Thread by @rob_sheridan

Oh no, someone used a *checks notes* digital art tool to win the *checks notes* digital art contest at the state fair, this is TEH END OF ART

arstechnica.com/information-te…

Brief thread, since people have asked me to weigh in on this. 1/

The most common complaint here is the very old and tired "that's not art, anyone could do that!" But no one else did. He did. Standing in an art gallery looking at a banana taped to a wall complaining "I could do that" misses the point: You DIDN'T, nor would you have. 2/

"It's lazy, I could do that in 5 minutes." But there's nothing lazier than looking at something someone already did & retroactively judging you COULD have easily done it. You wouldn't have thought to do it had someone not already done it. 3/

So, even if you did it right now in 5 minutes, it's not really 5 minutes, because you didn't come up with the idea in a vacuum, you're building on the work of the person who already had the idea and executed it. Why, that sounds a lot like a common critique of AI art... 4/

Art is not about how something was made. Craftsmanship is about how something was made. You can complain that you don't think there is enough craftsmanship in this person's AI art, but compared to what? It's a digital art contest. The craft of digital art is a VAST spectrum. 5/

Usually when new tech comes around and makes manual processes "easier," you expect the OLD people to get worked up about it, but with AI I see a lot of misplaced rage from young artists who take for granted that we now think of CGI and Photoshop as art. 6/

It's not real art if you use a camera, you didn't paint the picture yourself. It's not real photography if you use a digital camera, you didn't develop it yourself. It's not a real photo if you use Photoshop, you didn't capture it in-camera. 7/

It's not real illustration if you do it with a digital pen, the computer makes it too easy to do what REAL painters trained for 100s of hours in. It's not art at all if it's CGI, you're just moving points around and assigning parameters, the computer does all the work. 8/

It's not real CGI if you use other peoples' models in your scene, you're building off others who did the real work. It's not real art if you use filters or presets, that's a lazy way to recreate looks and styles that working artists spent thousands of hours perfecting. 9/

Back in the day I spent countless hours manually fucking around with hex editing and file corruption and all kinds of painstaking tricks to create glitch art. And then one day someone made an app where anyone could just tap and it did the same thing, just as good. 10/

Does that mean that you're not making REAL glitch art if you used an app to do it in five seconds? That's subjective, and depends on if you think the craftsmanship is integral to the art. Sometimes art is ABOUT how it was made, sometimes the end result is all that matters. 11/

Anything can be art, and in terms of value (not just monetary - art has a great deal of value that has nothing to do with money), there are no rules for how much suffering has to go into something to make it valuable to someone. 12/

Handmade, artisan work has never stopped having value no matter how many automated processes we invent. And at the same time, some of the most beloved art of all time was made with hardly any effort at all: Someone pointed a camera at something and pushed a button. 13/

It's outrageous that someone can just take imagery that already exists, push a button, print it out, call it "art," and win an award for it! I'm talking, of course, about photographs of sunsets. Who would PAY for a photo of a sunset when ANYONE could do that? Lots of people. 14/

Because art is not, nor has it ever been, about quantifying the value of time and manual labor that went into its production. Art is about the idea, art is about the intent, art is about the context, art is about the feeling, art is about the artist, art is about people. 15/

Tech has always given artists new ways to express ideas and automated processes to help artists execute their visions faster. It has never replaced artists or killed art. Art is human, computers are tools, and more humans can make art now than ever before in human history. 16/

Oh and one of the (bad-faith) complaints is that the artist "tricked" the judges by not disclosing it was made with AI. So? It's a DIGITAL ART contest. ALL digital art is "trickery" in some sense. Gatekeeping exactly how much trickery is acceptable is just petty nonsense. 17/

But hey, don't listen to me, I killed art back in 1999 when I cheated with computers to trick the judges of my college sculpture class:

https://twitter.com/rob_sheridan/status/1416461705916256259?s=20&t=nNGpigOZOGZwXbTkVG9gMQ

There IS lots of art that has less cultural value bc it's easy & common (Photoshop lens flares, IG filters). When everyone can make AI art, the default style of AI art will be common, artists will have to put more creative human work in to stand out. Like every medium ever. /19

AI art is new and changing rapidly; what it is now is not what it's going to be. Typing sentences in to make a picture will soon be as common and unexciting as an IG filter, but the same tech will power incredible new toolkits for pro artists. Don't panic. And DON'T GATEKEEP. /20

I’m pessimistic about a lot of tech lately, but I remain steadfastly techno-progressive when it comes to tools that democratize creativity, and AI is going to open so many doors for so many who have been left out. That’s good for art. /21

BTW the nature of subjectivity means you can and should think a lot of art is bullshit and rich people are idiots for spending $1m on a banana. But someone thought it was art. You know what I think is art? Inspiring this much global discourse by winning a state fair art show. 👏

A good thread ⬇️ about the uncomfortable truth behind my desire to contextualize AI art rather than dismiss or fight it: This progression is inevitable. It's here. It's not going away. Adapt or die. Welcome to the party, traditional artists. Some of us have been here a while.

https://twitter.com/ltamasfi/status/1565713974263439369

"What happens to artists if everyone can do it easily?" is short-sighted. If everyone can do it easily, simple pretty pictures become common & boring. But guess what? Simple pretty pictures have been common & boring for a LONG time. ARTISTS make more than simple pretty pictures.

This is a big messy topic and I'll get into it more later, there's a lot to say. For now, here's a thread about my first AI project from back in March as I was myself grappling with the very legitimate fears/questions about the implications of all this:

https://twitter.com/rob_sheridan/status/1509228256532189185