carsickcans
The OatmealLet’s talk about AI art.
Impertinenzija@oatmeal Supple jurassic body is just what I needed right now. XD <3
(And thanks for all the rest too. <3)
Mark T. Tomczak@oatmeal Honestly, great take from multiple directions.
This weekend, I made a t-shirt and a logo for a nonexistant studio in about an hour.
How'd I do it?
Text layout in Zazzle's store and clipart in Canva. Didn't push any of the AI buttons; did definitely use someone else's drawing of a dog and someone else's image of an upward-pointing arrow. And someone else's fonts. And someone else's t-shirt printing machinery.
Because my goal wasn't to create any of that; my goal was to composite it into a mildly-entertaining seasonal shirt I could wear. And because it took an hour, i could do that between the things people in my life care about me actually accomplishing.
Enjoy making Clipart, loser.
Thank you! I have not aspired to more in this domain.
@mark @oatmeal Nu'uh. What you've made is called a mashup aka a collage. And ppl have been doing that since there's any other medium to use and things to cut 'em up. Eventually you've decided what's going into your motive, you didn't let the stochastic parrot decide that for you or hit the button until it felt okayish enough.
@Impertinenzija Thing is... I don't see much of a distinction. Collaging and using a tool like stable diffusion are
both constrained by the materials at hand
both shortcut a lot of hand-work (at the tradeoff of the previously-mentioned constraints; if the AI gets 90% of the way there I need to do the last 10%, and if I really can't find a clipart that works for this logo I have to freehand it, or change my vision to match what I can see in front of me)
both involve the creator's eye and mind to know when to stop instead of what to start with
I think these are on a spectrum that includes things like sprite comics and "You're The Man Now Dog" mashups.
(... maybe one of the reasons the mass negative reaction to AI felt so odd to me is that I was there for YTMND. We had fun with it and nobody considered it high art. I think AI generated sits comfortably alongside memes in that sense.)
@mark Technically you're right, but the middle management types nowadays are pretty quick to decide that all those pesky ppl creating stuff just eat off their slice and do not create fast enough. And: I don't see YTMND killing jobs.
@Impertinenzija Yeah, that's true and I don't know what to predict from it.
Cards on the table: I have never been and expect I will never be in the business of preserving people's jobs if the job is redundant. I'm just not in favor of paying ditch-diggers if a ditch-digging machine is 100% better in every way; I'd rather free them up from having to dig ditches, even if, in the limit, that means we pay people for existing (our ancestors foraged and shared and literally got food for existing; in an era of far more abundance I don't see why we cut ourselves off from what our ancestors had). If my job gets replaced? Oh my God how nice that would be. I'd go do something else.
What I have seen that I'm excited about is more people being able to participate in the creation of art (the final product) because they can have a machine do art (the intermediary work) that other people can do but they can't pay those people to do. I see people using machine-generation for things like first-pass storyboarding on a video project so they aren't spending time creating draft pictures of the scene that the audience will never see. And these aren't projects gated on someone not being paid to do that work; these are projects where, if the work wasn't free, it just wouldn't get done because the end-result isn't intended to make money so there's no money to pay a storyboard artist with.
It's lowering the floor on the cost of the process, and when you do that you always let more people in. Rarely do I see letting more people in as a bad thing.
@mark Well, if it was letting more ppl into whatever creative process there is I'd agree with you, but what I see is less ppl learning whatever craft there is in the businesses, meaning they end up merely pushing buttons, not being aware of the hows and whys and being replaced as soon as they're not useful anymore. At least for now. And feeding ppl just because they're there... I'm in fact quite into this idea, but I don't see an awful lot of politicians backing it. Do you?
Do you?
I don't, and I don't see much future of the species as a whole if we don't fix that. The perpetual back-pressure of "We have this better approach that frees up people's time but instead of making everyone's lives better it lets this one guy afford a second yacht" is really slowing us down.
But I have to assume that's a fixable issue for the same reason people who are against AI making everything soulless have to assume they can talk people into not letting that happen.
