I like how he even had someone with art expertise literally explain it to him and he writes it off as “lol she must have super artist vision for details.”
I don’t know there’s something here about how broken the way we engage with art is. How commodified art is inherently decontextualized and while you can see the beauty or the power or whatever you lose something without the curation and presentation you get from a gallery or a museum.
I also want to dunk on a few of the specific inclusions. AI clearly doesn’t understand the point of cubism in particular, making it an exceptionally clear example of what Scott’s artist friend was talking about. Including a digital photograph of a collage that clearly makes use of the depth of the actual work is pretty dumb.
I like how he even had someone with art expertise literally explain it to him and he writes it off as “lol she must have super artist vision for details.”
I’ll quote her since it’s by far the only worthwhile part of the article:
When real pictures have details, the details have logic to them. I think of Ancient Gate being in the genre “superficially detailed, but all the details are bad and incoherent”. The red and blue paint and blank stone feel like they’re supposed to evoke worn-ness, but it’s not clear what style this is supposed to be a worn-down version of. One gets the feeling that if all the paint were present it would look like a pile of shipping containers, if shipping containers were only made in two colors.
It has ornaments, sort of, but they don’t look like anything, or even a worn-down version of anything. There are matchy disks in the left, center, and right, except they’re different sizes, different colors, and have neither “detail which parses as anything” nor stark smoothness. It has stuff that’s vaguely evocative of Egyptian paintings if you didn’t look carefully at all. The left column has a sort of door with a massive top-of-doorway-thingy over it. Why? Who knows? The right column doesn’t, and you’d expect it to. Instead, the right column has 2.5 arches embossed into it that just kind of halfheartedly trail off.
I’m not even sure how to describe the issues with the part a little above the door. It kind of sets a rhythm but then it gets distracted and breaks it. Are these semi-top protruding squares supposed to be red or blue? Ehh, whatever. Does the top border protrude the whole way? Ehh, mostly. Human artists have a secret technique, which is that if they don’t know what all the details should be they get vague. And you can tell it’s vague and you’re not drawn to go “hmm, this looks interesting, oh wait it’s terrible”.
I think part of the problem with AI art is that it produces stuff non-artists think look good but which on close inspection looks terrible, and so it ends up turning search results that used to be good into sifting through terrible stuff. Imagine if everyone got the ability to create mostly nutritional adequate meals for like five cents, but they all were mediocre rehydrated powder with way too much sucralose or artificial grape flavor or such. And your friends start inviting you over to dinner parties way more often because it’s so easy to deal with food now, but practically every time, they serve you sucralose protein shake. (Maybe they do so because they were used to almost never eating food? This isn’t a perfect analogy.) Furthermore, imagine people calling this the future of food and saying chefs are obsolete. You’d probably be like “wow, I’m happy that you have easy access to food you enjoy, and it is convenient for me to use sometimes, but this is kind of driving me crazy”. I feel like this is relevant to artist derangement over AI art, though of course a lot of it is economic anxiety and I’m a hobbyist who doesn’t feel like a temporarily embarrassed professional and thus can’t relate.
according to someone who goes by Ilzo on the socials.
I like how he even had someone with art expertise literally explain it to him and he writes it off as “lol she must have super artist vision for details.”
I don’t know there’s something here about how broken the way we engage with art is. How commodified art is inherently decontextualized and while you can see the beauty or the power or whatever you lose something without the curation and presentation you get from a gallery or a museum.
I also want to dunk on a few of the specific inclusions. AI clearly doesn’t understand the point of cubism in particular, making it an exceptionally clear example of what Scott’s artist friend was talking about. Including a digital photograph of a collage that clearly makes use of the depth of the actual work is pretty dumb.
I’ll quote her since it’s by far the only worthwhile part of the article:
according to someone who goes by Ilzo on the socials.
image in question: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GQ3wnEZWAAA_mY8?format=jpg