The Surreal Dreams of AI-Generated Art
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- Опубліковано 12 лип 2024
- Support the channel by watching this video ad-free on Nebula: nebula.tv/videos/lily-alexand...
Artificial Intelligence is enabling a new generation of artists to create bold, fascinating art. But the companies powering it don’t seem to care.
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CORRECTION: CLIP, the massive training set used for lots of AI-generated art (including mine), doesn't comprise photos with descriptive captions. Instead, it pulled photos from web pages, and used the text from those web pages (which is usually related, but not always a plain description of the photo). My bad!
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Patreon: / lily_lxndr
Twitter: / lily_lxndr
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Help a trans refugee come to Canada: www.canadahelps.org/en/charit...
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Voices by:
Akira: / _akirakirakirakira_
Bobby: / @badnewsfromouterspace...
Vic: www.angelfire.com/nj/prcastle...
Artists:
Felix Gonzalez-Torres: www.moma.org/artists/2233
Memo Atken: / memoakten
Katherine Crowson: / rivershavewings
HeavensLastAngel: / hvnslstangel
Colab notebook I used: colab.research.google.com/git...
Further viewing:
Luis Serrano's intro to GANs: • A Friendly Introductio...
Simple tutorial on creating GAN art: • How to Make AI Generat...
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Table of contents:
0:00 Introduction & groundwork
3:33 1. The skyline that wasn't
13:08 2. Authorless intent
21:04 3. Art as artifact
28:26 Closing thoughts
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tags for the algorithm lol:
artificial intelligence, ai generated art, VQGAN, VQGAN+CLIP, machine learning, neural network, deepdream, video essay
New video is out now: We Cooked & Ate an AI-Generated Meal.
It was disgusting! Go check it out!
As a coder, and someone who knows a bit about neural networks, it took Google many engineers and many necessary choices and tweaks in order to produce that program. In addition to the "artist" who thinks of the phrases and also chooses the best ones to showcase, there is a lot of intention that has gone into every piece of ai generated art.
Also, you can definitely download Jupyter notebook software that will allow you to use your own computer for processing power with the same code. I guarantee it'll be much faster than Colab free and it costs you pennies (electricity) rather than almost 70 a month.
I love the idea of AI art as a window into what we see as important. The skyline has two sunsets because that's when people take pictures of the sky, and animals almost always have their face towards the "camera". If you ask a GAN to create a sheep, it will always come with a field because there are so few pictures of sheep anywhere else. If art reflects the artist, then the artist here is the through-line of a thousand people who saw thing you are trying to generate and, in that small moment, decided that it was important.
So well put!
An example that didn’t make it into the video: when I rendered the Paris skyline at night, it created like SIX separate Eiffel towers. Because if you’re talking a picture of Paris at night, of course it’s going to be the Eiffel tower!
Just on the sheep example; I'm not sure if they "fixed" it, but it used to be that if you asked a GAN to produce a dumbbell the dumbbells would always come with a disembodied beefy arm attached for the same reason
@@IanM86 Man the initial comment gave me a gut punch and made me tear up, and yours right after made me laugh. Full spectrum of emotions in these comments tonight.
@@throughcolouredglasses9300 Honored to be part of your emotional rollercoaster
you lot are sheep for the slaughter...
I really liked the idea of AI art as "authorful." Interesting to imagine it as created not just by the AI itself, but by an entire network of people, computers, and the interactions between them.
That is mental masturbatory nonsense... It's no more `Art` than say when you walk past an interesting looking landscape that just happens to be there. The random seed and weights and biases that led you to be in that place arent art.... If you can call the results of a gan network art, then you can call anything art. Thats not to say its cant be interesting looking or even beautiful looking. But its not art.
BTW I make CGI `art` for a living, I also program things like renderers and shaders. I use Ai algorithms all the time, upscaling, denoising etc. Its a useful tool.
@@SLPCaires the random and deterministic aspect that you say disqualifies a landscape from being art, also in reality applies to humans too. We’re basically big meat computers who subvert a chunks of our processing power to diversify how we can advance in aspects of our life, be it money, sex, status or and including the creation of art. The end goal of these avenues of progress could be just to fuck and raise offspring, deal with the nihilistic side effects of our level of self awareness or more. If you deem candidates for art invalid because they were generated by an over deterministic system, then with our current understanding of physics and neurology you’d have to deem all human artwork invalid too (unless your religious or believe in metaphysical elements that give us free will). Even if humans weren’t purely deterministic and had free will, I’d argue that the intent to create art, needed for art to count as art, in the case of AI is actually supplemented by the intent of people who use the AI as a tool. In this case you could call the people who use the AI artists, though I feel that u might not like that due to the low entry barrier. As a musician and fellow creative, I’m happy to call random beautiful landscapes I walk past art because there is no fundamental difference between my meat circuitry and the ocean currents and wind patterns in the sky :)
@@alexmancera6566 What you did there was to put self aware analog meat computers on a level with gan networks, then declared yourself as the same as the wind etc.
It seems mental masturbation is the great equalizer.
I'm all for using the results of neural networks as a component in some piece of art just like you can with overused photoshop filters.
in 1988 i sketched what will be left of the universe - a music generating machine, and a music appreciating machine, intertwined for eternity.
check out the old boy. if you can't see the demons, it's because your demons won't let you yet. "art for a living" i've spent decades making procedural media. i chainsaw things in half for a living, it's creative.
at 8:02 I had a horrible thought about AI in policing. This really is automated bias. It looks like a picture of buildings, even though logically it can't be. Your gut feeling is going to tell you that the AI is correct even when it's logically wrong, because the AI relies so heavily on the kinds of patterns that cause bias in humans.
Yep. And AI is famously bad at recognising black faces, even classifying black people as gorillas at one point.
Whenever I see AI generated art, I can't shake the feeling that this is what my memories of childhood look like to me now. I know all of my memories of early childhood are inaccurate, they're based on the remembrance of the impressions of the world as filtered through my emotions. It looks like a world prior to language and understanding of time and object permanence.
If this is how AI "sees" the world, through the eyes of a child... the reminder that it can guide law enforcement and therefore state violence is absolutely chilling.