@mark We have to fix it.
AI at my workplace doesn't make things soulless but annoying. I write tech news. We have to rewrite test summarys at least once (da SEO gods hate duplicate content). So we have this AI tool. Last week I ended up rewriting stuff myself because it randomly adds empty paragraphs, sounds like an ad or doesn't rewrite shit. Or it hallucinates.
Hallucinating AI seriously hurts real ppl. Did you hear about that Deloitte thing in Australia?
https://apnews.com/article/australia-ai-errors-deloitte-ab54858680ffc4ae6555b31c8fb987f3
Deloitte Australia to partially refund $290,000 report filled with suspected AI-generated errors
Deloitte Australia will partially refund the Australian government for a report filled with apparent AI-generated errors. The report published in July includes a fabricated court judgment quote and references to nonexistent research. Researcher Chris Rudge alerted the media about the errors. Deloitte reviewed the report and confirmed some inaccuracies. The company agreed to repay the final contract installment, with the amount to be disclosed later. The revised report published Friday disclosed the use of Azure OpenAI in its creation. Quotes and references to nonexistent reports were removed but the report's recommendations remained unchanged.
@mark And sorry for moving away from the arts. I don't think it will hurt the arts too much, either, not the stuff that matters anyway. But it will hit hard everywhere else.
Brett R@Impertinenzija @mark Putting aside (briefly) the climate issues, my concern re: art is that new experienced artists will only come from those with enough spare money and time to gain art experience on the side. If humans stop designing greeting cards, billboards, music album "covers", illustrations on how to assemble your new desk, airplane safety brochures, or any other art job that pays the bills, how will new artists gain experience?
*Apologies to anyone in these example jobs, I'm ignorant
@swiftone @Impertinenzija I think there's definitely a concern there. The story of "you can get a job in this industry doing ephemeral work that will pay the bills but not be particularly remarkable or fame-inducing" is a story that these AI technologies challenge and disrupt.
I don't think that ends artists getting experience; I've seen enough people upload their things for free on the internet to know that people do this because they like the way it feels to do something that means something to them, not because they're going to get paid for it. But it sure would be unfair if only the wealthy can afford to have the leisure time to do that sort of thing.
We need universal basic income yesterday. This is only one of the reasons.
Fritz Adalis@oatmeal
You said it was going to be short...
You said it was going to be short...
Third spruce tree on the left"Pregnant Mario lactating jamba juice all over Baka from street fighter"
<spurfs coffee out nose>
ow!
the rest? 
Keep doing talented shit you wonderful bastard, Matthew. 
Mark Down
Henry Wilkinson@oatmeal Butt Rat may be the next big thing, lots of people are saying this.
Blort™ 🐀Ⓥ🥋☣️
Jesper Kamstrup Linnet@oatmeal Beautifully put!
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦@oatmeal ever noticed how it's "AI art" when generated but "content" when human made? 
(just to be clear, this is not a jab at your use of the term, it makes sense here obviously as a way to connect to the audience; just a general observation)
Eric Peacock@oatmeal Related: Here's the definitive documentary about the guy who made those original Jurassic Park dinosaurs not suck:
https://www.jurassicpunkmovie.com
Tip: the doc is about much more than CG dinosaur production.
image description:
a drawing of a falling laptop and a paintbrush on dark grey background; the paintbrush and the laptop both drip a bit of colorful paint.
text:
A cartoonist's review of AI art
Romain Maneschi 🇫🇷
proedie@oatmeal Is AI Art art in the first place? I say it isn’t. I’m somewhat exited about AI image generation and I feel this sence of wonder when I see it, because I am asking myself: how does this work? It’s the same feeling I have when I watch visual effects in a film and I ask myself: How did they do that? On the other hand, I am totally bored by CGI effects. I know how they did it.
