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Posted by _dain_ 2 days ago

Coarse is better(borretti.me)
212 points | 114 commentspage 2
recursivecaveat 1 day ago|
Maybe it's better that this author is using LLMs because they would be an immensely frustrating client for an artist. Asks for futurism: complains about getting it. Wants bright colors: refuses to ask. Parts of the request are supposed to be evocative and parts are supposed to be literal, who knows which.
yoan9224 1 day ago||
The author's prompts are fighting against what Nano Banana was optimized for. Saying "British Museum" to MJv2 worked because it blurred all images tagged with museums into the aesthetic. NBP interprets it literally: show me something IN a museum.

This isn't worse - it's different. MJv2 was a happy accident machine. NBP is a precision tool.

If you want the coarse aesthetic, prompt for it: "rough brushstrokes, visible canvas texture, unfinished edges, painterly, loose composition". NBP will give you exactly that because it actually understands what you're asking for.

The real lesson: we're in a transition period where prompting strategies that exploited old model quirks no longer work. That's fine - we just need to adapt our prompting to match what the model was designed to do.

speedgoose 1 day ago|
Thanks ChatGPT. I’m wondering about the motivation to spam HN with LLM generated comments. Not the worst comments though.
flexagoon 1 day ago|||
I don't think that comment is LLM generated. I would've certainly written it like that myself.
speedgoose 1 day ago|||
Check the account comments history. A lot of good comments of a similar length posted very closely in time. I don’t think a human can write that well, so quickly, on so many topics.
DrammBA 1 day ago|||
> It's not X - it's Y, it's Z.

> Consider: consideration. That's what you should consider.

Come on man

flexagoon 1 day ago||
The second point I agree with, but I hate that the "It's not ... it's ..." construct is a sign of LLMs now, because I use it all the time
juggy69 1 day ago|||
Have to agree that is sounds GPT-generated. Why so many colons? And the incurable marketing-speak.
nickelpro 2 days ago||
The author has succeeded only in arguing one meaningless image factory produces images they find more aesthetically pleasing than another meaningless image factory.

The framing implies they understand little of art at all; beyond gurgling and clapping like a child at the colors and shapes they find most stimulating.

kakapo5672 2 days ago||
It seems we have found the One True Artist on this thread, the gatekeeper and judge for all that is worthy. Humble obedience in thy presence.
jellyroll42 2 days ago||
Someone pushing back against a provincial and fundamentally incorrect definition of art is not gatekeeping.
brantmv 2 days ago|||
Why say this in such a rude way?
dwb 2 days ago||
Because powerful interests are trying to hijack human creative pursuits in the interest of profit. None of the images in the post are art.
black_13 2 days ago||
[dead]
cluckindan 2 days ago|||
Found the zealot.

Is true art a hermetic endeavour which must be gate-kept to seal out the lesser folk?

If so, then why lambast the lesser folk over their ignorance of the secret knowledge?

zelphirkalt 2 days ago|||
I don't think it is some secret. There are many who say that art is not just a painting itself, but in the process of making it, and the motivation and goals behind it. Generative "AI" has none of that. It does not labor like a human would. It has no motivation, because it is not a thinking being. It has no intention in making a digital output. It just works. It has no meaning by the process of creating. Some Michelangelo working on something amazing for years, that's something that has meaning.

It is also not inventive. It's rehashing and regurgitating. That point is a bit muddy, because many humans do that too. But ask a generative "AI" to make something better than what it has learned from and new, and you will probably be disappointed.

I am not an art buff, but I can sort of see, why one wouldn't consider it proper art.

nativeit 2 days ago||||
> Is true art a hermetic endeavour which must be gate-kept to seal out the lesser folk?

Kind of. If everyone on the planet can paint the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling, then it’s not anything special anymore is it? Especially if it reduces the process to asking the world’s most prolific counterfeit machine to do it for you.

graemefawcett 2 days ago|||
Besides, if everyone could paint the Sisten Chapel, then we'd have works equivalent to the Sistene Chapell everywhere.

Why is that a problem?

That to me sounds like the opposite of a problem.

Used effectively, these tools are elevators, enhancing the capabilities of everything they touch.

Telling them to paint you a picture results in the word you envision.

Painting a picture with them is how you see mine

graemefawcett 2 days ago|||
Is art then just the outcome? The artifact that was produced?

What's your criteria then for who is allowed to produce art? If allowing everyone to create it lessens its value such that it becomes worthless, there must be a cutoff.

