this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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If you want, you can say that "prompt engineering" is an art. The act of engineering that prompts to get a picture, maybe that has a skill we might call art.
But no, the jpeg isn't art. It's a million cut-up images formed to make our monkey brains go "I enjoy".
Do you do this prompt engineering? The last time I had this conversation it turned out I was talking to someone that called themselves an artist because they put words into an ai.
Let's see if we can keep this civil, shall we?
First and foremost the model isn't compositing bits and pieces of other pictures - it's predicting what the next pixel should look like based on its training data. It is generating the image. In laymans terms: it's drawing based on what it has 'learned' by looking at other art. It's pretty interesting honestly.
I do have a background in art, though it is not my profession. Regardless of that- there are no requirements to create nor appreciate art.
A few good excerpts from wikipedia:
Everyone is entitled to their opinions. Ours seem to differ- and that's fine. My views are simple: if someone can express themselves through a medium- it is a form of art.
Prompt engineering may be a form of expression, but the ai generated images composed of copying what it saw previously and repeating is not art. It has no humanity in it. The brush strokes have nothing to say. It is really no different than the wind blowing about cut-up versions of other people's art.
If someone intentionally opens a window that allows the wind to blow in and shuffle up the cut-up art into a new image, that may be performance art, the act of opening the window. But the final result, which has no humanity to it, is not art. Will never be art.
Prompt engineering is no different than opening that window and then letting the ai wind shuffle up everything it knew over and over until you find an esthetic you like. It's not art. It will never be art. Because it fundamentally can not be art.
I know I expressed this already but the wind analogy doesn't work here. It isn't random nor undirected.
As far as copying goes - considering your staunch stance on what is and isn't art I think it's fair to say you have some involvement with it.
Regardless of the medium we all start the same way. Imitation. In traditional art we are trained by observing what the masses find pleasing. When we observe most artists work we can identify these roots. Very few artists art is not based in the works of those before them.
This article does a fine job of expressing the above.
AI assisted (generative) art is a tool that provides a user access to a compendium of learned styles. It lowers the barrier of entry to express yourself through art.
I posit that this is such a divisive topic because there is so little difference between how we learn and how these models do. It garners a lot of the same negativity that a prodigy might. "Why is it so easy for them when I worked so hard. They don't appreciate it as much as me."
In the end art belongs to nobody and everybody. Art is amorphous; formless. Art and artistic expression can exist anywhere- even here. I personally am not so high minded to gatekeep such a broad field.
I have no involvement with art. I have a lot of involvement with ai. I know what it makes is not art because I make the sausage, and that sausage is nothing but blown about and recombined shredded versions of everyone else's art.
Ai doesn't learn. That's marketing. It can't reason. It can't create. It can only generate an endless stream of anything but art. It's the antithesis of art.
I won't respond to your next comment for what it's worth. This conversation stopped having value five replies back.
Enough value to respond though. Interesting.
Be that as it may: considering your involvement you should have known the differences between random copy and paste and pixel prediction. I'm afraid I doubt your claims. Your views on art were pretty polarized - I'm pleased to have provided contrast to them.