So the problem here lies in the fact that a lot of Art schools dropped practical exams and instead demand borderline professional portfolios in order to get admitted. There's 0 reason to submit a fake portfolio for art school because you will fail in the practical portion during the educational process, but also there's 0 reason because art school is meant to teach you how to build a proper portfolio and expand on your talents. If I can already do the work I do not need to waste several more years and hundred of thousand dollars to learn how to do it. Also you can just pay someone to make your portfolio so you don't even need AI. This video just underlines a huge problem of the way Visual arts education is handled. If you can produce viable and professional portfolio for art school, then you don't need art school because you already have the skills to work in the industry. Essentially the exams need to be narrowed down to basic techniques which have objective metrics to which one can be judged upon. This is not an AI problem, it's another amongst many problems with education, where we pointlessly have kids waste time and resources going through completely unnecessary processes convincing them it's for their own good.
That's an interesting point. Obviously, a clear understanding of fundamentals will make you a better artist, though in the work force it is your end result that counts, and if one artist uses AI to fill in the gap of understanding due to either a lack of knowledge or experience, is that artist therefore not worthy of being paid for his time? Most people still approach AI from an artist perspective. But if you approach it form a company perspective, it's less about people padding their knowledge or fundamentals, but having the ability to automate all production art in their library. That aspect is going to be industry changing whether it's for the better or worse from the worker's perspective.
This is why the best education is work experience. Yeah, there are some professions that need a "professional learning" environment like those in health, science and law perhaps. But a lot of other things you can learn on the job and most in a year. No need for expensive courses where when you go into that field, they tell you to forget everything you learned and to learn it their way. Really the only 3 things you need is basic aptitude in maths, science and language, and the drive to pursue your career.
@@lanzer22 It's mostly experience and experimentation that make you better. Find a medium that cliques with you and go wild. You can produce amazing art without even knowing much about color theory, light and materials. Art Academies and a lot of Universities ended up being more about prestige rather than actually learning something or developing something. But prestige doesn't really get you much especially in the current day where University mass produce graduates. This is still through the artists perspective. A company will only automate a task if there is a purpose to it. Big corpos will create multiple fluff positions where the person literally does 0, for the simple purpose of controlling the workforce in a specific sector making it harder for competitors. Right now with the advent of AI the only jobs that will be replaced are those and middle/upper management, because they serve no purpose and the AI can perform those functions without risks of HR cases or mishandling of company assets.
As someone who has studied Art, the purpose of portfolio screening is supposed to be for looking for people with creative and insightful design/thoughts, then take them in to help elevate their work and skills to the next level -- which, unfortunately does not happen in practice. Or rather, probably doesn't happen for scholarships, which is just as important as acceptance into the programs themselves, usually If I were to do screenings for art schools, I would consider writing prompts alongside a portfolio submission, then a subsequent interview process for candidates if there is still need to filter more people out. There are many ways to try to screen out bad actors, and a lot of those methods aren't the most obvious. Some examples are rather innocent looking "about you" questions where... if you answer with rather generic but commonly "impressive" responses, will set off red flag markers -- with enough markers, would result in turning down the application. Eg. "What newspapers do you read" - if your response is only "New York Times" and you don't live anywhere near New York, that is an instant rejection because you are almost certainly BSing (Reason: Where's the actually relevant local paper? Or if New York Times was actually truly read, it was probably done digitally, so where are all of the other digital papers that you probably also ran into along the way?)
@@tessawilkins4016 what no? Really it defines an industrial society Schools have halted for some reason and are stuck within that era *the last thing a capitalist wants is a senario we’re his workers can’t even work together (especially for big tech)*
This is the exact opposite though. The issue described here is that the grades will sadly be the only measure left. Have you even watched the video before pasting a "profound" quote?