Samæ@oatmeal Ah! This landed recently from kurtzgesagt: https://youtu.be/_zfN9wnPvU0
AI Slop Is Destroying The Internet
Anthropy@oatmeal If there's anything I really really appreciate about AI art
it's that it finally seems to make people care about the process and not just the resulting picture.
Drawing with digital tablets is significantly easier compared to manually mixing paints from manually collected pigments.
I'd say that doesn't mean either is more valid than the other, but you can appreciate the difference in process, you can imagine the blood sweat and tears it took, it gives the creation a body, a background
@oatmeal and just to be clear I'm not saying we should appreciate AI art or whatever, I'm saying I specifically appreciate the one side effect where people care more about the process, rather than only the result.
Although I suppose one could argue that, you could appreciate everything in isolation; computer generated flame fractals can be beautiful in their own ways too. But comparing that to someone who would draw such a thing manually, is somewhere between ridiculous and very out of touch 😅
Likely Jan LukasExcellent analysis. This reminds me very much of my early days as a communications professional, specialising in small business needs.
At the time, technological limitations (anf the skillsets needed to use professional-level prepress tools) meant that generally, most clients recognised the need for professional help with layout, design, and so forth.
But the *copy* (text) of whatever was needed? Clients overwhelmingly insisted they could write and would want to provide that content -- despite it generally being terrible for the intended use.
It took me a long time to figure out that many of them considered writing merely to be a functional thing that they already spent 12 years in school doing, so they 'must' already be experts.
There was zero understanding that graduating grade 12 is not the same as knowing, practising and developing the conventions, skills and techniques specific to writing for different genres and audiences, or in this case, target markets.
😐
Lady@likelyjanlukas @oatmeal I have a Communications degree but no one will hire me in that field...
In my city at that time there were numerous opportunities as there are extensive offices for three levels of government.
However, I ended up trying going it alone -- which was its own joy and horror, in equal measure. 😛
JamesThere was this thing where companies wrote their own positive, motivating mission statement. The company I was at wrote something on the line of, "We do the best we can."
Corporate slapped them down - hard.
A few years later I'm at a company that wrote advertising copy about life-saving equipment with the line, "we do the best possible."
I told the writer I found it somewhat weak. I got reported to their boss, my boss, HR ...
I still find it a wimpy statement.
When done well (AND rigorously applied/used by an organisation), mission statements can be extremely helpful.
Alas, they're often gibberish.
I concur the one you mention is weak but at least it is intelligible. 😛
Ottawa, Canada's national capital, was (perhaps still is??? I live thousands of km further west) known as 'Silicon Valley north' back when tech giants such as Blackberry were booming there.
I don't know who got paid for the job, but somehow the tagline "Ottawa: Technically Beautiful" made the cut … until the big public reveal and pretty much everyone laughed themselves silly that any organisation would *willingly* use that phrase to describe itself. 😂😂😂
rhempel
krig@oatmeal I feel the way you feel about AI art about everything AI. The words are empty, the connections are trite and bland, it’s just an endless soup of mashed potato mix. I don’t think AI is good even for backgrounds or form emails or job applications or anything because whoever is at the receiving end will pick up on the complete lack of energy in it. I also don’t think it’s inevitable. It’s enormously costly and seems to generate absolutely zero profit so far. This period of subsidized AI everywhere can’t last.
@krig Some things really want zero energy though.
I do flowcharts to describe logical flows in programs. I want to spend exactly 0 seconds bumping boxes 5 pixels left or right; instead, I describe them in a domain specific language (usually Mermaid, sometimes dot, the graphviz language) and feed the description to a renderer to spit out the image.
People pick up on the complete lack of energy in it... Because all the energy went into the underlying architectural design, this is just a visual representation to make that design easy to understand for people unpracticed in building the picture in their minds from the text description.
I think a lot of AI is going to pour into those niches. If I could go one step further and build those flowcharts by handing my code to the generator and going "Here, figure it out, and I'll let you know if you captured the salient bits or need to do another pass," I would.
