comment: >
  
  I'm not a huge tech guy so I could be 100% wrong here, but what a lot of people seem to call AI these days are just computer programs that use and compare keywords associated with images or sound files to expose you to more stuff with similar keywords describing it.
  Am I wrong?
context: This is a friendly reminder to read our rules.
  Remember, /r/Showerthoughts is for showerthoughts, not "thoughts had in the shower!"
  (For an explanation of what a "showerthought" is, please read this page.)
  Rule-breaking posts may result in bans. >
  
  Never discuss art on reddit, its a rule I made for myself and it has kept me sane over the years >
  
  After discussing AI art yesterday some dickhead has been spamming me with Reddit self harm prevention messages. >
  
  Technically anybody who has ever drawn a picture of Cortana is an AI artist. >
  
  Even the one who tapes a banana onto a wall or shits into bottle and puts it to display is an artist. Art isn't about your technique. If you throw a bucket of paint at canvas then is it you who made the art? nope. It was a bunch of laws of physics, you barely had any part of it, probably didn't even create the paint. >
  
  I wanna know why the creator of the AI used never comes up in these discussions >
  
  because the creator of the AI is not the artist. >
  
  But they created the AI, they coded how it works and how it interprets the inputs, they provided the data they wanted to use to train it. Everything they've done impacts the final image the AI produces, probably more so that someone giving a prompt >
  
  maybe think of it this way.
  someone created photoshop. are they the artist of all works done by people using it?
  no, they merely provided the tools necessary. it still requires someone to use it, it won't create art on it's own. so the user is the artist.
  AI generated though could be a bit different. is the user who provided input to the AI an artist? or is the AI more functioning like an artist who is commissioned to create art based off input provided by the client.
  either way, whether there is an artist or not, it's not the person who created the AI.
  edit: or maybe you could think of it as the creator is like an art teacher for the AI. you're art teacher in highschool may have taught you how to do things, but they aren't the artist for your own works, you are.
  personally im leaning towards the AI being the artist. but i guess that depends on whether sentience is required to be an artist. i don't think it does. >
  
  it depends how you define art. if it's just ooh pretty picture then I guess ai is an artist but if it's something more and requires conscious thought and skill to create them no-one is the artist in this scenario. >
  
  maybe, but i don't see why having a conscious has anything to do with art.
  clearly amazing and very popular art can be created without it, and still me moving.
  normally yes a conscious would be needed, you would think. and artist doesn't just put their skills into their work but also their emotion. which is what makes art moving right?
  but now we have moving art, with no emotions put into it's construction. which would be you don't beed to have emotions to make art.
  so i think an AI can be an artist. if anything it may just be redefining what art is. emotionally driving without being emotionally driven, which is a first i think. >
  
  And what about creators who input their own art into these models? >
  
  It's funny how occasionally people posting AI art demand to be acknowledged as artists for the hour of work they put into writing the prompt and fiddling with generation settings
  Meanwhile actual artists in the other room each with hundreds of hours of practice under their belt >
  
  There are numerous cases of AI users calling legendary industry artists technophobes and amateurs too unforunately. I've never experienced second hand embarassment so hard lol >
  
  The artist is the ai, with the user as alternatively the commissioner or a collaborator. >
  
  The ai does not care about the content. It is just told to grab a little from box a and a little from box b and then it combines them based on parameters not accessible to the person writing the prompt. The AI will return something whether you write "a foggy river made of blood" or if you write "ajhsd iyuiyquwyqieu". Some input is necessary but the prompt is like asking the dude making the subway sandwich what you want in it. The result might taste good, but requesting ingredients doesn't make you a chef or a collaborator.
  I would argue that even providing your own art as a starting point for the ai is not a collaboration, to the AI it is just a set of parameters, just like the words in the prompt field.
  I say it's more like curating because in the end you have to weed out through the output which is basically  n amount of frankenstein monsters made of other people's work. >
  
  The Midjourney Styles Library specifically lists artists/movements that contribute to its various aesthetics. This is a dataset. Each pixel is generated uniquely at the time of prompt, but the model references a specific set of past and contemporary work to do so. Users can also input image references directly. If someone can't see how this is worrisome for living artists, I would assume they haven't spent years developing a style and making a living from it.
  That said, as this new medium progresses, it will inevitably become a deeply involved and skilled process to generate an image; there will be people who hold technical art degrees in this medium. I'm betting that eventually it will integrate into many creative softwares in some form and benefit practicing artists more than it will hurt them, if they are willing to adapt to the continuum of art and technology. >
  