I love the idea of an AI understanding the general form or detailed features of morals but not really understanding the empathy and mutual benefit behind it.
@@sashaboydcom That’s not a flaw inherent to AI, that’s a flaw in the mostly white data sets that are used to train it, which actually proves OP’s point: AI only serves to reflect our own biases back to us. Garbage in, garbage out.
This was proven when a Microsoft chatbot was exposed to twitter and turned racist af.
The images based around "you cannot recognize a single distinct object in this image" always mess with me, gotta stare at them for ten minutes and then wash my eyes out with soap - if they elicit that visceral of a reaction I consider them art lol
Saame, it makes me panic for some reason!
@@user-th7nx9it3e it’s very uncanny!
I think we as human beings need together and grapple with whatever is going on with AI and human perception before it advances enough to the point where questions of "what is real" are so far behind us that we can't catch up. There are real questions here about the nameless horror of watching the mechanics of our visual cortices be laid out bare for everyone to see. At least while we can still see them.
i saw a parrot looking over its shoulder, an asian calendar, condiment bottles, the edge of a sink and a stuffed pig in a tshirt. what's all the fuss about?
I see you’re a fan of Twin Peaks as well
i feel like my biggest beef w ai comes from when artist’s work are taken to feed to the ai as prompts without the permission of the artist, as well as the tendency for artists to do the nft thing with them. other than that there are many beautiful, surreal pieces of art that come out of ai generated works.
I wanted to come back to this video after everything that has transpired over the last couple years wrt AI art. I remember you made me really like AI art, and a part of me still does. The old, weird versions were a fun, new medium. But seeing the current state, where AI is going to start being useable for replacing human artists in commercial projects... It does feel bad. Art philosophy aside, in a real sense it's just a sad thing for an already struggling art sector
I also came back to this video, and I still think ai art has potential. Just not in the gross commercialized way it's used now
That description of Gonzales' art made me tear up. After learning about the meaning behind it, the candy suddenly stopped looking like candy, and I could see Ross' face and body there instead, slowly losing all semblance of body.
Human art can represent so much in so little, and we can "see" it the way it was "intended" just by learning about the thinking behind the creator. The same thing happens with AI art. As soon as we learn the title, we can make meaning happen in what otherwise looks like blotches of colour.
I love this video and the part where you stopped your partner from reading in a "british" accent made me laugh out loud btw
Then you ask yourself, "With all of the things he could have chosen, why candy to represent his lover?"
Because he was sweet or much rather because everybody was going to take a piece.
What meaning does that have?
The story you've been given is 100% of the art and emotion while the candy is just vaguely enough related to make you compare it with the story.
Without the story it's just candy. With the story it's candy meant to represent a dying lover.
Real deep.
This was super interesting! I really like the way that you look at things... Always good to have a reminder that, contrary to the hopes of hackers and technofetishists, computers (including AI) are made by and for humans in our society, and they operate within that cultural and political context.
Thank you so much!
I'm currently studying computer science and AI is something that comes up a lot (due to its escalating prevalence in the world). I'm also artistic, and human, so I really enjoyed @Lily Alexandre's interpretation of why AI art is not only art, but art that matters, especially when they talk about the difference between recognizing an object and understanding an object. AI looks at the world out-of-context, like an alien from a different galaxy might, and then regurgitates its own interpretation in the images it produces. So, in a way, it's like seeing some sort of truth about the world. After all, 'reality' is just what people with different biases and interpretations agree upon, and when we recognize that an image of a building produced by an AI is in fact an image of a building (or whatever), we reveal that there is something we agree upon that makes a building a building, that we have no conscious knowledge of. Maybe a building isn't a building because it has a door, windows, and four walls. Maybe what makes it a building is something else entirely, and AI can give us perspective on that. IDK does that make sense?
I'm so fascinated by AI art because when you really think about it, because the images it makes
aren't much different from surrealist automatism. The artist and UA-camr Peter Draws makes art that feels very similar to neural network art, and its incredible to watch him start with nothing and creates weird city scapes and creatures that make no sense. Actually, it was when I found his art over 5 years ago that got me into art. Now as someone fairly skilled at art, enough to do professional commissions, his work is still incredible. Arguably moreso now that I know how challenging that type of art is, as I've made plenty of art of that type.
This is such an amazing illustration of why tech ethics matter so much! We are so prone to seeing code (and science more generally) as objective when it is so humanistic
on the thought of "musicians that can be anywhere forever" it makes me think of vocaloid and utaloid singers. Like, they're not people but they can be based on people and need careful tuning from a human artist and the sound of Miku or Len won't be changed but the passage of time. There's even one transmasc person who created a voice pack of himself before he started T so his fans could continue to generate his old voice even after his own changed.
this is really interesting
AI art reminds me of my own autistic perspective. its nice to see my inability to understand WHY things function represented in such a lovely, uneasy, terrifying, and beautiful manner. i dont understand WHY there are so amny social rules, i just have to preform them the best i can and hope people dont squint at me too much
Also the way AI generates weird art depending on the data set reminds me of how creatures became social and eventually sentient, like how we as humans tend to see human faces in objects whether or not it makes sense all of the time.
that's very cool
This, I love this, so many interpretations since it has no defined meaning. Reminds me of abstract art.
There's a certain irony to the fact that this video was fed to me by an algorithm. I find myself feeling ambivalent and grateful and unsettled in the way that I do every time YT's AI pegs me and nails it. Fascinating video, very nicely presented. Subscribed to see the follow up. More of this please. You are fantastic. The world is a better place for having you in it. One of the best half hours I've spent all week.
The rather simplistic answer that I’ve personally settled on for “what is art?” is “Anything created with the intention of being art”. It’s not a perfect answer, there are some grey areas, but I feel it mostly gets the job done. It allows for any medium to be considered art, but places limits so that not everything within that medium is art. For example, music is widely considered an art, however some music to me isn’t art. Like, a soulless, message-less pop song made for the sake of money uses the medium of music, generally something de facto seen as art, but it isn’t art to me. However, just because it isn’t art, doesn’t mean it is inherently worse than something that is art. There’s bad art, and there’s good non-art.
