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It's debatable depending on who you're talking to whether taste is more "important" than execution/the mechanical part (I think calling it the mechanical part is a little misleading because that suggests one is brainlessly implementing a fixed algorithm). Maybe for the manager/CEO types who have a grand pie in the sky vision that they need an army to implement "taste" is more important. But I think for the artist themselves being able to spawn something into existence with their own labor is a large part of the experience.

Yes, we'll have lots more art for people to enjoy, but fewer artists.

Taste is essentially a set of heuristics for what has worked for you and the people you learned from, and how the details of your current situation feed into it. You could argue that AI has almost nothing but taste.

For humans, taste is learned through friction against the details of your problem, and finding what ends up sliding smoothly through the details of the medium you're working in. For AI, it's the same, but it comes from the details of the training data.

We've automated taste well enough for most production needs, and its only going to get better over time. If you don't think it'll be good enough for artistic needs too, you're placing a pretty hard bet against AI.

"Taste is all that's left" is pure cope. Taste is one of the first things where humans become useless.

>We've automated taste well enough for most production needs, and its only going to get better over time. If you don't think it'll be good enough for artistic needs too, you're placing a pretty hard bet against AI.

It's not about placing bets on the ability of AI.

"Taste" can also include the human behind the piece. For example, I love listening to black metal. My "taste" as a consumer of black metal includes sombre atmospheres, oppressive walls of noise, dissonant, angular rhythmic guitar sections, etc.

But my "taste" in black metal extends to the artists behind the music. Black metal has a huge issue with racism and white supremacy. There is a lot of sonically interesting music made by hateful individuals in the black metal scene that I don't listen to because the artists values are antithetical to my own.

In a similar manner, art made primarily through generative AI may technically resemble art that normally matches my "taste", but I find myself wholly uninterested in it because the artists behind it have values that are antithetical to my own.

PS: I'm not trying to say "AI artists = nazis". I'm trying to say that your own motivations and world view behind the art you create influence whether I'll engage with it or not.

Yes, that's fair. But at least if judged purely on output, human taste is no moat.

So, if we're going to preserve human art, we either need AI to fail naturally, or we need to explicitly reject it. The same goes for the rest of human creativity.

> You could argue that AI has almost nothing but taste

But then you could argue that it has nothing but trained taste, and isn't creative. Then somebody could ask what you mean by that, and you could throw up your hands and say "I don't know", which is the decent thing to do, because none of us know, but it means something.

It isn't about the merits of the output, except that there are some creative outputs that it won't produce. But we can't formally describe those, because they're creative. They're all different, they have different qualities, there's no formula, and you don't get there by training. Once you "get there" you have to get there again, which is to say, keep being creative. This process can be mediated by actually daubing actual paint around.

>But maybe you can get good at the more important "taste" part first

I keep putting quotes around "taste" because its hard to properly describe. Whatever it is, it seems like a mixture of observing what has worked for others, personal preference, worldview, etc. "Getting good at" taste is therefor hard to quantify.

Furthermore, having good "taste" in the art you consume doesn't translate to having good "taste" in the art you create. There exists a gap between the appreciation and application of said "taste", and you need to practice creating a lot of stuff to shorten that gap. And again, these two sides of "taste" are deeply intertwined. The kind of art you consume tends to change as you hone your creative skills and begin to see the technique behind it all, and that in turn influences the kind of art you may wish to create.

Being able to rapidly prototype concepts might help people get good at it, in a sort of I know it when I see it and need to explore, kind of way.

>Being able to rapidly prototype concepts might help people get good at it,

Again, it's hard to quantify or validate. One thing I will say is that people can often misinterpret the things that make a certain piece of art work. It's often the little details, or even the absence of detail that make or break it. This is the sort of stuff that requires you to train your eye to notice.

For example, Da Vinci is often heralded as a master of the human form and proportions (the Vitruvian man). But many of his later works often eschewed realistic proportions, with his figures often being 10-11 heads tall. This is a subtle detail that influences how a piece feels, and yet most people would completely miss it!

Both sides of this are about exploration. Compare with collage: it's a different thing. It's not painting or drawing. It's fast, and it's art, and it depends on and reuses other people's painting and drawing. It's not strictly superior.

