I strongly believe that generative AI fanatics, those eager to cut costs by automating away artists, do not fully understand or value art. It’s sad.
I explored this in the effort of creation, which discusses opinions on generative art, and why people create art
From Kazuo Ishiguro:
stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?
From R.F. Kuang:
“Art connects us deeply to people who are not like us”
- Humans can only try to understand each other through “imperfect methods of communication”
- Visual art and writing enables an openness to someone else’s mind, which is essential for “an ethical attitude towards the world”
From Kiyotaka Oshiyama:
Lines contain the artist’s feelings, their will to paint something. If you trace them and make them look mechanical, the information in the lines is lost. […] Even if AI were to imitate humans and reproduce the rough sketches, it would just be a design. It would be a fake. The lines have meaning because they were drawn by humans.
From Ted Chiang:
An artist—whether working digitally or with paint—implicitly makes far more decisions during the process of making a painting than would fit into a text prompt of a few hundred words. […] Art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception. […] Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium. But the creators of traditional novels, paintings, and films are drawn to those art forms because they see the unique expressive potential that each medium affords. It is their eagerness to take full advantage of those potentialities that makes their work satisfying, whether as entertainment or as art.
From David Zwirner:
Great art is, by definition, complex, and it expects work from us when we engage with it. […] I would contend that art and culture are the most important vehicles by which we come to understand one another. They make us curious about that which’ is different or unfamiliar, and ultimately allow us to accept it, even embrace it.
I attended a panel by the art and game directors of Final Fantasy. They talked about decisions made when directing the Heavensward game trailer.
- One thing the art director really focused on was the clicking sound during a scene where the main character dons a gauntlet. He described how this sound would go completely unnoticed amidst the noise of a real battlefield. But he really wanted to exaggerate it and bring it to the forefront. In fact, he had several back-and-forths with the sound effects team to iterate on just this element. At one point, the sound designer sent back the same clip unchanged, thinking the director wouldn’t be able to tell. The director noticed that it was the same as before.
- The minute decisions, the details most may not even consciously notice or think matters at all. All of this goes into creating something great.
AI slop first and foremost is lazy. I attended a Stardew Valley symphony concert, where they displayed fun animations of the game characters. As they show the very first animation, I hear a voice from behind me: “is this AI?” This is where we are at. Stardew Valley is a labor of love from a single person, who coded, composed, wrote, and drew every single piece of the game himself over 4.5 years. We are at the symphony, where some of the best musicians in the city, people who dedicate their lives to music, are performing. A hall dedicated to sharing the arts. And you don’t think a human is capable of producing the animation on screen? You think the producers would do something that disrespectful to the creator? You think that little of artists?
AI bros cannot comprehend the time and effort some people are willing to put into a craft and medium they are passionate about. Again, “generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium.”
Art is expression, empathy, community, translation, and deliberate decision-making.