Overall I think intentionality is the key over anything else. Trees and landscapes can be beautiful, and illicit an emotional response, but they aren’t art. However, someone making a painting or taking a photo depicting that landscape can turn it into art.
In regards to the AI generated images, it might seem that they’re automatically disqualified, but I would say that the AI itself isn’t the creator. It doesn’t have a mind to make decisions, it doesn’t make choices in any meaningful sense. It’s just randomness, guided by a set of rules to limit the randomness of the outcome. The person manipulating the AI is using it as a tool to create something, and that something they make can be art. The AI is just the medium, the person choosing what they want it to make is the artist.
My fave definition is from Steven Sondheim's 'Sunday In The Park With George':
"work is what you do for others, art is what you do for yourself"
It highlights art as human action, and one done for self fulfillment. This handily covers both the making of an artwork and the engaging with it, which I think is important because art can still be art without a singular author and a person can engage with something not intended as art and make it art anyway.
It also is somewhat ambiguous, obviously there are things that can both be for oneself and others, and as such it becomes a spectrum not a binary.
It captures why something can almost feel de-arted by being treated as mere product, because then it becomes more work than art. Triple-A videogames and big studio films will always feel less artistic to me than indie ones made without profit in mind. They still are art especially when engaged with as such by audiences, but maybe they aren't *as* art as some other things.
It also I feel captures how anything can become art. Fighting can become a martial art that fulfills its practitioners, cooking can be hard work or a fulfilling artistic practice in and of itself, if you do it for you then it is art.
This definition of art excludes every historical act of craft. Every ancient coin, tool or work of engineering.
The Hoover dam wasn’t intended to be art, but it absolutely fulfils that function for me when observed in that light. Similarly da Vinci’s inventions, or even a modern aircraft.
interesting thread about a subject that makes me very uneasy - not the definition of "art" , which is multifaceted, but artificial intelligence, not because of how it is now, although i think the impact of algorithm and AI moderation already raise many questions, but because i think we're heading down the garden path to hell, paved with good intentions and vintage cat videos. i think this video is less interesting is the present than it will be to look back on later. As someone who grew up embracing the notion of the promises of cyberpunk, i am so filled with regrets. And pessimism. We are so dependent on technology that we'd be absolutely rooted without it because we barely know how to do anything ourselves any more. My pessimism is somewhat off topic, but only somewhat. i remember thinking Magic Eye stuff was really cool for example, but by now i have no words for how dejected i feel about the state of the world.
@@eoincampbell1584 i like this definition but i am biased because it jives with my own personal motivation to be creative, which essentially never includes an audience, or has an audience of one. Although it can presumably be attacked in a gamut of ways, i am also likely to agree with your thinking in terms of spontaneity of expression versus modulating the character out of something that made it likeably unique in the first place to make it more palatable to a wider audience, which arguably does seem to result in expressions becoming vulnerable to a limp and pallid blandness, forgettable objects of consumption rather than something memorable that stays with you.
I'm interested in writing (not that i can edit) but not necessarily for people, at least not until I'm a lot better at it. But i think some of the best things I've written are things i wrote to amuse any person i cared about where i wanted to amuse or entertain them..
If only i could write a book in that spirit and then publish it, given I'm absolutely driven like nothing else when it comes to making things appear out of nowhere for such purposes.
Perhaps a splash of Celtic blood doesn't hurt either ;)
@@oldvlognewtricks I'm a bit confused about a dam as art, unless any human creation can then be viewed as art. i think i know what you mean in the following sense - I'm not in the slightest bit scientifically minded but whenever i have fallen into rabbitholes about about light, astronomy, physics etc, i always end up finding aspects of it unintentionally poetic in concept, and I'm constantly wanting to appropriate these concepts to serenade a crush. i just never really get an opportunity to use reference to Quasars to flirt, sadly. Perhaps i have been trying to flirt with the wrong people.
That said, as devil's advocate, why can't "craft" or similar concepts stand on their own, as craft, aviation design, engineering or whatever? Why does it have to be conceived of as categorised "art" just in order to be viewed as possessed of artistic merit or acknowledge the artistry in design and craftsmanship?
Strictly speaking, design is not the same as art. Which doesn't mean artistic skill isn't coming into it, but to speak of optics, a personal making spectacle lenses is not doing the same job as someone making telescope lenses, even if they both deal in lenses and there are historic links between the two. (That initially was a typo of "historic kinks".)
Like i confess i defo find a streak in me that resists "anything can be art" discourse, especially if we acknowledge that we are tacitly actually primarily discussing visual art when we use the word. i feel like i see the footprint of cultural studies deconstructing art and not necessarily in a good way (not aimed at you, it's just in the air, and I'm not above it either, I'm just wary about its bs capacity).
So from that position, I'd argue that the design of a dam may involve an artistic sensibility that can be evocative. But needless to say this can clearly be delineated from what we think of when we say visual art. Sure, rigid categorisation isn't always helpful in terms of thinking about art, at least according to notions prevalent in postmodernity,, but i think we still need to keep a common sense bs radar to hand when it comes to deconstruction.
Da Vinci was an artist, but, in designing machines, he was engaged in design, in which other elements are not only as important as artistry but more important to focus on than aesthetics alone. Art often may not require precision, it could even be satisfying to omit it, whereas generally, precision is actually requisite for craft and design because function ultimately must always supercede lyrical expression or it can be very easily argued to be "bad design" and it's not just a subjective slur if the item is not fit for purpose..
Blah blah blah, you get the idea. i dunno, i think its more respectful to appraise the likes of a dam on its own merits, and it's most unlike a picture that has no function but to be pleasant/interesting/evocative/thought provoking etc. It has a very, uh, concrete job to do, ie holding water, that isn't going to vary between your subjective view of it and mine. If ot does the job badly, there are real and measurable consequences. This concrete nature puts ot squarely in a design category which may make use of artistic design skills but is not art.
As someone who has done a lot with excel, I can say that there is nothing more beautiful in the moment than accomplishing the thing in a neat and orderly way. And the functions are full of emotions! Mostly wrath. Some sadness. A hatred for statistics.