@@thefatbob3710 lol that is only true if the workers are human, once we all get replaced they won't even have to pay minimum wage anymore. capitalism is just about profit profit profit. In the eyes of the capitalists wages have been eating into their margins for way too long they don't want workers that work together they want workers working at minimum wage and preferably less.
I think art schools should also be thinking about how to prepare students for the real working environment. I'm not sure myself what that environment will look like in 5 years for aspiring artists, the prospect of companies downsizing art teams and using ai instead makes me sad. This isn't the kind of future I want for my daughter, one in which we effectively encourage people not to bother trying to be creative anymore.
Its pretty clear that ALL knowledge work is on the verge of massive change. They’re was this whole thing where pundits spoke of how AI was giving to threaten Jo’s like truck driving. IF AI fucks up truck driving there are MASSIVE casualties. IF AI fucks up a book jacket, no on knows. The Creative Class is threatened… yikes
@@StudioPractice1 Absolutely this. AI bros picking up on art first was a given considering this view: unlike other AI testing scenarios, they can't get sued / jailed for malpractice in art. After years of being said creative fields were going to be the last ones affected by AI, we didn't see this twist coming...
I’m using Midjourney and I find it offers far more possibilities for creativity. You’re not limited by having the right paint or pencils or canvas on hand, you’re not limited by requiring space to work or allow things to dry. AI frees you to create whatever is in your head right now, and to tweak it until it feels right.
Reminds me of when I was learning Spanish and google translate was just getting good. It took a lot of discipline not to just google translate everything.
Nowadays translators use the translating programmes and just edit the final text. However, AI, for now, does not fill in for interpreters, but this job is brutal. :)
@@mf-- unfrortunately, many people think they can translate and the AI only made them more sure of that. I won't even begin to speak about the level of translations I see today and I did not even put my foot into the job (although that was my dream job), because it is gatekept by people and I have better things to do, than to fight with those, who want to think they are elite and want to keep the industry as small as possible. :/ The AI is not a problem, people are.
@@marikothecheetah9342 it works for surface level stuff but as soon as you get into strange cultural references or things like that, the automatic translator just can't do anything.
One of the only student questions I got when reading through my syllabus on the first day of this semester was, "Do you consider AI plagiarism?" I didn't know how to respond because I couldn't wrap my head around why anyone taking the time and spending the money to go to art/design school would want to use AI. I assumed (possibly naively) anyone pursuing a creative path would want to actually create. I hope and believe that the excitement and novelty of all this will wear off quickly for the individuals once they realize that the rewards of making creative work or engaging with it were never about the outward results. Along with a return to real, I hope all of this will drive people toward the kind of work or endeavors that deliver inward results, increase thinking, stimulate growth, etc. If that happens, then there may be some hope that the people, organizations, and corporations that dive head first into all the hype as a shortcut or a means to make a quick buck will either fail or be forced to adjust and do better.
Yo bro. Crazy times. Kids are friggin lazy AF. NO WAY TO TELL how this shots is going to play out. Right? Just look for 6 fingers. LOL. AI fucks up hands and feet. LOL!!!
The problem is a societal focus on results over the process and that if you're not producing fast enough, cheaply enough then you will perish. The incentives in our socio-economic model has perversely pervaded all rungs and aspects of society and has led people to look for the easiest way to achieve what they want and what they've been taught to believe what they should have and deserve. AI is a tool but only amplifies what is desired and what is wanted in our culture.
AI art feels like the invention of dynamite. I don’t think we know how powerful it is at the moment and how much it will change the landscape. It’s possible to pull interesting ideas out of it and I am sure it could be a fascinating tool to integrate with craft. What is disheartening to see is how a lot of folks are willing to plug and chug with the program.
@@FP19487 I think as an artist it's more like ai chess, you can play around with it but not in the tournament setting. in industry however more like automated machine, It's an invention for big movie studio, ad companies, and maybe game studios but I cant see it implemented in smaller or individuals level without being overcrowded
"Non" artists wil be able to create stories they have never before been able to even think of being able to create. It is going to be wonderful to see the stories of humans by the millions.
