You're right that it removes some (honestly perhaps most) of the craftsmanship that comes with creating art. I do think the resulting work is still interesting, valuable, and art from a practical point of view, though. There is perhaps a threshold where this is not true, perhaps related to how much curation/pruning/how indiscriminate the human is in determining the final outcome.
That is to say, if there is some text to image generation program, and the human generates 1 image based on the first phrase they thought of, that image they generated is probably not going to be very interesting, at least based on the image generation stuff I've played around with so far. It often takes time and several attempts / variations on the phrasing to get something which is interesting and novel.
People have been finding tricks like appending the words "Unreal Engine" onto the phrase in order to produce certain types of results. Some people actually go into the code to tweak things to get desired results.
I do wonder how true this will be going forward. It feels like this media synthesis stuff is progressing at the speed of light, and perhaps it'll only take 1 iteration / attempt to craft the interesting and novel stuff that we're looking for.
So at least at the moment it's maybe not so different from anything else. I think of it as exploring the possibilities in a given space. I work on video game development, and it's the same story there. If you're creating a game prototype, you might have an initial idea which sparks development, but once the initial seed is implemented the game often takes on and is guided by a life of it's own, shaped by the possibilities in that given space which you are narrowing down into a subset which seem to work and gel together. That's how I view it anyway.
>You're right that it removes some (honestly perhaps most) of the craftsmanship that comes with creating art.
Perhaps art, going forward, is simply described as the process, not the result.
I don't doubt that a computer could (or will) produce a perfectly convincing Charlie Parker solo or Richard M. Powers painting. There really was less there than met the eye (or ear) and most of human output consists of cliches in any case.
My take is to become increasingly archaic and self-sufficient in interests. Greek red figure pottery looks like a good place to end up after the walls are filled with amateur art, but a kiln looks pricey.
‘Beautiful thing’ will indeed be massively available (as it is right now), but ‘beautiful thing touched by a human’ will always remain scarce. Only the latter will be truly considered an art object.
That is to say, if there is some text to image generation program, and the human generates 1 image based on the first phrase they thought of, that image they generated is probably not going to be very interesting, at least based on the image generation stuff I've played around with so far. It often takes time and several attempts / variations on the phrasing to get something which is interesting and novel.
People have been finding tricks like appending the words "Unreal Engine" onto the phrase in order to produce certain types of results. Some people actually go into the code to tweak things to get desired results.
I do wonder how true this will be going forward. It feels like this media synthesis stuff is progressing at the speed of light, and perhaps it'll only take 1 iteration / attempt to craft the interesting and novel stuff that we're looking for.
So at least at the moment it's maybe not so different from anything else. I think of it as exploring the possibilities in a given space. I work on video game development, and it's the same story there. If you're creating a game prototype, you might have an initial idea which sparks development, but once the initial seed is implemented the game often takes on and is guided by a life of it's own, shaped by the possibilities in that given space which you are narrowing down into a subset which seem to work and gel together. That's how I view it anyway.