If your goal is to ensure the continuity of human expression, limiting who is allowed to create art and narrowly defining art to great works kind of misses the point.

only-one1701 2 days ago|||
People are aren’t entitled to get entry into every space they want to with no effort!
andy99 2 days ago||
Well, birthdays are merely symbolic of how another year's gone by and how little we've grown. No matter how desperate we are that someday a better self will emerge, with each flicker of the candles on the cake we know it's not to be. That for the rest of our sad, wretched, pathetic lives, this is who we are to the bitter end. Inevitably, irrevocably. Happy birthday? No such thing.
Demiurge 2 days ago||
I don’t see splashes of primary color as more artistic. Anyway, what if you just ask it “more coarse”? I see impressive depth in the latest outputs, but as with all technically proficient performers, you might just have to consciously scale it back.
amram_art 2 days ago||
The problem is not in the image models rather the training data and its context. "British museum" for MJ is the image source, "British museum" is the setting for Nano Banana.
delis-thumbs-7e 2 days ago||
Just fucking by canvas, brushes and good quality oil paint. You need only five colours[1]. Cost you maybe 50-80 euros. And any mess you produce will give you more joy thanand shot produced by any clanker brain. Keep at it for few years, take evening classrs, look tutorials and you have learned yourself a skill. You can now travel to any majos art museum across the world and have a discussion with masters through their works hanging on the wall.

And you will also see how fucking sad and inferior all these ai images are. Really, trust me, please. There is more to art than this. There is more to life.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7F67FsLaaY

p4bl0 1 day ago||
With a title like this I was expecting an interesting discussion about pour over coffee. Titles should probably be edited when they're this vague.
Zak 2 days ago||
The author claims the old models are better at creating art than the new ones. I disagree; art requires consciousness and intent while this type of model is capable of neither.
LatencyKills 2 days ago||
I define art as something that evokes an emotion or feeling. I’ve seen people wax poetic about the ”meaning” of an imagine only to find out that the image was created synthetically.

Were those “feelings” not authentic?

neonnoodle 2 days ago|||
If I see a cloud in the shape of my childhood dog and start to cry, is the cloud art?
rtldg 2 days ago||
Yes. The Earth and its formations are art. I disagree that art requires consciousness and intent, but those admittedly do improve its value [to me]. (For reference, I value AI content/art poorly and avoid it)
only-one1701 2 days ago||
Everything is art, fantastic. I see nothing wrong with this definition.
card_zero 2 days ago||
We have at least established that very boring pieces, such as Andy Warhol's Empire, Kazimir Malevich's White on White, and John Cage's As Slow As Possible, are not art.
only-one1701 2 days ago||
Bad code is still code. A painting of code is not code.
card_zero 2 days ago||
I think you're saying bad art is still art, but I'm unsure what to do with the second sentence. I'm toying with "an encoding of art is not art", which might mean that art has to be available to an audience.
zelphirkalt 2 days ago||||
I don't think it is about the feelings or emotions evoked in the observer. At least not in that generality. It only is, if there is an intention in the creating process of the art, that aims at evoking the emotions or feelings. Otherwise going by the more general definition, many everyday objects become art. Home becomes art. The way to the office becomes art, even if it completely sucks.
only-one1701 2 days ago||||
Is a car crash art?
RHSeeger 2 days ago|||
A drawing/painting of a car crash certainly can be

https://www.etsy.com/listing/4329570102/crash-impact-car-can...

As can a photo of one (sorry, I don't have a good example of that).

And, both a camera and AI are an example of "using a tool to create an image of something". Both involve a creator to determine what picture is created; but the tool is central/crucial to the creation.

card_zero 2 days ago|||
When I was about 12 a car crashed in my quiet street (somebody tried to drive it through a concrete fence), so the next day I sat in the street and did an ink drawing of the wreckage with a mapping pen nib. That was excellent art. Then I stole one of the gigantic suspension springs and took it home to use as a stool, which by some silly definitions was also an act of art. But this all evades the original question about whether the actual car crash is art for evoking feelings, or whether art in fact must involve pictures, or human communication, or what. It's one of the impossible definitions, along with "intelligence" and "freedom". I'm a fan of "I know it when I see it".
only-one1701 2 days ago|||
I would never argue that a painting of a car crash couldn’t be art. It’s funny your bringing up that a camera is a tool for creating art; I also hold photographic art in lower esteem than other kinds of visual art (though I still think some kind of photography can be art).

At a certain point, we need to be realistic about the amount of effort involved in artistic creation. Here’s a thought experiment: someone puts two paintings in a photocopier and makes a single sheet of paper with both paintings. Did that person create art? They certainly had the vision to put those two specific paintings together, and they used a tool to create that vision in reality!

RHSeeger 1 day ago|||
> Here’s a thought experiment: someone puts two paintings in a photocopier and makes a single sheet of paper with both paintings. Did that person create art?

Yeah, it gets really murky there. For that specific thought experiment, I would say it depends on if it's something that people will see and think about and talk about, etc. For example, a collection of pairs of images of people that were assassinated over the years and an image of their assassin would certain get people talking (some in a good way, some bad).