I put this video on as background while I started a new knitting project..one thing that it feels like the computer-generated art conversation often misses is the pleasure of *making* something. I feel like craft is as important as art, and it's really interesting to have a new field that in some ways, obliterates the aspect of craft, of physical creation and work with the hands. That's why I like to knit and bake, and to a lesser extent, write. It's not about making *art* for me, it's about *making* art.
Great video!
One of my favourite art pieces I've seen at a gallery, was a video on loop of brightly coloured and patterned fabric drying on a washing line. It reminded me of when my mum did the washing. Sure enough that was the feeling the artist wanted to capture too.
I love art that brings up emotions and feelings in me, like that. It's almost like mind reading in a way. Since you get to get a peck into the inner life of someone else on rare occations.
I'm a traditional and digital artist. This was my first introduction to AI art I'm completely blown away, it's truly beautiful, I love this use of colour and beyond abstract creations. I'm inspired.
every time you upload i drop everything and just enjoy the video
you’re a real one Angel Spice
The "process art" discussion reminds me of a symphony performance. Composer, music director, conductor, musicians - all participate in different ways.
this video is absolutely fascinating, and can I just say, your voice is so soothing and calm, I just love listening to your content
Thank you!
As an artist, the quote from the Wired article made me want to scream… It got such a visceral reaction out of me the more and more it went on… I absolutely agree with you on not loving the idea and finding it borderline icky, and I think it fits with the actual trend of seeing art only as 'content' (or profit) and artists as art machines that have to pump out continual art for consumption that we've seen on social media lately. It's incredibly depressing to see people having so little artistic litteracy and sensitivity, but at the same time it's how the business art of the world always has been, and I guess there will always be people who only see profit and nothing else in art. I guess it is really interesting to think about the place of money in art (though as someone who needs to eat, it's an utopic dream to think of a world where the two never interact)
All in all I really loved this essay, it's a really interesting subject and it's always cool to see people to video on things they're clearly really passionate about, thank you for taking the time to bring it to life for us, I'm looking forward to part 2 ♡
This is one of my favourite youtube videos of the entire year. So well made and thought out, fantastic points for consideration and debate, and wonderful examples. I am so excited to see more from your channel!!
Thank you :)
i love this video so much. i am a data scientist by trade and hobbyist ai tinkerer but this video offered so much more insight than anything ive ever been presented with. love it!!
Thank you!!
Ai generated "art" is like a beautiful waterfall; a natural wonder/ something shaped by circumstance. I would define "real" art as expression which is a form of communication. There needs to be an artist who wants to express/ communicate something about their human experience. A computer can't express feelings or human experience, it can only analyse trends and execute orders. The aesthetically pleasing media it produces, I would argue, is not so much art, the real artistry is more so the code which produced said media. Humans made ai, the fact that we felt a need to create something that replicates what we find pleasing and valuable says something about the human experience.
Which is just a long way to say: I agree more with your partner :)
This was a fascinating video 😭 it’s nice to hear your interpretation of contemporary art. I think something about AI that stood out to me in this vid was how un-neurotic it was? Maybe I’m projecting, but the idea of creating art and pushing boundaries without the constant anxiety that can come with it is interesting to me. It doesn’t care if it’s ugly or not, it’s just trying to copy what it “sees”.
My mum is an art therapist. Art presents a relatively direct link to the subconscious, especially in young children. I think art gets more impactful the more you tap into this link and the less other interests you have to consider (likes, sellability etc.) aside from just creating what you want. So, to expect a database of an artists work without any subconscious attached, to turn out work remotely in the same quality as the original artist's work, is wild to me. I think this is an interesting new medium, because it leaves the artist with less input ability than any other medium, but ultimately it's still the thought behind the input that counts.
can i ask a very rudely direct question, which is whether she could make a decent living through her work? i figure it's incredibly helpful work but i also figure only part time work would be available and it would be difficult to support a family on the income, which isn't to diminish the value of the work. Rather, i think i imagine that if would be difficult tp get by financially in that line of work, and I'm wondering if I'm mistaken You never know if you don't ask, and i haven't actually encountered many art therapists before.. Also, i imagine affordability could be an issue for many poorer families.. Perhaps she gains employment with facilities that use diversional therapy such as cancer treatment centres and nursing homes, so she actually works across a variety of workplaces? Sorry for being nosey, i just never conceived of doing something like that myself even though technically it would be right up my alley, and I've certainly never seen any advertisement for such positions, so i was wondering if she was self employed and teaching out of your home and so pn, whether she goes to people's houses, or is working at facilities, and whether it's steady work.
@@mothratemporalradio517 No worries about asking. it's not a well known job, so I can see why you'd be curious. My mum works part time as a teacher, part time as a therapist. She organises group projects together with local social workers and does more traditional single person therapy sessions. She does make quite a bit of money, not enough for a full income though. However if you work as an art therapist full time, for example in a psychiatry or with your own office, you can make enough money to live off of it. But it definitely depends on where you live, in big non conservative cities you'll probably get clients easier.
What payment looks like for the clients really depends on where you are in the world. Where I live, some of the general health care providers pay for sessions, but not all of them do.
Overall my mum is not the only person I know with an art related job, and all of them are dicey when it comes to financial security. It's a good idea to have a stable source of income before starting, you need to go to university to get a proper degree in art therapy and depending on your country additional certifications might be necessary. Hope this helped a little :)
@@strawberrycheesecake5502 that's a great, solid, honest response. Love it. Thanks for the useful insight! :) Appreciate you taking the time to relay the details My best regards to both of you! 🎨🖌️🖼️🛋️👓👍 Take care :)
@@mothratemporalradio517 Thank you for your interest :) good luck on your further job search!
@@strawberrycheesecake5502 thanks lovely! 🍓🍰 Take care :) ✌️🐞
19:00 I don't know if it's from mouse cages. I think it may have been from people playing noughts and crosses with their pets. That involves a 3 by 3 grid. You put a pet treat in each square. You invite the pet to take a treat, and use that to indicate where they want to place their naught or cross. In that image it looks like the same pet over and over? Maybe one particular person played noughts and crosses with their pet, and that got into the dataset.
It’s possible!
Super excited! Love from Australia.
