Jojo, Lady of the West

In the US, every employment contract has a line where any “invention” of an employee belongs to the company, so

Thanks, I just hope my $5000 will be enough

The book was kind of all over the place, couldn’t seem to pick a thread and follow it until halfway through, and then they kill off the main character and the rest is just lectures and moralizing? It had a fun bit at the end, though.

But they’ll take all of our incredibly desirable jobs!

On top of that, it doesn’t have to power the city for a day, it only has to store unused energy produced during off-peak hours while the sun is shining and/or wind is blowing.

Clearly they only think bigger, better batteries are magic and physics defying. The batteries we have now are the best batteries that physics allows for, and they can’t be made more or bigger because… We already used up all the stuff for them. Yeah, that tracks.

Geothermal too is possible

Pinky promise I’ll stop fighting you if you just let me have all your stuff and stop asking other people for help.

Okay but real question… Can dolphins sneeze?

“most moral army in the world” is a bit like the dryest lake.

ask for full price with the bugs and multiplayer disabled

At least the bugs are disabled /s

As an artist can use a guitar instead of their own mouth. But can an artist’s art be the guitar playing itself… hm.

Absolutely it can. Numerous artists have created work that unfolds itself into something beautiful through their planning but not through their power.

But can choosing a book from a library be art?

Choosing a urinal counts as art. Of course choosing a book can.

The argument here hinges on the definitions of inherently vague words.

Art is an inherently vague word.

I would rather watch one made by people who care.

This right here is the crux of my argument. What about art made by people who care, but made with ai? Is it so impossible that people might care about something and use ai to make it?

I absolutely do not contend that using ai makes something art. I merely contend that using ai (even as a major part of a work) is not sufficient to make it not art. To whit,

Joel Haver uses an AI filter to do his rotoscoping. I like Joel Haver just fine.

It sounds like you agree with me on that, at least in principle.

Does the director take credit for their actor’s acting, though? Usually, the actors win the award for best acting.

So an ai artist shouldn’t earn any awards for best painting. Directors are still credited as artists. I’m not saying using ai makes you a painter, or any other kind of artist. I’m just saying that “ai” doesn’t magically make a creation “not art”. And yeah, it’s possible to create zero effort slop with ai that can look a lot more interesting than the zero effort slop you can make with just paint, but a kid splattering paint everywhere doesn’t make Jackson Pollock not be an artist.

Well, the word deep fake is literally from the ai boom, but I understand you to mean doctored images to make it look like someone was doing a porn when they didn’t was already a thing.

And yeah, it very much was. But unless you were already a high profile individual like a popular celebrity, or mayyybe if you happened to be attractive to the one guy making them, they didn’t tend to get made of you, and certainly not well. Now, anyone with a crush and a photo of you can make your face and a pretty decent approximation of your naked body move around and make noises while doing the nasty. And they can do it many orders of magnitude faster and with less skill than before.

So no, you don’t need ai for it to exist and be somewhat problematic, but ai makes it much more problematic.

Dude, I don’t care how many iterations a person goes through. I care that the piece contains a bit of their soul.

the prompt artist who spends a 3-month chunk of their life toiling over their latest piece,

I’m curious what could possibly convince you that someone put their soul into their work? Or why the assumption is always that ai is the only tool being used.

Here’s a list of artists using ai tools in their work.

But further, the prompt artist doesn’t even make it.

Again, ai is a tool. That’s like saying digital artists didn’t make their paintings, the printer did. Or maybe it’s like saying the director didn’t make the movie, the actors and cameras did. Actually, I really like the director analogy. They give directions to the actors as many times as they need to get the take they want, and then they finalize it later with post production.

Okay. Got it. Charitable interpretation is dead.

Ohhh, so this is why people tag their images by popular art commisioners

There’s a point where writing becomes art. You either agree with that, or you don’t believe any kind of literature or poetry counts as art. In the latter case, that’s a bit of an extreme take but I guess you’re welcome to your opinion. In the former case, there’s a lone somewhere between Tolkien and XanthemG where something starts being art.

For the same reason ChatGPT can’t make you any less lonely.

