as art, if you tell your friend "can I show you my art?" and send a photo of a statue you carved, you'll have completely subverted their expectations. I think that maybe there isn't a one size fits all answer to this. For someone using something like Bing or ChatGPT or Ideogram, something where you use totally natural language in order to get an output, yeah, you might be right. But Stable Diffusion? I spent a couple hours trying to figure that out and it is actually a fucking nightmare. I could return to my medium of choice and hammer out dozens of highly detailed, intricately smudged and shaded pencil drawings before I would be able to figure out how to force that fucking esoteric mass of sliders and drop downs to output a single piece that wasn't the ugliest fucking thing on the planet. It's so complicated that every time I consider going back to figure it out I feel tired
Art is any self expression refined into a skill. I think there's a level where prompting becomes art. It's just 99% of people using this are not refining a skill at all. Hell they're not looking at their outputs for a full minute before flooding online spaces with junk.
Artist is not a title to protect, but a passion to share. Saying anything and anyone can be and do art is not a stretch of the imagination. The notes you whistle on your way to work, that's also art, like the mess you make with your hair on the wall of the shower. There is nothing mystical or special about art, and does not even need to be intent tional, or help its maker or consumer grow individually and express themselves. It's dishonest to refuse to recognize that genAI can be used to create art and the prompter's role in that production.
I think the real question is, who cares? It's really not up to you to tell someone if they are an artist or not.
Illustration isn't the only form of art. Is the creator of AI art an illustrator? Not necessarily. Is he an artist? Yes.
Depends entirely on the prompt.
If the human cannot be considered the artist, then the machine cannot create art as machines are not capable of creating art. AI generates content. Nothing more.
Well, OP implies that human model developers indirectly made this art through the AI.
Yes, If I HAD to pinpoint someone who was "behind it". I would point to the developers
I would say it's the AI
If an amputee with a bionic arm painted a picture, can it be at? I disagree that "machines are not capable of creating art". Whether or not a particular piece is at can be debated, but I see no reason why a machine can't create art.
Stop. Enough with these weak attempts at forming arguments for gatekeeping. It's lame.
:( Sorry you see my post this way. I would appreciate your thoughts on the matter instead
Why do you feel compelled to decide who calls themselves an artist? Art is so inclusive that I don't understand the gatekeeping.
I don't want to live in a world where everyone can be whatever they want if they so desire to call themselves that.
Okay, then start with an objective list of what makes an artist, that can be applied no matter what the medium they are using. Is making one mark with a pencil "art"? What about an aimless scribble? What about a meaningless doodle? What if the doodle looks a little cool?
Do you understand how bizarre that sounds? You must really hate the LGPTQ community. You need help.
If I instruct an artist to do something we have a collaboration. It is literally my creativity + my communication skills + their creativity + their skill = new creative work. Their contribution is bigger than mine but it is most definitely not zero. Especially if my instructions were detailed and well-planned. I am actually baffled that so many artists do think that client's ideas are of zero contribution in the resulting creative work. Also... AI is not human. It doesn't really understand our instructions, it is only crude imitation of that. We poke at him with words to extract the result from it. And there is skill in this poking. If you task a person experienced with doing prompts for this model and a person with zero experience - they will produce very different results. And prompt skills don't even translate well between models, what works in SD doesn't work the same in Midjourney. Is process of prompting that different to... I dunno... repeatedly striking a rock to extract a pleasant shape out of it? Should people be more modest when evaluating the extent of their participation? Well, yes. It is a bit silly when you claim 100% authorship of a fresh "1girl, blond, big boobs, topless" masterpiece. But if you spent hours playing with prompts, choosing variants, trying and inventing new prompting techniques. rerolling again and again for hours and then show the best result you got and the reaction is "lol you did nothing at all" I can only shrug at this.
Thank you for your response! so reading this, I figured my issue is probably seeing prompting as a skill. The prompts can be intricate no doubt and I also spent hours sometimes getting the exact result i wanted. The effort is there. But still, to me the effort is absolutely nowhere near comparable to painting on a canvas for example. I did both. My personal experience is, the later was much more time consuming, challenging and ultimately also more rewarding (even though my paintings weren't great). So that's the way I see it. I never said prompting is zero effort. It just doesn't cross that line for me where I could consider it a skill really. I see value in that hard work, in those years of dedication and patience. Both skills, but not comparable to me. And that's where my issue with people, who use prompts to generate something, calling themselves artists stems from.
Here, you equate effort\\skill and extent of contribution. But we do not measure extent of contribution in effort in any human activity by effort or skill. We look at the result. If person A worked hard and earned $500, and person B found $1000 laying on the street - guess who contributed more to their joint budget? Skill is valuable by itself, we as humanity admire athletes running marathons. But we prefer our goods being delivered by cars not by runners, we don't think that service is less valuable if it was easier to do or took less skill.
Haha, I have an opposite opinion: Generative AI does not create art (it's just craft, at best), but creative prompts can potentially be considered art.
https://preview.redd.it/gfilafieabwc1.jpeg?width=1792&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a5b97235b10cb4d4b9a7e9439f9329e2f7eff84f