I'm gonna have to muse on this before I have anything interesting to say, but this is one of the more thought provoking videos I've seen in a long time.
The sections discussing art with your partner were a meaningful addition to your commentary.
This is such a fascinating topic! Really excited to see your take on it
I love the link for Vic in the description. Thank you for sharing a glimpse of your life. You give me hope. May your vacuum prove true. ♥
Nice episode! Was looking forward to it since the last one. I like impressionist art and AI-generated art looks kinda similiar - more realistic than expressionism or the various 20th century styles, but more surreal and dreamlike than pure realism. Looking forward to these recipes, lol.
I love your essays so much, I'm watching this one the 2nd time over and still feel like I'm gaining new and incredible insight into the topic...
So much unnecessary drama around GANs and it all goes back to the seemingly inconsequential question of 'what is art?', with all the contradictory answers to it clashing together as we are rapidly approaching some kind of small scale artistic singularity, shit's fascinating to think about!!! It's like we taught machines to dream and yet we ourself know jack shit about why or how humans are able to dream and in that sense we are truly playing with philosophical fire here... These flames are as terrifying as they are mesmerizing and I can't look away even though it hurts to stare.
As a certain other content creator often says, 'What a time to be alive!'
ahhh loved this so much!! so interesting!! i wanna see more arts discourse like this in commentary yt bc among media it really unfairly gets the back burner to film/tv/music :\ partially bc the visual arts world isn't as democratized/inclusive as other media butttt hopefully vids like this will help change that bc all ppl deserve access to art and art education
Thank you!!
it's so weird to watch this video in 2023. crazy how fast technology becomes outdated.
I am just consistently amazed by your videos. They leave me thinking about them for months!
Thank you so much!
Wonderful video. As an artist and someone with an art degree I have had the "is this art?" discussion with many people. The long and short of it is that everything is art and nothing is art. Or maybe a better definition is that everything is art, but only if you decided that it is. It's tough to put my thoughts into a comment message without turning it into an essay because there is so much to the definition of art, so I hope this make sense 😅
Sorry, Vic, Stonks is 100% art... but I'm interested in hearing your argument.
I've been meaning to mix up my patronages anyway, no time like the present!
Can't wait to see it !
as a painter I find this a Super fantastic thought provoking video! refreshing to see the take of Ai-generated images as art rather than just a vehicle for profit. Inspired to try this kind of art out for myself now :)
the link you left in the description under Vic's name just put tears in my eyes. that's so incredibly sweet
I was hoping someone would check!!
They’re not really a public figure so I wasn’t sure what to put lol
This was excellent!!
As an artist myself, I find all of this absolutely fascinating. And you touched on every single issue relevant to all of it. Really compelling video. You clearly have a passion for this stuff...and your on-camera delivery is super natural and compelling.
Subscribed straight away. Then I saw your video about the whole "trans thing" and was blown away. I'm a straight cis guy...and while I've always been quite liberal, I feel like I'm FAR more educated on the trans issue now than I was just a few years ago. Because of channels like this...and also in large part Contrapoints.
It's so refreshing to hear that topic being discussed by actual trans people....with all the nuance and intelligence and humor and honesty that can only come from that inside perspective. It's so much more interesting than hearing a bunch of whiny scared talking heads on TV argue about genitals and bathrooms. That level of discourse now feels so mind bogglingly stupid and shallow and boring....after encountering channels like Contrapoints....and now your own.
I just wish the larger population would avail themselves of this kind of content. Maybe then we could move past the super low brow dumb bickering about bathroom use.....
This was really bloody interesting. You put a lot of abberative qualities inherent in most generative architectures in a really succinct way. Considering you also talked about the whole "art doesn't exist in a vacuum" thing, it's interesting how a lot of what we consider to intangible when it comes to visual style (or audio/text style with architectures) can be parametrised. While a lot of the rapid prototyping stuff that comes out of all this field is incredibly interesting, it certainly feels like the start of a very long nightmare. You got yourself a subscriber!
Thank you!
We need a follow-up to this video SO much.....
It's fascinating to see how much has transpired in a mere year and a half. That's all it's been since you put this out.
The world is changing SO fast. And I could not be more ambivalent about it. I'm both fascinated and afraid.
But your ability to talk about aesthetic and artistic and cultural ideas is deeply valuable...to me. And I know many others.
One of the most interesting angles on this to me personally emerges when you really try to visualize just how an AI is trying to make sense of the world. For visual processing neural networks you can do something where for each individual neuron you calculate back through the network to find what starting pixel values produce the maximum output for that neuron. When this is done you can essentially see the image that is what the AI considers the "essence" of something it sees, be it a car or a dog or a face. At the high level neurons you can see the strange dreamlike representations of these things like what was in this video, but as you travel down into the more primitive neurons in the network, the neurons represent more and more basic things, a wheel, a circle, an edge, a brightness value on one part of the image, a frequency. What makes this really cool is that as neuroscience advances we are learning that this basic idea of having layers of neurons recognize things at different levels of abstraction is exactly how human brains work as well! So I'd argue that these art pieces don't just invoke such strong emotions because of what the AI doesn't understand, but that produces an image that directly activates an intermediary in our brain without activating almost anything else associated with it. It's a window into a part of our psyche normally inaccessible.
Also I think it hilarious that for so long we believed that AI would first replicate human logic and reasoning and only eventually get to emotions and artistic experience and in reality it's very much the other way round.
There is the genre of "Generative Art", where AI art best fits in. Besides Algorithmic Art it also encompasses apertures to generate music.
A few months ago I visited the Modern Art Museum in Stuttgart and they had a synthesizer there, which in-cooperated a circuit, that lead to some resonance, when you interacted with the synthesizer, generating melodies, even after you stopped interacting with it.
Here the circuit was the art and interacting with it imo was similar to watching a painting from different angles. Similar in the case of AI art, the programming (of which the ways of delivering feedback are part) plus the data-set are the art. Generating images with GAN or another model is looking at the gigantic artwork, in which so many artists are implicated, is looking at it at different angles.
I wish you had included style transfer, but it was already a big project you took on, and props to you for taking it on!