Only insofar as neither can a book. And yeah, there’s obviously a difference there, but the difference isn’t inherent to ai. Ai isn’t a person, it’s a tool. Dismissing anything made by the tool because the tool was used to make them is the position that I think is ridiculous. I’m not claiming that all of the “ai art” people are posting everywhere is definitely "real art"and needs to be taken seriously. I’m claiming that it’s possible for an artist to use ai in the production of real art.

Hours of effort to create prompts to maneuver the models output until it looks closer to what you wanted, possibly with the addition of touch-up or addition steps at the end likely needed for certain kinds of image to clean up things the ai struggles with (like, say, hands) or to add something in particular the ai didn’t understand (like, say, a monster of your own invention or something).

It’s easy to say that doesn’t count, that the prompt engineer could have just come up with their final prompt in the first place, but then does it count when a digital painter sketches an outline a dozen times before deciding it’s where they want it? After all, the digital artist could have just drawn it the way they wanted at first blush. But I’d bet you’ll say the time the digital artist spent “counts” as time spent working on an art piece, even if you might be inclined to say the prompt engineer’s time doesn’t. I’d be interested to hear your take.

Right, so this is what I mean when I say that charitable interpretation is dead. Taking my earlier assertion that AI generated art isn’t real art, along with my assertion that providing a prompt to an AI is essentially equivalent to providing a description to a human artist for a commission, should not have read as an argument for or against AI generated art being real art. Taking those statements together, the only reasonable conclusion you can make about my position is that prompt engineers aren’t artists.

That sounds like the interpretation I’m responding to. It either doesn’t follow from your premises, or it begs the question. Yes, if ai art isn’t real art, no art produced with ai is real art, but that’s a tautology. I’m trying to get at why you believe ai inherently makes something not art. Low effort was a reason you gave, but you also said no amount of effort could change it.

Never. It’s not an artistic skill in the same way that providing a description to an actual artist is not an artistic skill

But providing a description to an “actual artist” is an artistic skill. If you have a particular vision in your head for a character, writing that out is art the same way any kind of writing can be, no? Writing something in a way that gives another artist a mental image that matches yours takes creativity and skill. Why doesn’t the work created by that creativity and skill count as art? It seems unnecessarily gatekeep-y.

Telling a machine “car, sedan, neon lights, raining, shining asphalt, night time, city lights” is not creating art. To me, it’s equivalent to commissioning art.

When art is commissioned, art is produced. If no human produced it, an ai did. If ai cannot produce art, then a human must have.

Similarly, I feel that prompt engineers can’t take any credit for the pictures that AI produces past the prompt that they provided and whatever post-processing they do.

I suppose I don’t understand why engineering a prompt can’t count as an artistic skill, nor why selecting from a number of generated outputs can’t (albeit to probably a much lower degree). At what point does a patron making a commission become a collaborator? And if ai fills the role of the painter, why wouldn’t you expect that line to move?

As for why I hate AI art, I just hate effortless slop.

I’m with you there. And I would brook no issue with completing about the massive amount of terrible, low-effort ai art currently being produced. But broadening the claim to include all art in which the most efficacious tool used was ai pushes it over the line for me.

It doesn’t matter how many hours you spend working on a piece, if you use AI, then the AI made the art.

Except that artists can use ai as a tool to make art. Sure, the ai can’t say why that pixel looks that way, but the artist can say why this is the output that was kept. They can tell you why they chose to prompt the ai the way they did, what outputs they expected and why the ones that were kept were special, let alone what changes they may have made after and why.

If Jackson Pollock can make art from randomness by flicking a brush, why can’t someone make art from randomness by promoting an ai? Is there a lone somewhere that makes it become art, in your opinion? I don’t think it would be uncharitable by interpreting the above quote to mean you don’t believe it is possible at all to use ai as a tool in the production of the art.

If ai is the only tool used, it never makes an image, let alone art, because there was never even a human using language to prompt the ai. But from that obviously ridiculous extreme there is certainly a long spectrum ranging through what I described above to something as far removed as a human generating landscapes for a storyboard before fully producing a movie that doesn’t include the air outputs in any physical way. I’m sure you would claim a line exists between there, and I’m curious where.