Some nuanced takes from someone who is both a consumer and a researcher.
Personally, if somebody I follow posts one it usually smacks of laziness, the degree of acceptability of which can depend on the purpose of the image.
If the intent is artistic, unless it’s something really good (or often a commentary on AI art itself), it looks like bland regurgitated crap.
If the objective is political, more often than not it feels like the person thought up some bland idea and didn’t think it through enough.
If it’s for marketing, specially from small businesses who couldn’t afford actual designers, I find it often does the job well enough.
Socially, we live under developed capitalism, and so, every single human product is commodified. Value is imbued on a commodity by human labour socially required to produce it. “AI art” doesn’t just have lower labour value, it actually reduces the socially required labour for the production of digital images, which in turn depreciates their value even for human producers.
Human-made images can only remain competive by differentiation from “AI”-ones, which, although is already happening very naturally, is no easy task for beginners. This puts pressure on artists, photographers and such, who are not big fish on a market intentionally flooded with “AI art” by the internet companies who control that market and hold a massive stake in “AI” investment and adoption.
And finally, scientifically, “Artificial Neural Networks” are fantastic interpolators, but terrible extrapolators. This permeates the entire field of DNN-based “AI”, which is why some sort of extrapolation is always at the edge of “AI” futurology stock-hype, often solved by just another layer of interpolation rather than breaking the mathematical limits of DNNs.
Yesterday’s “MLP learned XOR” is today’s “GPT learned to count”, but at the end of the day most hopes built into “AI” are fundamentally flawed, and most advances are born out of a lot of good work on interpolation being masked as “another step towards AGI”.
Some nuanced takes from someone who is both a consumer and a researcher.
Personally, if somebody I follow posts one it usually smacks of laziness, the degree of acceptability of which can depend on the purpose of the image.
If the intent is artistic, unless it’s something really good (or often a commentary on AI art itself), it looks like bland regurgitated crap.
If the objective is political, more often than not it feels like the person thought up some bland idea and didn’t think it through enough.
If it’s for marketing, specially from small businesses who couldn’t afford actual designers, I find it often does the job well enough.
Socially, we live under developed capitalism, and so, every single human product is commodified. Value is imbued on a commodity by human labour socially required to produce it. “AI art” doesn’t just have lower labour value, it actually reduces the socially required labour for the production of digital images, which in turn depreciates their value even for human producers.
Human-made images can only remain competive by differentiation from “AI”-ones, which, although is already happening very naturally, is no easy task for beginners. This puts pressure on artists, photographers and such, who are not big fish on a market intentionally flooded with “AI art” by the internet companies who control that market and hold a massive stake in “AI” investment and adoption.
And finally, scientifically, “Artificial Neural Networks” are fantastic interpolators, but terrible extrapolators. This permeates the entire field of DNN-based “AI”, which is why some sort of extrapolation is always at the edge of “AI” futurology stock-hype, often solved by just another layer of interpolation rather than breaking the mathematical limits of DNNs.
Yesterday’s “MLP learned XOR” is today’s “GPT learned to count”, but at the end of the day most hopes built into “AI” are fundamentally flawed, and most advances are born out of a lot of good work on interpolation being masked as “another step towards AGI”.