I encourage you to do an experiment. Get two friends to learn a subject -- one spends 20 hours on it, actually solving problems by hand. One reads AI answers to problems.

At the end of those twenty hours, quiz them. Get them to solve a problem. Who do you think will do better?

Learning happens when the brain struggles with problems. Trying to shortcut that only prevents learning.

I’m truly so tired of hearing opinions about art from people who don't participate in or practice it

Yes I agree, you should try generating your own custom AI assisted art. You might be surprised by the enjoyment you get out of manifesting a vision in your head that you could not have produced before.

No dude I'm good. I respect my peers in art too much to use a machine that was built by stealing from them.

I like sketching! Am I a one of your "peers in art"?

Please stop trying to shit in our mouths.

Here's a general principle: non-participants can have opinions about our thing (whatever thing that is). If they trot out the same naive dumb lines of thought over and over, and we can't put into words why they're wrong, that's a regrettable failure of discussion, but it's nobody's fault, and they should continue with their aggravating droning until we actually get our act together and find something effective to say in reply.

Yup and here's how the discussion always goes and why it persists:

> "AI images are not art."

> "Define art."

I have yet to see someone produce a definition for art which excludes AI generated images but includes various widely accepted forms of art.

>I have yet to see someone produce a definition for art which excludes AI generated images but includes various widely accepted forms of art.

You can't define art for the same reasons you can't define what it is to be human. But most people can easily recognize what is/behaviors that are inhumane.

And yet, it's very problematic when someone thinks they've defined what it means to be human and decides to do something about everything that falls on the other side of their arbitrary line.

Art is for everyone and everyone can have an opinion on it. Dont be so elitist.

A ream of printer paper and 5 fineliners are about $10 and there's tons of online tutorials. Nobody is gatekeeping Art you just refuse to try actually doing it.

You are gatekeeping though. The poster you're being disparaging to has created something new, they are producing art even if it doesn't meet your standards.

>The poster you're being disparaging to has created something new

The big issue here is that through all of human history, effort was a necessary prerequisite to making art. Whether that effort came from mixing paint together before sitting down in front of an easel, hiking through the back country to find the perfect spot for a photograph, or fixing n-gons in Blender all evening. If you created a piece of art, there was a shared understanding amongst other artists that you cared enough to put in the work to make something. For most artists, it's the work/journey/process they cherish, not just the end goal. Putting in the work to make your art is usually the only "gatekeeping" that happens in the art community.

But AI is allowing people to short circuit the path from idea -> creation, which begs the question: is that actually creating? Is prompting for a picture substantially any different than tweaking your search on Google images until you find a photo that resembles what you had in mind? Is creating just having a shiny new picture, or is it the hours/weeks/months of effort, failure, and successes that happened leading up to the picture?

Point is: you can call it "gatekeeping" if you want, but all we're really saying is that creation != ideation.

I would say that it opens up art to a wider audience. Despite the lack of effort, they're still creating something.

Where this becomes even more of an issue is imagine somebody spends substantial time with these tools to create something - editing the output of vid models for example. Some would say that's not art but at the end of the day it is just using a tool.

I wouldn't.

Thats the beauty of art, appreciation is subjective and different for everyone. The only thing you have control over is whether you are open to that or not.

>Thats the beauty of art, appreciation is subjective and different for everyone. The only thing you have control over is whether you are open to that or not.

Subjectivity is not a shield that protects a work from criticism, and disliking a piece of art does not necessarily mean you are closed minded. It could simply be that you don't find it interesting, or that you find the values of the artist reprehensible, or that you find it overly derivative, etc.

I completely agree with everything you are saying, but that is not what is being argued in this thread.

Failure is the most relevant part of that, not effort. But yes, tweaking an image search is creative, and tweaking a prompt is creative. The process isn't the process of using a pencil, though, and it isn't a camera, or clay, or a mesh, or a replacement for interacting with any other medium.

>But yes, tweaking an image search is creative, and tweaking a prompt is creative.

I don't believe they are. Searching and prompting are far more akin to a customer asking their artist to tweak the commission.

Which is also creative! You have a theory of what you want, you experiment to try to get it to happen (in this case by instructing the artist), you don't like the result, you revise your theory and try a new experiment.