  I know why people are worried. However, I am just saying that the ai isn't simply copying. In learning about historical artists, you also learn the artists who inspired them and the movements they were a part of.
  I am not familiar with how midjourney works exactly but at least with stable diffusion the input image is a starting point to be transformed.
  AI is at the level of a technically skilled artist who has gotten her "voice" yet. It may be a bit derivative but it is original art. >
  
  I might counter this with the fact that actual art curators for museums and galleries are trained individuals with perspective and understand the significance of any given piece. I'd pitch that instead of "AI art curators", a more accurate title might be "AI art consumer", in the vein of something like ordering food off a menu and having it show up on your table. >
  
  It’s fucking lazy, and people want to be credited as artists for it? Insane. >
  
  Just like normal art or anything else people do, some of it is lazy and some of it isn't. Some people put a lot of time and work into the way they work the the AI to get the result they want, including actually modifying the images at various steps in the process.
  People that put the time and hard work in to become highly skilled at using these tools will benefit from it in the long run, and already experienced artists are in the best position to do that if they want to. >
  
  Actually AI has been used as a partial aid to digital artists for ages now, it's only now that we're seeing full images made entirely by AI. >
  
  "Code-generating AI doesn't actually write code based on your comments. It just curates it."
  "Chatbots aren't actually responding to your messages, they're just returning a Frankenstein's monster of other people's responses."
  "That robot's not actually making coffee, it's just recreating a coffee someone else made."
  "That music student isn't actually creating anything original. They're just regurgitating some mix of the collective styles of Mozart, Beethoven, and every other composer they've ever heard before."
  I get the fear of having an AI index and then directly steal a piece of work, but to pretend that the vast majority aren't genuinely, truly new pieces of art focuses way too much on semantics and not enough on what this means. It's dodging the question.
  AI can learn to create art in exactly the same way a human would. The important question here isn't "is it really art," but rather "what are we going to do about it now that it's here?" >
  
  Right. As someone who loves AI Art, I just hate it when the term AI artist is used. >
  
  It definately needs a separate term. >
  
  The more spectacular images make use of a lot of different techniques using AI, even compositing multiple images together to create something new. In that regard, yes there are AI artists, and if you still don't believe that then you're going to need to redefine an entire industry of compositors and graphic designers. >
  
  Remember when Tron was denied an Oscar for visual effects because using a computer was considered “cheating”!!
  People need to grow the hell up!! >
  
  I make AI images so this comes up. AI prompt writer, AI image generator, AI image maker seems fair titles. >
  
  You don’t “make” the images though lol - I love the software it’s fun as hell, but it’s like ordering custom food from a restaurant and saying “I’m a meal creator”. >
  
  A restaurant with infinite dishes and you can combine them in any fashion you so please. It's just downright fun to fire some stuff at it and see what it produces. It's stellar for fast mood board imagery. >
  
  Totally agree, I’ve messed around with it a lot it’s fun. >
  
  Idk, if you have an inspiration and you choose any input at all, even 3 words, you're part of the creation process. 
  True AI that had its own motivation to communicate and spontaneously produced art would result in a no-artist situation.
  I guess, is "art" about intent or result? >
  
  Let's say I go to an artist and commission a work from them. They ask me what I want to paint, and I give them the three word prompt "portrait, cat, cubist."
  When the finished work is given to me, would it be weird for me to consider myself anything more than the person who commissioned the work? >
  
  Super weird. It's just interesting to consider at what point the AI stops being a tool and starts being considered a creator. >
  
  I see no difference between "AI" artists and human artist.    
  Both get their ideas/inspirations from previously seen images. >
  
  Except current AI images couldn’t exist without human artists. Humans can create art intrinsically, with or without seeing another human’s work, AI images aren’t created from nothing. >
  
  
  Humans can create art intrinsically, with or without seeing another human’s work, AI images aren’t created from nothing.
  
  lol, what?
  If you're talking about only training on the natural world, you can train an AI on just photos too. Both their work will be similarly crappy. >
  
  There are still no confirmed Artificial Intelligence in the first place. They are still computer programs and not full pledged AI.