I see all of this as another toolset. It's a new paintbrush. You can control what you put in, the operations taking place, and therefore the end result.
your voice is so soothing and lovely that it surprises me that the content of your videos are, defying all possible sense, even lovelier. thank you.
Thank you 😊
I can't even look at "Name one thing in this photo." It's too unsettling.
now I want to see a GAN learn from Beksinski's art styles (the nightmarish paintings and drawings of course)!
Ha, you’re in luck, there’s TONS of GAN art that does this! Check out rivershavewings on Twitter
@@lily_lxndr oh wow they've got some nice results from some of the prompts, thanks! I especially love the weird cthulhu mist/stone angels from a few days ago :O
i was hoping someone might make a video like this, thank you! this was great
Loved the topic so much!! Got me hyped up on doing research on the matter. And maybe getting started !
Exquisite content, very happy I’ve found your channel.
Lots of love from Berlin
Thanks so much! Glad you liked it :)
When you see all the comments a year ago when people were just in somekind of fascination, inspiration and philosophical thoughts about ai images.
What shifted in the discourse completely into that sinister controversy 3 month ago. 😃 And from that time ob AI art is mainly seen as a threat by many creative people.
I never give thumbs up to videos on UA-cam. I gave this one a thumbs up. You did a great job presenting all of this information to someone that doesn't even really understand art that well. Great job
this was such an interesting topic, really enjoyed this!
Thank you Amanda!!
the conversation here about authorship and intent reminds me of art made by animals, like that elephant that was trained to use a paintbrush. It similarly produces something that resembles art we recognize, but also reveals just how different the creator is to us humans. Personally tho I think I come down on the side of art being something man-made, if only bc the things made by non-humans is just so different that calling it "art" feels inaccurate to me
An incredibly interesting, and thoughtful video essay. Subscribed, and look forward to more of your work.
Really enjoyable video. I think an important part of what makes something art is what I'd call "curation": choosing to show something as art, even if it wasn't made as art originally, can make it art,imo.
loved the video! i like your outlook on AI generated art, it's something i'm not very familiar with but the implications are so interesting, and some of the examples you showed us are beautiful, i liked the skyline at night especially.
Your definiton of art too, really got me thinking. The possibility of anything being art if only we look at it that way. I wonder, would it have to be good art? Like the meal example you mentioned, you said especifically "a good meal", but could it be a bad one? a mediocre meal? what if i considered a regular sandwich mediocre art? unoriginal and uninspired but art still, maybe? Idk this is a fun line of thought, now i wanna bring it up with my friends, so thank you for the video!
great vid, lily!
Thank you!
Dead artists painting again
as ghosts in the machine...
Dead artists painting for you
as ghosts in the machine...
Dead artists painting forever
as ghosts in the machine...
THIS VIDEO IS ART. its so magical
i think a little more like you than like vic, but i still understand them! this is one of my all time fav videos!!!!! :)
gonna cite this video as a source for an essay about ai art that i'm writing for school, thank u for ur insights
wow i am sososo glad the alg threw this video my way!! i remember reading amanda palmer's "the art of asking" in which she broke down her idea of the artistic process as a series of collecting, connecting, and sharing... some artists may collect and connect ideas but rarely or never share, some may mostly care about the sharing part, etc. basically an infinite number of ways to DO art you know? maybe the fact that some numbers and code connected me to this video is an act of AI art at work, and maybe i am foolishly romanticizing a math equation that was developed by humans with monetary incentives - regardless it still brought me here!
just like a GAN producing a piece that technically fails to generate its intended outcome, something new is created instead leading to new connections, perspectives, conversations, all that jazz!! so even if art is defined by its utility, there is much to be explored :·)
thank YOU for collecting connecting and sharing these dots & btw i love the open dialogue you included between you and your partner! looking forward to future vids
Ah man, this made my night. Thank you so much!
This has been one of my favorite videos on GANs! Subscribed :)
Thanks so much!
Your video is based on so much research and thought provoking ideas! 😃
I am a high school student and I based my end of year report on AI generated art, and how it might be a threat for the future of digital artists, and though I've done a lot of research I keep finding myself referring to your video.
Thank you so much again! 🥰
Oh that's awesome, thank you so much!
Incredibly interesting video, lots of effort put in and very engaging subject!
very inspiring! Thank you!! great vid again :D
ahh when you started talking about the ai not actually knowing what it's working with or why there needs to be a door etc, that's actually a trait that we in painting training try to develop! We call it the naive eye, and it essentially allows you to work from any source material without needing to understand the anatomy of it.
as someone who is studying data science and ai, i love to see this more philosophical take on the meaning of ais and what they create, and how it reflects us people
17:33 i’d argue that the photographers likely use cameras that somebody else designed and created, creating yet another layer of subjectivity
The fact that these AIs can capture the essence of what something looks like without actually producing anything coherent is super interesting.
It shows that on some level the AI looks at images in the same way humans, image recognition is a really complicated process that isn't well understood and this AI "getting" a part of it that is really hard to define is honestly an incredible achievement.
holy shit, i expected just some other video essay, but now i am completely entranced by ai art and the discussion around it... props
Thank you!!
i really enjoyed this video. AI generated art was something i researched a bit like half a year ago for school. through this feedback loop AI could basically be told to create something that hasn't been done before but still can be considered art.
also the generated images are very pretty
Ooooooh 🖌️🤖🎨 🖼️
I believe that it becomes art when people derive emotion and meaning from it. All beautiful poems exist within the Library of Babel project, but it would require someone sifting through the pages of random characters to find those nuggets of beauty, and through appreciating them, give them life and meaning they lacked before.
A sunset can be art just as easily, art without a human creator
I had a heated argument with a friend whether AI can someday do every single task possible and be capable of any human function. I was of the position that it can't, that there's something innately human AI will never reach. And I'm so glad to have watches this video because kinda helped me word what i was thinking: that AI isn't this objective, independent entity. That when we think of it, AI is deeply entrenched to the human authors creating it
AI is a mockery of the art it scrapes.
Really liking your presentation style. Very well done.
Lily, Thank you so much for this video.
