In my opinion the sine qua non of photography and indeed all art is that it transmits human experience because shared experience is one of the core binding elements and joys of human existence.
The internet and now AI has slowly separated the experience from the final product. That's absolutely an emergent pressure that comes from digital sharing simply because sites that encourage that are more likely to get more engagement due to the resulting superficiality when art is separated from experience. Indeed, once we are separated from a true thing, the search for that thing becomes eternal.
As much as I hate AI, I think AI itself should be considered an artistic reflection of machine experience. But by elevating that, we lower ourselves and forget the true meaning of sharing art for the purposes of human connection. So we are giving up a legacy and tradition for economic short-term advantage and the opiate-like qualities of advanced technology.
It's a sad process and one I think we should fight against, although I acknowledge I am in the minority.
AI pictures / art prose or poetry I think of as more like a separate art form sort of like the "ultimate kitsch art" since it has been trained on a large amount of images and art in general and derives an output that attempts to imitate (inference) other pieces of art. I don't hate that type of art and I actually like AI right now but I do recognize why people hate it and its why I think it is a separate art form at this point.
So is art itself. AI art is the ultimate fuck you to the IP/Copyright crowd, and the fact that the supposedly left wing artists are turning into Luddite copyright trolls at the moment that their field becomes opened to the masses tells me that most folks who purport to hold left wing sympathies actually don’t. I always knew that the performative leftism thing was bullshit. RMS, Aaron Swartz, huggingface and mistral are far more liberatory than 50 years of Marxist artists wasting our time with empty claims of liberation
Never ever claim to support the poor if you get butthurt at the idea that poor people can now access tools to create beautiful art. And if your first thought is to take shots at me for claiming that “Ai art can be beautiful”, you’re part of the problem!!!
Art has always been open to the masses. Poor people could already access tools to create beautiful art, they do so all the time.
You're just venting your anti-leftist prejudice, I get that. Finding a way to work an anti-leftist rant into the subject at hand is practically a pastime around around here. But your thesis that only the wealthy and privileged were capable of creating art until generative AI came around is absurd. We've literally been in the midst of a global creative renaissance across every creative field, AI wasn't necessary for any of it.
When the “tools” are built from countless lifetimes of blood sweat and tears dedicated to mastery and bottled by mega corps to siphon all of the value and sell it back to the people by laundering their intellectual property, your angle falls flat. The “poor” can’t eat art. They used to be able to sell their art to buy food. Now 5 tech bros are seizing all of that food money, artists are starving, humanity is being regurgitated into slop, and you’re cheerleading for molloch.
It's not even that. A lot of papers are trained from copyrighted works without permission by less than five people groups in academia or startups. The systems to make the models can be done extremely cheap.
People are downvoting wrongthink again. This is a valid rebuttal to a pretty poor and not very historical comment. The new narrative must be perpetuated at all costs.
This is a misunderstanding of Marx. Marx would have loathed AI, because it it the ultimate form of alienation ("Entfremdung") of people from their work.
He would have loathed the industrialization of art and the concentration of the means of production in the hands of huge corporations.
Marx proposed the equality in the access to the means of production. He never said that everyone has the right to "be" the greatest chess player by using Stockfish. He never said that everyone must be an equally great mathematician.
The empty claims about equality are from the huge corporations who hold the means of production and steal from the original producers.
I'm not going to bother engaging with... whatever ideological soapbox this is, so I'm just going to address one baffling assertion:
"Never ever claim to support the poor if you get butthurt at the idea that poor people can now access tools to create beautiful art."
Being able to afford a decent laptop/machine to run diffusion models or a SaaS subscription to Midjourney is VASTLY less financially viable to poor people then just putting pencil to paper.
Poor people have ALWAYS been artists, and artists have ALMOST ALWAYS been poor people.
The internet and now AI has slowly separated the experience from the final product. That's absolutely an emergent pressure that comes from digital sharing simply because sites that encourage that are more likely to get more engagement due to the resulting superficiality when art is separated from experience. Indeed, once we are separated from a true thing, the search for that thing becomes eternal.
As much as I hate AI, I think AI itself should be considered an artistic reflection of machine experience. But by elevating that, we lower ourselves and forget the true meaning of sharing art for the purposes of human connection. So we are giving up a legacy and tradition for economic short-term advantage and the opiate-like qualities of advanced technology.
It's a sad process and one I think we should fight against, although I acknowledge I am in the minority.