Of course the commissioned artist is creative too, and the artists AIs are trained on are creative, and the artists who made the engravings that Max Ernst cut up for his collages were also creative. Creativity everywhere. Even Microsoft employees are creative sometimes, I believe, even when at work.

I guess your point is that we now have the option to produce uncreative slop, which is true and annoying.

AI enables artistic creation in the same way that Papa John's enables me to cook great pizza at home.

They're buying it from the AI. They haven't produced anything new.

So? You still got to eat and enjoy your pizza and it didnt take anything away from the hand crafted pizza artisans out there. In fact if anything Papa Johns has enabled many more people to enjoy pizza than would have been able to if only die hard pizza crafters were allowed to make and sell pizza.

>In fact if anything Papa Johns has enabled many more people to enjoy pizza than would have been able to if only die hard pizza crafters were allowed to make and sell pizza.

Well, your analogy assumes people consume art and food for the same reasons. Does the desire to experiencing a new piece of art come from the same place that makes you crave for a slice of pizza?

Of course not.

Another disconnect I often see in these discussions is that there seems to be a misunderstanding about what most artists conceive as "creating art." "Creating art" is not primarily about consuming or satiating some part of our brains. To use your analogy, we're not baking pizzas purely because we wish to eat them, but because we value the process of baking the pizza itself!

When artists have these sorts of conversations with people, it tends to turn into frustrating arguments due to this misunderstanding. When I question whether you're "creating" art, its not me trying to scold you and others who like to ask AI to generate a pictures you thought up. It's that I'm seeing people misinterpret the end result of creation with the act of creation itself.

Again, for artists these are two separate things!

The pizza analogy isa not mine, it is the post above mine . You can stop replying to me on multiple different threads now, theres no point in us conversing in multiple different conversations on old threads you are deciding to reply on.

By the way, you do realise I am an artist dont you? I think that proves that everything you are saying is false, because here we have two artists disagreeing on what artists think!

>I think that proves that everything you are saying is false, because here we have two artists disagreeing on what artists think

I also said "most artists" not "all artists". I'm not terribly surprised that a poster on Hacker News tends to think differently than most artists, seeing as this community tends to attract the sort of person who is pro-AI.

I draw all the time, I love it. I also dont care if somebody else chooses to use a machine to do it. Why does somebody else using ai affect me sketching in my pad?

Don't be naïve

>Why does somebody else using ai affect me sketching in my pad

It may not for you, but obviously it does impact lots of artists ability to make a living off their art, to find community in their art, and on a longer time scale it could even change how society values art.

It is not elitist to expect people to be honest about what role they play in the creation of generative AI.

It is elitist to only consider opinions from "peers in art" as valid opinions on the subject, as OP is doing.

>It is elitist to only consider opinions from "peers in art" as valid opinions on the subject, as OP is doing.

For me, it's not about invalidating others opinions. In the same way I hold my doctors opinions of my health in higher regard than a random person on the internet, I hold the opinions creatives/artists/etc. on the subject of creation in higher regard than people who use generative AI.

So you can have your opinions, but it's not "elitism" for those of us who actually have experience doing a thing to state our opinions as well.

I feel your opinion is wrong here, and I dont say that lightly. Medicine is a science, art is art. They are very different things. You can trust somebody to know more about a science than you do because it is a discipline of knowledge. You cannot do that with art, as the beauty of art is in the eye of the beholder and has no relation whatsoever to the knowledge of the person creating it.

In no way can you trust someone to know more about the beauty of art than you do, because nobody else has any idea of what you yourself consider beautiful art.

No, you don't understand what art is. Art emerges from a process. If you have no process, you can't make art. An idea, or a prompt, is not a process.

> you don't understand what art is

This is one of the most elitist and hilarious things I have ever read XD

you clearly don't know what art is either.

haha, you actually managed to top it! XD

Sorry oh great art master, I am but a poor peasant who cannot grasp the vast complexities of your world. Please forgive me for daring to speak about something I not worthy of understanding.

The point is that these are not separate. They cannot be separate.

Deep understanding, taste, aesthetic, sensitivity to nuance, and so on...none of that can be developed without intimate involvement with the process, with the thing itself.

Your example of poisonous paint vs buying it in tubes is a fallacy, because that isn't what we're talking about. We're talking about _actually painting_ vs just...telling someone else to paint.