Can't seem to understand Graphic Designers and or people who constantly cry about generative AI being "not art".

Why are they so angry?

!graphic designer

The whole point of art is being creative and coming up with new content. AI art is based on previous people’s work

@IdontHaveAName that is certainly a factor.

The biggest reason Designers and Artists hate it is pretty much the same, as in other industries (like the music and film industry).

Imagine you as a creator made some cool shit, and people start copying your it without ever mentioning you. That would make you pretty annoyed, because now you have multiple copies of _your own_ stuff out there, but only one of them is actually from you. There are loads of implications and consequences with that.

Now imagine the same situation, but instead of one or multiple people copying your stuff it's an algorithm, essentially doing the same. The effect is the same or even worse.

The underlying problem of that is, that someone (or something) is taking your shit, and profiting off of that.

If Midjourney and all these other AI Image gens would actually pay for their training data (that means pay their creators) and/or continuously license from the owners, that problem wouldn't even exist.

The definition of art is as follows:

" the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power. "

notice the "human creative skill" part. Art is something inherently human. For example you can find the most beautiful valley or a gorgeous field if flowers, but no one ever would call it "art" because it was not made by a human... But if you come across a field of flowers specifically planted and arranged by a human then you could call it art. If you find the portrait of jesus on your toast it's not art, but if said portrait is painted by a human it's called art. So by definition images created by AI are not art and can't be. It's a cold machine flow of data throw silicon and if you get rid of the random seed it will consistently create pixel perfect copies over and over

@Hazarth

But, best art usually are mathematical? Found in nature, nature's design, art and problem solving is beautiful. Golden ratio, which is found in everything, from nature to humans to da vinci paintings to products and logos. There is a mathematical reason why things look beautiful, why colour palettes look beautiful and why music sounds good.

To say art is a human thing is perhaps narcissistic? Humans use art to express themselves, for their own ego fueled reasons and for their own fame and riches.

Graphic Designers with 7th grade mathematical levels using advanced softwares to do their heavy lifting shouldn't really call themselves "designers" or "artists". At least chill out.

@kanyewest I don't think that's how it works. I mean the golden ratio isn't "art" automatically. It's used to create art. Also we don't call "math" art by itself, only the resulting formulas if they are really something good. Math is the tool in this example. It's as if you'd call a brush "art" because it's the base for creating stunning art. You can definitely call an equation a "work of art" but that equation was created by a human, understood by a human and has to be appreciated by humans for it to be considered art.

I don't think it's narcissistic at all. Art didn't exist without us. We created both the word and the concept. I think it would be a incorrect to start attributing human concepts to nature.

AI is a tool, without human input it's nothing, yet even with human input it barely does more than search and mangle a large database of numbers (overly simplified, but not incorrect).

Remember that the entire image space of any AI model is already perfectly mathematically defined and severly limited. While a human can paint any possible combination of strokes on a canvas, bounded only by reality itself. the model can generate exactly as many images as there are seeds per each feature it is trained to follow. For example if we only had models with 3 features (say, chair, dog, cat would be the only prompt words that would actually be accepted as tokens) you could generate exactly 4,294,967,295 (max seed apparently) * (C′(3,1) + C′(3,2) + C′(3,3)):

4,294,967,295 * 19 = 81604378605 unique images...

in reality it's much more because it has more 3 features, but also the images don't change drastically between seeds, going from seed 1 to 2 just introduces small changes overall. so probably a division by 2 would be reasonable as well.

How can something so bound and well defined be called "creative" in the first place?

@Hazarth Your logic implies that art cannot exist without humans, which is false?

Even if humans created the equation, the equation follows the laws of geometry, mathematics and physics which in turn makes it beautiful. Not because humans created fancy letters to represent them.

@IdontHaveAName so is current art.

Artist study and imitate previous artists style to develop their own.

Also AI has its own style. Midjourney looks different than dalle, etc.

They're mad because it was hard enough to convince people to pay for art before, now it's going to be impossible.

@lungdart I would like to share that I have a bias against graphic designers. My stepbro is a graphic designer and I fucking hate that guy. Thus, I don't respect graphic designers. 12 years of secondary education, 4 years of higher education just to become a guy who creates uses photoshop.

@kanyewest spite is a legit reason to hate a profession IMO.

!graphic designer

Before I became a software engineer, I was a transcriptionist for a decade. I saw how the industry changed with the improvement of voice recognition software and how some companies stopped paying reasonable rates for transcription and started treating transcriptionists as glorified proofreaders (encouraging professionals to use voice recognition to generate a transcript and then just fix it). People started expecting to pay less to get more in a shorter amount of time. It was exhausting. And it wasn’t what we signed up for when we got into the industry and got really good at our jobs.

I’d imagine AI art feels the same way for graphic designers, that there’s a push for them to become glorified editors of content generated by AI instead of professionals who use their own skills to do the work they were trained to do.

Because it's not art. It is cosmic background radiation that has been assembled to statistically resemble art by a non sentient algorithm.

It devalues the skill and work people put in to create real art, because to the average person, what AI outputs is good enough. When in reality, it is a ghoulish insult full of oddities and errors.

It also doesn't help that Big Tech, yet again, is using their infinite wealth and resources to ruin the lives of the average person for their own benefit.

@kanyewest

It's not false. Art indeed can't exist without humans. Or rather if we die out the art we created will keep existing, but if we never existed there would be no art.

However I'm interested to see if you can name a single thing that majority of people would call "art" that existed before humans.

Also regarding equations and laws of geometry, you're not correct. the equation doesn't follow the laws of geometry, there's no such thing as "laws of geometry". The golden ratio appears in nature, yes, but if we, the humans, didn't find it appealing and aesthetic, we would never follow it in the first place. There's a good chance that creatures on earth are interested in the golden ratio purely because we evolved alongside it, but there very well might be alien life that doesn't see it, it doesn't mean anything to them, and it doesn't appeal to them. My point being that it's not any kind of law, it's just something *we* specifically found we like

Does anybody here recall what happened to telephone switch operators?