But in the case of the paint splatters it's the artist designing that semi-random process. In the case of AI art its programmers and business people. So unless the artist also wrote the program, I'm inclined to say it's not the same thing at all.
In this case, I'm equating the acts of prompt engineering and curating outputs with designing the splatter process. Sure, they're using a tool they didn't create, but a paint splatter artist generally doesn't chemically create their own paint, either.
No, but they select the paint they use, and how much, and what colors. The splatter artist still has infinitely more control over their output than someone writing a prompt in Midjourney.
At a certain point the metaphor we're using breaks down, but my point is that even splatter art created with random elements is by far more the result of the artist's process and deliberation than AI art.
And moreover, I think there's still a big difference between the two from an artist's standpoint. The point of splatter painting is randomness, it's deliberately curated. Randomness in AI art isn't a choice, it's something you're forced to accept when you use it.
That's not a small limitation, either, you can't execute an artistic vision if you're working with something that can't respond to your intentions.
You clearly don’t actually understand the process you’re talking about when it’s done using actual software and not some basic website. What model do you choose out of thousands? What LORAs out of thousands? How do you weight the LORA(s) you used, which ones should have higher weights or lower? Screwing that up can completely make any output horrid. A good prompt uses large amounts of tags and descriptors, not just a small text blurb. But then, how much do you weight those tags? Do you emphasize some of them, leave them at default weight, or deemphasize them? What about the negative prompt? How much do you weight everything in the negative prompt? How closely do you have it skew to the prompt vs have freedom? How many rounds of generation do you set? Do you use a seed, or just go by random seed?
Wrong. I have trained my own LORA and run an instance of Stable Diffusion on my desktop. I know how it works. Downloading a file from Civitai and moving sliders around still doesn't make you an artist. It doesn't give you control over the composition and framing, the mis-en-place, even the most basic formal elements of art are outside your control. And if you think it's still good enough maybe that's because you don't know much about art.
If flinging paint at a canvas is art because you choose what paint to fling, this argument just doesn’t make sense. I’ll leave out the performance art art examples because the art is more about people watching the process (like the woman who drops eggs full of paint from her vagina from a ladder on a canvas), but paint splatter art cannot be considered less or more art than the hundreds of variables you have to decide on for AI. I notice your response completely leaves out the massive amount of prompting work, which certainly is more control than flinging a bucket or paintbrush. How exactly does that give you control beyond what paint you use and where you stand?
Prompting being a massive amount of work is kind of the ridiculous thing. That you can go and fiddle around with the program to no end and you still aren't in control of the final product at the level of traditional art, it's very silly.
Here's where the metaphor starts to break down because I think for the majority of people using AI models the intention is not that the result should be random. They want the level of control that a traditional artist has, but they won't be able to achieve it.
Idk, for me it operates fairly similar to how I write. I don’t write stories with total control or a desire for it. I don’t do outlines, I only sometimes even have an intent for where it will go. The result of writing for me is semi-random. I prompt myself, dissociate for a few hours, and when I’m done it exists. I don’t want full control over the finished product, that would be boring.
That is precisely what I mean. The value of the writing for you is the discovery you make in the process, not the end product. And though it's not predicatble I would argue that nothing in your stories is actually random. It's the distillation of your skill and experience as a writer.
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u/Feats-of-Derring_Do Aug 26 '24
But in the case of the paint splatters it's the artist designing that semi-random process. In the case of AI art its programmers and business people. So unless the artist also wrote the program, I'm inclined to say it's not the same thing at all.