I liked your description of the process of sitting down and thinking about the process of making art, then fully partaking in making it. This is something only a teacher or a pro could tell you. The process is the most important part, and it starts before putting brush to canvas/pencil to paper and continues on as the artist works on a piece.
I am an art teacher and an artist. The joy of creativity and discovery my students get using their ideas, hand and eye coordination, and emotions is the whole reason of being an artist. Hand knitted is coveted than machine made. One is a piece of art, the other could be mass produced. It is the process, focus, emotional mindset, and sensory factors that bring gratification. Having said that, I do like the quality and beauty of AI Art. Digital Art should be a class/genre of its own.
For submitting art to a school just have the students come in and do one life drawing session so the school can take the real art samples and compare the techniques with the submitted portfolio
I was thinking something exactly like this. I had a provisional admission to an art school after high school that required me to get a B in life drawing after the first quarter since my portfolio didn't include any (hadn't done it yet). So these kinds of requirements are not new and likely will just be more common for everyone regardless of portfolio. I didn't go to that school based on the uncertainty of whether or not I could meet that expectation married to the fact of the loan risk I would have taken on, as a whole in general, but especially if wasn't able to stay at the school. So I can imagine it's likely to catch those who really don't have faith enough in their ability to perform at the level required to enter, so much that they're putting AI images in their portfolio.
that is actually how art schools do it where i live. the portfolio has to be traditional as well. As much as I enjoy digital work a talented artist should be able to translate his techniques to any other medium
theirs a hell of a alot of artist you r incredibly shit at life drawing but crush it at everything else. when drawing the figure from life it uses different motor skills. you would have to test them across all fields of art
@@jeremyp2164 i would love to say you are right and you can definitely be a great designer and have great artistic skills without good muscle memory, but schools still try to prepare you for that and you still need to have a decent life drawing skills.
@@jeremyp2164 i for one have very limited experience with working on big canvases and have a hard time with them, but still my understanding of anatomy, form and composition puts me above people with much more traditional art experience
There are likely talented young artist that have grown up using only a tablet or computer and may be completely blindsided by a rising demand for physical media. I hope teachers and mentors can help yong artist navigate this monumental change in the art world.
I’m just turning 21. I graduated Highschool during covid. I’ve been drawing with the intention of being a professional for at least 12 years or so. In the span of about 5 months, I’ve watched AI far surpass what I having been working over a decade on. I watch new Deviantart accounts that have only been created weeks ago amass thousand of watchers. For me, who cannot make a living with my art, I watch as these people make hundreds of dollars a week selling ai commissions and adoptables. Making a minimum wage. These ai are made with the drawings that artists have listed online. Artists like myself. It can be gauranteed that even my art has been used by many data sets at this time. My art is used, but I am not paid. My future seems more and more hopeless. I have no other skills in this life and am also very disabled. This was fine before ai existed. It was a hard path, but one that I could pave towards success. I wonder how if the only way to succeed artistically is to steal others stolen work by using ai. I feel depressed. I wish ai didn’t exist.
I guess the crisis is not so much in what AI can produce, but in the kind of people our society is producing. We should not be afraid of what AI can produce, we should be afraid of what AI can produce in the people our society is producing. If our society produces people without the basic virtues (and I use that outdated word on purpose, a "mental habit in harmony with reason and the order of nature"), which are Critical Thinking ("Prudence"), Integrity ("Justice"), Perseverance ("Fortitude") and Self-Discipline ("Temperance"), then what AI can produce in those people is disastrous, since it will enhance the deficiencies in those virtues feeding back in a negative way. So the solution doesn't happen so much, although we have to take precautions, in finding ways to prevent people from misusing AI, but in educate people so that they don't misuse AI, and that means that basic education has to produce people with those virtues. any other solution is going to be a patch that will lose effectiveness very soon (a temporal patch).