Wolf480pl
Abban
aburka 🫣@oatmeal you lost me at this part tbh
This is credulous nonsense... AI is an advanced next-token predictor, not a supercomputer. The output is full of hallucinations and inaccuracies.
Daniel Gibson
Noodlemaz@Doomed_Daniel @aburka @oatmeal yep total nonsense there. It's making Keith think he's great at all sorts but he's actually just making more work for everyone else and atrophying his brain and skills in the process.
Michael Knudsen@oatmeal oh man, I love this!
I hate¹ how gen-AI makes the world a poorer place because people can now get things they don't care about much cheaper, so we end up with worse things.
When you commission someone to do things, they tend to -care- about what they make and will take care to do it right.
Recently a children's book was published here, where the lion had hooves. The publisher didn't notice because, well, they didn't care. A human artist would have cared to get this right, but the world got a book with poor drawings.
Subtitles are getting increasingly worse, and it looks like LLM work because it's stuff like using the wrong word because of a lack of context. The movie gets worse because the meaning is distorted so you end up being distracted trying to make sense of it.
The thing is.. we are constantly exposed to this slop.. and I worry people are just going to get used to it.
The book was retracted and they ended up hiring an illustrator. Next time, who knows.
1) I don't use the word hate lightly but I don't know how else to put it.
Ronan
Preston Maness ☭@oatmeal "AI has accelerated our abilities... It enables ordinary minds to have extraordinary abilities." It really, really hasn't, and it really, really doesn't. The same disdain you have for AI in the field of Art translates just fine for AI in any other Field.
Edit: I knew there was a term for the phenomenon, but had forgotten the name: the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.
Juhani Lehtimäki@oatmeal a very good take on the topic.
Cley Faye@oatmeal You talk about feelings and stuff when viewing a piece. I think I have a similar concept, but mainly about the amount of work put in something. The sum of all details, big and small, known circumstances, etc. that lead something seemingly basic (xkcd, or indeed the ratcopter) to really click, while some seemingly perfectly rendered thing don't trigger anything in the viewer.
Somehow, I think the work of the authors creep into their productions, one way or another. And we can see that.
Yncke
KevinFlynn 
@oatmeal
I agree with most of what you said.
What I do know is that AI art will do what clipart did, and give the talentless people who understand the value of having visuals break up mind-numbing blocks of text the opportunity to illustrate their documents.
As long as nobody pretends that it's an original artistic composition, there's no harm done. In return we give people who are otherwise visually mute the opportunity to mumble a little
Also, thank you for "ten trillion teraclops per floppyshart"
laura lemay@oatmeal I spotted the the Allie Brosh reference immediately in the middle of this and I am so so happy to see her name in your credits. Yay! ❤️
rainey 🌻
Dźwiedziu@oatmeal
> AI has accelerated our abilities (…)
“AI” as in the overused since the 70 wanketeering term, or as the current overhyped “AI” as LLMs and diffusion slop extruders?
If first then well okay.
If second then heeeeeeeeell no.
The current lineup of AI wank can't do the things you mention, as it doesn't understand what they are. Being probabilistic models they only statistically estimate the next word or static noise iteration.
F4GRX Sébastien@oatmeal do we have to?
Astrid@oatmeal I will reuse the eating styrofoam expression.
@oatmeal and despite your prudence I will say it, even for administrative purposes, ai art is shitty crap that deserve to die and be banned. It's not avoiding tech. It's avoiding technofascism that reduces every human to a production machine driven by engagement by the DataFecal chief of staff.
Sylvia Wenmackers 🦉🍀@oatmeal Loved it. Pairs well with your this-is-how-projects-actually-come-together frame from "Erasers are wonderful" https://theoatmeal.com/comics/creativity_erasers I bet those who sell or buy into AI tools don't know the power of erasers, since they want to go from plan to finish without the very detours (and optional suffering) that make the journey worthwhile and that give the end result a soul. 💌
dazfuller 
famousringo@oatmeal “that’s a cool painting”
“I made it with AI”
Rob