This aged well
The philosopher John Dewey had a very modern take on the philosophy of art & beauty (he was a capital P Pragmatist), and I think your self-description as an anarchist on the subject would be well-served by his take on art. I did a class in college on the philosophy of art, and went over a bunch of different theories, and Hewey's philosophy of art was by far the most compelling and useful. (His work on the subject is found in his 1934 book "Art as Experience.")
Basically, what Dewey was getting at, was that counter to traditional secular philosophies of art that focus on the object of art itself, what defines art is our experience of it.
He would describe art as being a part of life, not merely for the creator but for the consumer as well. As we might read a book, this process is not a passive receiving of static information, but a reactive filtering of information through all of the accumulated experiences of our lives, as we build a sense of meaningfulness from the piece. No two readings of a book can be identical, for the simple reason that no two lives can be identical. It is art’s unique purpose to pull together the whole of our life experiences, such that they create a moment of magnified, aesthetic perspective on the whole.
You cannot detach "art" from the artist, nor can you detach the art from the context in which it was made, nor the context in which it is *viewed*, nor the person who is indeed viewing the art. Each step along the way between the life of the artist, the creation of the art, the position of the art within the world, and the experiences of the person who is viewing the art. Each step contributes something to the overall *experience* of the art.
In the context of artificial intelligence, one could, I suppose, dismiss the explanation of how these AI generated pieces are in fact more of a collaborative human piece filtered through an algorithm. You could say 'it still lacks the intent of artful creation required by an emotional mind.'
But in Dewey's view (at least how I interpret it, they just didn't have computers making art in 1934), even if you throw that all away, we are still left with the context of the art (which in this case is not meaningless at all, it is a novel context but it is a *context*), but also, importantly, our experience of it.
If a piece moves you, if you see something in it that you can reflect upon, if it speaks to you, then it is art. At least, it is art for you.
Maybe that is a wish-washy definition of art, and maybe people want something that is more definitive, but I would argue that art and beauty is neither universal nor cleanly defined, and nor should it be. Would our world be better off by drawing a hard line and dismissing the human, emotional experiences people have of AI-generated art?
What do we call those experiences? Art-like? Art-adjacent?
Isn't that splitting hairs? Isn't that an unnecessary distinction?
16:53 "these ai generated paintings won't include a coherent mission statement, etc."
me: yet.
to test this, i made an AI Dungeon prompt where I was in an art gallery asking painters about their paintings, and i got some pretty legit results from my questioning them. In a few years we'll be able to generate both the paintings with a text blurb, and it will be able to generate a portrait and name of the artist, their back story, a list of techniques they used in the painting, what the painting means to them, and what inspired it.
Here's what i got, pressing retry to get the most interesting responses possible:
"This painting depicts a young girl in a blue dress kneeling on a red carpet leading to a staircase. The staircase is on the other side wall of the room."
"What is the girl doing?"
"The girl is about to ascend the staircase."
"Why is she doing that?"
"She is about to leave the room and go to another room."
You say "why did you paint this? what feeling did you want to convey?"
"The painting conveys the feeling of hope. The girl in the painting ascends the staircase towards a future that is unknown."
You say "what in your life inspired this painting?"
The artist looks down at his feet and considers your question for a moment.
He looks up at you and smiles.
"This painting is a homage to the memory of my father."
You say "how so?"
"My father was a great admirer of Michelangelo. In fact, the real inspiration for this painting came from the Sistine Chapel. My father was particularly fond of the ceiling painting by Michelangelo and it was this painting that inspired me to become a painter myself. While studying the painting, I tried to imagine what it would be like to stand in that room in the Vatican during the time of the old religion."
"What do you mean?"
"The Sistine Chapel was painted by the Catholic Church to illustrate the stories of the Old Testament and the New Testament. Michelangelo's painting captured the imagination of the entire world.
You say "how does your painting here make you feel?"
"My work of art makes me feel hopeful. The painting depicts what I would like to be: a creator. I would like to create something that is greater than myself with a technique I possess.
You say "what painting techniques did you employ to create this piece?"
"I used oil paint and I also drew upon the memory of my experience."
"What experience?"
"I have studied the work of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. You can see this in the painting."
"How did you arrive at such a painting as this?"
"I worked from the memory of seeing the Sistine Chapel in person and from the memory of my father describing it to me. I was only ten years old when he took me into the Vatican.
You say "what does the blue dress symbolize?"
The artist looks down at his feet and considers your question for a moment.
He looks up at you and smiles.
Upon further questioning, he said: "The dress signifies the girl's purity. She has not yet tasted the corruption of this world. She is a creature of God.
"The red carpet signifies the desire to arrive at a destination.
I just used the free version of AI Dungeon to generate all this in 2 minutes. BRUH.
even if we know it's an AI doing this, I wonder if at a certain point it won't matter, because the art and "painter"''s relationship to us, the viewer, will create a strange emotional portrait in itself within us.
Wow, AI improved fast.
This a very well done video reflecting on the philosophy of art in the era of machine learning. Make more!
22k subs? Dang, nice piece on various aspects people are still very apprehensive about. And mind you, this is basically just baby GAN, it goes so much deeper already - bigsleep and the iterations upon semantic art creations following it up are huge and have been blowing me away. Every iteration of abstraction into its own domain (music turned into a painting? Very much a possibility) has been a milestone in its own right. Not one month passed during the last ten years where people weren't absolutely boggled by what ANNs can produce and how unique the resulting art - and that's what it is - might be in the end. As far as I am concerned, the human is the discriminator in the loop, in every single discipline. Doesn't matter if we have to think it into a machine turning it into a picture or a video (which ultimately is just an intermediate step before we end up transferring thoughts and concepts into other brains directly), if it is unique enough and a person or sufficiently similar entity brought it about, it's every bit as real as a Monet and at least as much streaked with the fascination of countless inventions as "real art", as perceived, is today.
