Comment by pavlov
3 months ago
One interesting development from generative AI is that it has opened a lot more people's eyes to seeing kitsch.
Professional artists generally don't see great value in the style of art exemplified by these AI-powered image generators. It tends to be formulaic, derivative, and melodramatic with all the high-contrast portraits and sunsets and oversaturated pastoral landscapes. But popular taste has been in many ways stuck a century or more in the past.
Now that these styles can be generated at the click of a button, it's far easier for even laypersons to see them as essentially canned forms of expression. I wonder if this augurs a larger shift in artistic taste. The introduction of photography fundamentally changed what people want from human-made images, and AI could have almost as far-reaching effects.
I think I generally agree with this take, with the caveat that I still hugely value AI generated art, even the kitsch stuff. Why? Because it's me. I wouldn't have been able to have a portrait of my wife and I together without finding an artist and commissioning a painting. Now, I can have something that is personalized, pleasant to look at, and meaningful. Even if it isn't an original style or anything noteworthy artistically, I hugely value the AI art because it can give me something that I want, that is meaningful to me.
> pleasant to look at
That is very subjective. Mass market art loses appeal fast, popular turns common, what is unique steals the spotlight and tastes change.
I can see best quality AI generated custom portraits being as pleasant to look at as selfies.
You're conflating "art commonly created by these AI-powered image generators" with "art that AI is capable of".
Just because most people create things that you categorise as kitsch should not fool you into thinking that's an inherent limitation. There's almost no limit to the kind of images that can be created given the right input.
Unless you want to define kitsch as "anything that an AI image generator is capable of producing"?
It’s the opposite really. I’m not claiming anything about AI image generators. I’m saying that people have quite limited tastes, and so they end up going for kitsch because it looks good at first glance.
But now that it’s so easy to generate, will it mean a shift in taste? The current crop of AI art looks the same because enough people think those limited styles are good. But in ten years, users may be a lot more demanding.
Think about 1950s pop music, before the invention of electric guitars and synthesizers and sequencers. The range of musical expression is quite limited to modern ears. But at the time, it was uncontested among ordinary listeners that “good music” had that particular sound. There was an enormous gulf between avant garde contemporary music and pop music, just like in art today.
You are absolutely right regarding the capabilities.
Although many image generators now seem to be fine-tuned to output impressive but formulaic art by default, to ensure a good first-impression for a broad audience.
Midjourney for example has always been great at generating very "cool" art easily, but seems to be less versatile and always tends towards that same people-pleasing style.
Yes - I've noticed these trends as well. I still have a fondness for the quirks and limitations of the earlier generation models Disco Diffusion and it's kin.
Sadly it's become quite hard to run some of these due to bit rot and the fact that "pinning your Python dependencies" doesn't appear to have ever been a thing for large sections of the ML dev community.
The style associated with AI image generators is by no means all they are capable of, it’s what is both actuallypopular in use and promoted by vendors because they expect it to be popular and blandly inoffensive.
Also there's nothing inherent in currently popular style that makes it “canned expression”; is used for canned expression because it’s popular; when popular tastes shift, so does canned expression; that's how commercial vs. fine art moves.
If AI changes the details of that other than accelerating the process, it’ll probably be by a “Latinum is valuable because you can't replicate it” effect, which probably won’t hit exactly where what current professional artist see as most interesting is any more than it will hit where current populat art is.
> I wonder if this augurs a larger shift in artistic taste.
People have distorted/blurred/abstracted images from the start with 'Vaseline on the lens' to airbrushing to modern concerns about 4k showing too much detail. Popular art wants to remove the detail and portray the subject as better-than.
I'll note that it's AI art generated by non-artists that tends to be this way (the majority of AI art) but it's definitely possible to get much more human looking output with proper conditioning/model tuning. I do think you have a point though.
I think you're absolutely right that generative AI art doesn't produce any "great value" at all, in terms of Art with a capital A.
But on the other hand, probably 99% of what professional illustrators do isn't, and doesn't need to be, great Art either.
They're just trying to quickly produce a hero illustration for an article, or turn an author headshot into a simpler sketch, or add some appropriate clothing to a background NPC. Being "formulaic" and "derivative" and a "canned form of expression" here is a feature, not a bug.
Which is why generative AI seems so great to me.
In terms of "kitsch" -- yeah I'd never in a million years hang something AI-generated on my wall as if it were fine art produced by a human soul trying to express something.
And I think the creator of Drawbert should focus entirely on this being a tool for being professional portraits for business and branding use, rather than "stunning portraits" or "masterpiece paintings". The former is what it actually is, the latter it ain't.