When it comes to effort, I think that's only a factor, too; and not even necessarily a good one. There's art out there like

- Someone taped a banana to a wall (and included instructions for taping another banana to replace it)

- Someone (literally) threw a few cans of paint at a canvas and created something chaotic looking

Both of those things are "low effort" at first glance. But someone spent time thinking about it, and what they wanted to do, and what people might think of it. And, without a doubt, there's people that would refer to both as art.

card_zero 2 days ago|||
It's going to be "creativity" (another hazy definition!) rather than effort, though. Photography, often said to be all about framing, seems very low effort. You might take one lucky snap. Then the effort can be claimed to be in years of getting ready to be lucky, which is a fair point, but that displaced effort isn't really in the specific photo. Besides, maybe you're a very happy photographer, loved every minute of learning your craft, and found it no effort at all, just really interesting.
tormeh 1 day ago||
Yeah, photography (editing aside) is about having taste and getting lucky. A good photographer can of course raise their odds of getting lucky, but still. There's some technique in there too, but that's really not all that complicated. That said, I think few things match a good photo. There's something about a photo subject being real that I find fascinating. A photo exhibition does not display the imagination of the photographers, but rather the incredible in the real world.
RHSeeger 1 day ago||
It does, however, display the photographers ability to say "hey, you should see this" and be right about it.
card_zero 2 days ago||||
Perhaps it has to be a more sophisticated emotion, such as feeling tired of a hackneyed definition.
black_13 2 days ago|||
[dead]
greekrich92 1 day ago|||
If someone lies and convinces you that a loved one has died and you cry, were those feelings authentic?

Art that provokes emotion in a cheap or manipulative way is often, if not always, bad art.

CuriouslyC 2 days ago||
I'm pretty sure people have created images via random physical processes, then selected the best ones, and people have called it "art." That's no different than cherry picking AI generated images that resonate. The only difference is the anti-generative AI crusade being spearheaded by gatekeepers who want to keep their technical skills scarce in their own interests.
zelphirkalt 2 days ago||
I think one could still point out a little difference: Random physical processes do usually not involve mix and matching millions of other people's works. Instead, something new in every aspect and its origin can emerge.

It feels like AI art is often just a version of: "I take all the things and mix them! You can't tell which original work that tree is taken from! Tiihiiihi!"

Where "tree" stands for any aspect of arbitrary size. The relationship is not that direct, of course, because all the works gen AI learns from kind of gets mixed in the weights of edges in the ANN. Nevertheless, the output is still some kind of mix of the stuff it learned from, even if it is not necessarily recognizable as such any longer. It is in the nature of how these things work.

only-one1701 2 days ago|
AI doesn’t make art. The OP is trying to fit the square peg of their intuitive understanding about the art creation process into the round hole of generating it via AI
jellyroll42 2 days ago|
Correct! The process and struggle of creation is a large part of what makes art art. Removing friction from the process makes something artless.
card_zero 2 days ago||
Yes, but: when I was young I used to love photorealism and hyperrealism, which is super-smooth-and-shiny art that conceals its process in order to awe simpletons. Then I bought an airbrush, and then true color computer graphics happened, and soon after that I began to appreciate brush strokes and the texture of pen marks and the idea of the personality of the artist's hand. But that doesn't mean the process-hiding stuff is non-art, or even bad art. What's wrong with creating an amazingly convincing illusion, wasn't that always the goal, historically? Also there are no prizes for effort, and if your artwork is only struggle, I don't want to see it. Unless you're really badass about it.
nehal3m 2 days ago|||
I really like Cory Doctorow’s description of why it feels empty, quote:

“Herein lies the problem with AI art. Just like with a law school letter of reference generated from three bullet points, the prompt given to an AI to produce creative writing or an image is the sum total of the communicative intent infused into the work. The prompter has a big, numinous, irreducible feeling and they want to infuse it into a work in order to materialize versions of that feeling in your mind and mine. When they deliver a single line's worth of description into the prompt box, then – by definition – that's the only part that carries any communicative freight.”

card_zero 1 day ago||
OK, but then there's the possibility of reestablishing the bandwidth by selecting the output. If the artist selects one AI image from hundreds, that's like photography, or collage, or "found sculpture" if you can dig it. Then we can do away with the need for hundreds of versions by saying that the artist selected this image from among all the assorted sights seen during the day to frame as art and present to the viewer, and that's just like picking a preferred version from among hundreds, and thus is just like crafting an image. Tenuously. (This falls apart because the selectivity of the selection isn't good enough, I guess. But the process - throwing away bad ideas as you go along - is just like drawing.)
nehal3m 1 day ago|||
Sort of. It’s like selecting from hundreds of versions of a letter of reference that word the same three bullet points slightly differently. It still feels empty to me, but I guess that’s personal.
card_zero 1 day ago||
I reckon it's not personal, and you and Doctorow are objectively correct, but the explanation isn't great.
goopypoop 1 day ago|||
art without will is like street vomit: it might be pretty but it's just lumps of old content arranged how you'd expect. less than food; more a waste than a triumph. and it always smells the same.

the street vomit photographer is offering a bit more art through his choices but I can already see he makes poor choices

greekrich92 1 day ago|||
Art that takes tremendous effort but looks effortless isn't negated by my comment. The process and struggle is still there.
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