To turn this slightly controversial and extreme for no good reason: I laugh at people claiming that crypto or stocks or even "degenerate gambling" is just speculation and mental insufficiency. Maybe so for most people and the repercussions might be tangible, but somewhere out there you've got a couple thousand people who see God while doing mundane stuff, something that might even allow them to expand their mindset or get into the groove for whatever artistic endeavor they embark on. There is almost nothing in this world - short of things that harmfully impact other people directly - I can't see being valuable, useful, and enriching (heck, maybe even animals!) - it's just that most of us are completely blind to stimuli we don't (yet) understand. Ask the millions upon millions of players mindlessly slaying an inordinate amount of virtual monsters what it does to their mental health... and then consider the budding industry surrounding TV, movies, gaming, writing, concept art, music - everything can be an inspiration. Looking at one cultural "asset" without the runoff benefits society gains from them is just a bit narrow-minded, and I am glad you're here to hold the line.
Loved that video, can't even fathom what revisiting the premise looks like two or ten years from now.
btw, what you said about the AI paintings of "buildings" reminds me so much of the Center Cenote City level in the game Anodyne 2. you should rly check it out, amazing game all around, but it uses PS1 era graphics in super surreal ways, ans the buildings totally match the aesthetic illogic of the AI painting.
I gave this algorithm a shot with the phrase 'dragons fighting airplanes by Greg Rutkowski' - the results were beyond amazing... this is ART, because of the goosebumps it gave me. It feels like it was co-created by me, a weird feeling... but it wasn't me... it feels awesome just to look at it. Can't wait to show it to my 8-year-old boy... Thanks for the effort you have invested in this great video!
Great video! A very thorough and fair tour through Ai art! I am a painter for animation. Still figuring out how i feel about these new technologies.
that mice and grid shit was so fucking crazy for real
Just stunbled upon nightcafe yesterday so this was a nice surprise! very cool video, this stuff is really interesting.
I make art by setting the scene in blender with a character, and such. I make the textures myself.
But, I do put it through an AI to make it look more 'painted'.
Hey, before I start going on my little rant, I do want to say that this video is very well done, I appreciate hearing your thoughts and I do believe you made some very interesting points.
However, I feel there are some issues you didn't address that I find very important when discussing AI art, and I'd like to share my own thoughts.
To start off, as an artist, my personal definition of art aligns a lot more with Vic's. I believe art is always filled with intent, that it was created by humans to evoke some kind of emotion, whether it's to evoke emotions and ideas in others, or an emotional outlet for the artist. It's a distinctly human creation (or even other living creatures- I'd argue that a bowerbird's nest is art, they make them primarily to visually attract other birds, they have the intent of making something aesthetically attractive. I suppose I'd call bowerbirds a species that highly values art).
While my definition includes the classic paintings (or in my case, digital illustration), I'd include objects with functionality too- I enjoy woodworking, I view the bookshelf and stool and table I've made as art, as they were created partially with the intent to look pleasing, and an outlet for my creativity and passion. However, massed produced items made for capitalistic gain (ex. an ikea table or something, my partner and I went to ikea recently so it's on my mind) lose that emotion, not to mention they are often put together by machines or assembly lines of people who aren't often building these things for the beauty and passion, but rather for the simple reason of needing a job to survive.
I also believe art is always completely original- though an artist might take a lot of inspiration from already existing art, every piece they make still is their own, with their own unique twist on their inspirations.
However, just because I might not consider something art doesn't mean I don't think it's beautiful or emotion-evoking in it's own way. I think moths are beautiful, even the ikea tables can be aesthetically pleasing, but I wouldn't call them art. I feel like that's an important thing to note because in your definition of art (though very wide and vague), I kinda got the vibe that art to you is really anything that evokes emotion or could be considered aesthetically pleasing in some way. Not at all trying to say that's wrong, I just personally have a different view.
AI art, however, doesn't really fit my definition. It's definitely not original- AI produces images that are simply a sum of its database, it aims to copy the images it's been fed, unlike an artist taking inspiration from images. There's no way for AI to be original, it's a machine.
AI also obviously lacks the emotion, the passion. Again, it's a machine, there's no way for it to have any. AI doesn't create images with the intent of evoking emotion, it creates images because it is coded to do so. It's following instructions. It loses a lot of the meaning for me.
I might be a bit nitpicky here, but another issue I have is the entire idea of calling the person prompting AI the "artist." Even if I considered AI generated images art, it still doesn't make sense to me. The person prompting AI isn't creating the images, just like someone commissioning an artist isn't the one making the art. When someone asks me to draw them a flower, they aren't the creator of the flower I drew them, they can't go around insisting they created it because they told me to draw a flower. And if they did do that, I'd view it as an insult, as stealing credit. I think of AI the same way. The prompter might've requested a specific image, but they didn't make the image. The AI made it, and the AI made the image from a database of other images created by other artists, and the AI was made by the person who coded it. If anything, I'd say the true artists in that chain are a combination of the artists who contributed to the database and the person who made the code. Prompters calling AI generated images something they created really rubs me the wrong way because of all this. No matter how much someone fiddles with their prompts, no matter how much time they spend trying to write the perfect request to get the image they want, it is really no different than someone commissioning an artist and requesting adjustment upon adjustment until the product matches what they want.
Okay, last but certainly not least, I want to talk about the issue of art theft. I definitely don't blame you for not including this in your video, as in the last year a lot of developments have been made in AI, and this information is decently new to most people. Many AI databases are composed of art that was not consented to be used in said databases. Artists aren't even contacted and informed their art is being used in said database, even if their work has copyright. That's already bad enough, but whats more is that people profit off of these AI, the companies selling AI subscriptions making potentially billions off of AI that uses stolen art. Are the artists compensated for their unconsensual contributions to these company's riches? No, of course not, they already stole the art, they're obviously not going to go on to pay the artists back. At that point, I really do not believe you could consider such AI generated images true art (by my definition that is).
That's all my thoughts for now, I could really keep ranting for pages upon pages worth of words (as an artist and the demographic primarily affected by AI art, I have a lot I could say), but this is a youtube comment section and this is basically a mini essay already. If anyone has a response to this they want to share please do!! I'm super interested in all the different ways to view the whole topic of AI art (although I've come to my own conclusions on it after a lot of debate so I might not change my mind super easily). Thanks to anyone who took the time read this all the way through :3
Love the concept of the next video
Fantastic as always!
looking forward to the video!
Thank you!
Outstanding video. Thoughtful, interesting, enlightening. Well done.
Thanks so much!