this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
483 points (96.7% liked)
Curated Tumblr
5932 readers
616 users here now
For preserving the least toxic and most culturally relevant Tumblr heritage posts.
Here are some OCR tools to assist you in transcribing posts:
-
FOSS Android Recs per u/m_f@discuss.online: 1 , 2
Don't be mean. I promise to do my best to judge that fairly.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Fountain is unfathomably based. I've used this history lesson to reassure my cousin who started painting for his PTSD and got told by a bunch of shitheads that he wasn't a "Real Artist" when he sold some art.
This stuff is a litmus test for when you're in a culture war with people trying to hide the fact they're warring with you on every front they can
Only people who don't understand art say that people "aren't real artists." It's the most obvious way to know that someone's opinion isn't worth listening to.
You're only "not an artist" if you're not making art. If you make something and don't want it to be art, then it's not art, and you're not an artist.
That's about it as not artist goes.
That got me thinking;
a welder creating a sculpture: artist
a welder making a tool: artisan
Is the tool a functional piece of art?
It can be. If presented as art, then yes. If crafted so masterfully that it's perceived as art, then also yes.
If neither intended nor received as art: no.
The functional contains beauty. It can be artistic to remind someone that functionality is a type of beauty. It's also possible to create an expression of form so perfectly that you can't help but notice the beauty.
While attempting to find some images of beautiful tools (I was thinking fine wood carving tools from the mid 1800s were a good bet), I found this: https://fortune.com/article/beauties-of-the-common-tool-walker-evans/ I think it does a good job conveying the notion. :)
Perhaps, I think I'm guilty of that too in this exact thread. The generative AI question is a focal point if such notions and it doesn't seem like there will ever be a consensus without at least some learned people asserting that something isn't art.
i'ma change my mind about it when those damn scrapers stop to think
The same thing happened to photography, and other kinds of modern art, too. Things are often excluded from being art until they are included (to at least a subset of people).
With AI it is often questionable how much 'intent' someone has put into a work: 'wrote a simple trivial prompt, generated a few images, shared all of them' results in uninteresting slop, while 'spent a lot of time to make the AI generate exactly what you want, even coming up with weird ways to use the model (like this / non-archive link)' is a lot more interesting in my view.
The difference is photography can be art, but it isn't always. Photo composition and content are used to convey meaning. The photo is a tool under the artist's complete control. The photo is not art on its own. Just like if you accidentally spill paint on a canvas it isn't necessarily art, a photo taken without intent isn't necessarily art. If I accidentally hit the camera button on my phone that doesn't make me a photographer.
AI generated images can not do this. The user can give a prompt, but they don't actually have control over the tool. They can modify their prompt to get different outputs, but the tool is doing its own thing. The user just has to keep trying until they get an output they like, but it isn't done by their control. It's similar to a user always accidentally doing things, until they get what they want. If you record every moment of your life you're likely to have some frames that look good, but you aren't a photographer because you didn't intend to get that output.
I don't completely agree. While an accident is one example where intent is missing, publishing accidental shots could be a form of art in its own way as the act of publishing itself has intent associated with it.
Furthermore, nature photography is in my view also art, but provides much less control than studio photography, as the scene and subject are free to do whatever they want.
I don't think recording everything would make it less of an artpiece: you would have intentionally chosen to record continuously to capture that frame, and skimmed though those frames to find the right one. Like splattering paint on a canvas intentionally, you don't intend to control the full picture - where the paint ends up - but rather the conceptual idea of a splatter of paint, leaving the details, in part, up to physics.
There are limits to what repeatedly prompting an AI model can do, but that doesn't stop you from doing other things with the output, or toying with how it functions or how it is used, as my example shows.
While I wouldn't discount something if it was created using AI, I need there to be something for me to interact with or think about in a piece of art. As the creation of an image is effectively done by probability, anything missing in the prompt will in all likelihood be filled with a probabilistically plausible answer, which makes the output rather boring and uninteresting. This doesn't mean that AI cannot be used to create art, but it does mean you need to put in some effort to make it so.
Yeah, find interesting accidental photos that tell a story would be a creative work of art. The photos wouldn't be before, but putting them together could be.
Like I said, composition and subject are important. That doesn't mean you stage them. It means make something interesting out of the scene.
Yeah, the act of choosing a frame could be artistic. That's not what I meant. I meant an amazing image could exist within the frames. It isn't art just because it's there. Sure, something could be done with it to make it art. Like you imply, intention is the important part. You're agreeing, but you're adding intention to all the examples I'm giving. Without the intention I assume you agree that they aren't art.
Sure, you can do things with the output. I've proposed the idea of making a piece about the soulessness of AI generated images, and making a collage of AI generated images next to artist created ones, to show how it's missing the creative spark a human can add. This would be taking AI generated images and making art out of them. They wouldn't be art right out of the model though.
That's the beauty of art. It spawns discussion and it can't be nailed down to any singular definition. You and the person you responded to are completely correct
I think with ai art though the issue is not the user's ability to tweak the prompts but more the fact that anything generated from an AI is stolen work
If there was a way to train your own ai (llm, genai) off of your own creations or the works of others with their explicit consent then I'd consider that art. But the biggest issue right now is many of these ais are using stolen work across the board to generate their images, regardless of how much time and care goes into crafting the perfect prompt
I think that is less of a problem with the technology itself, but rather in how it is currently used or created. I wouldn't say that anything generated with AI is stolen work, as that predicates that AI necessarily involves stealing.
I vaguely remember Adobe Firefly using images only with proper licensing to the point they will allow themselves to be legally held responsible (though some AI generated work did make it into their stock image site, which makes the ethics part vague, even if it will in all likelihood be legally impossible to pin down). Sadly, this is Adobe, and this stuff is all behind closed doors, you have to pay them pretty significant sum and you can't really mess with the internals there.
So for now there is a choice between ethics, openness, and capability (pick at most two). Which, frankly, is a terrible state to be in.
That's what I said too! Is there another way to view that link? I'm either struggling with opening it in my browser or my current VPN server
I've added a non archive link.
Ayyyy, thank you that's pretty cool. This is how we got all those pictures hiding shrek's face, isn't it?
Yup, or at least a refined version of this idea. The paper they reference on the technique has more examples.
Wow, okay seeing an artist employ these in a wider sweeping piece, I wouldn't have a doubt in my mind that was art. I feel like I've probably seen a few of these already and just by not knowing how it worked dismissed it as analogue art.
I mean the toilet is quite obviously art, you can understand exactly what the artist was expressing. AI art literally isn't art because it lacks any expression or meaning.
Evidence? Show me an expressive piece of AI "art". There is none.
AI art, in my mind, is art in the same way that "photography" is art. It's people using a tool.
AI art is unsatisfying not because it's not art, but because it doesn't have as much depth or intention behind it.
In the image above, you know exactly what I'm trying to convey and what references I'm making in doing so. But knowing that it's AI, you also know I spent all of 10 seconds on it for a laugh. I could have put in more work to flesh out how the details should look, and to get everything just right, but the tool makes it too easy to get "close enough", so there's no push to refine, get the details right, and put the time into it that would make someone else feel compelled to appreciate the attention or statement.
My hand drawn representation of the same idea in about the same time conveys roughly the same expression and meaning, if we adjust for "drawing with thumb on a phone", "bad handwriting in general", and "why did my own default to... Fuschia? "
If he sold art he's definitely an artist.
If he hadn't sold any he would be too, but selling it is undsniable proof that someone else across him as an artist.
People were still assholes. I think they just wanted to hurt him because of their own internal problems and he appeared as an easy target