In the university where I'm currently teaching in (Aalto ARTS, Finland), we have ba applicants send in a digital work on the basis of which around 90 are invited to campus for a 3-day entrance exam, where they work under supervised conditions and turn in original work. Around 30 are then accepted into the programme based on the exam + an interview. It's not a perfect system - it tends to favour people with strong painting skills over analytic/typographic skills - but at least we get to see work we know for certain was produced by the applicants.
Thanks for taking the time to write… That sounds like a great way to really get a sense of who you’re dealing with. It reminds me of Benetton’s system at Fabrica in the 1990’s/2000’s (not sure what they are currently doing). When I was a guest artist there, they would invite students for a two week trial. they would end up “sending about half off.” (Not accepting about half). Brutal process but led to good results. t seems lime the school would have to pay the student for their time. No? that would make it a near impossibility in America. What problems if any do you see with your system?
Finnish and US higher ed are so different that it makes comparisons a little tricky - here, there is no tuition (at least for EU passport holders) and Finnish students get a small monthly stipend from the state on top. As such the applicants are not paid to sit through the exams - I think they have to pay travel & accomodation costs themselves as well. Def something we should work on though. Maybe the biggest challenge we're facing is finding, as you put it, self-actualised (or almost self-actualised) human beings. It seems that Finnish high schools have become extremely goal-oriented in the past decade and as a result we find that many students are primarily focused on 'ticking boxes' in order to complete courses and get their degrees - expecting the next set of doors (employment) to magically open once they've done so.
In terms of the admissions system & the exams, they make it quite easy to identify applicants with high-level craft skills in painting and drawing, but on the other hand simple craft skills don't mean that one has things to say and an interest in the outside world/visual communication in general. Partly this is a problem of briefs and grading (both of which we're working on), partly it's a problem of time and resources (work undertaken by 90 people during the span of 3 days is a lot to assess & grade for our staff). A thing that IMO is only seldom brought up in discussions about the ramifications of AI in higher ed is that if we want to create assignments and exams that truly measure the skills of the student (and not just a semblance of those skills), we'll have to dedicate considerable time and effort on both coming up with AI proof briefs and/or their grading (as well as other forms of feedback to students). And I'm not sure if this equation is workable given the insane cohort sizes in many art schools...
I guess the crisis is not so much in what AI can produce, but in the kind of people our society is producing. We should not be afraid of what AI can produce, we should be afraid of what AI can produce in the people our society is producing. If our society produces people without the basic virtues (and I use that outdated word on purpose, a "mental habit in harmony with reason and the order of nature"), which are Critical Thinking ("Prudence"), Integrity ("Justice"), Perseverance ("Fortitude") and Self-Discipline ("Temperance"), then what AI can produce in those people is disastrous, since it will enhance the deficiencies in those virtues feeding back in a negative way. So the solution doesn't happen so much, although we have to take precautions, in finding ways to prevent people from misusing AI, but in educate people so that they don't misuse AI, and that means that basic education has to produce people with those virtues. any other solution is going to be a patch that will lose effectiveness very soon (a temporal patch).
Interesting take Elliott. The Art Academy of Latvia has been known to have in person exams for their courses. For BA Graphic design course for example there are three tasks: Classical drawing, 2D composition task (poster) and a 3D composition task (sculpture). Then there’s also a portfolio review and an interview. Quite a tricky one.
@@marikothecheetah9342 A lot of the top schools around the world require only portfolio and an interview as means for admission. It's an extremely stupid system.
@@StudioPractice1 Not that tricky actually. It's VERY simple. Ask them to show a sketchbook with drawings done by hand to compare their natural style to the finished pieces that may look too polished ( ie. AI ) for their admitted age of 18 right out of high school or close to early 20s. That's how you smoke them out. This will force wanna be frauds to think twice before trying to fake their way into art school OR rather the real working world to cut in front of the line like a punk. The latter IS the threat that art and design schools should be worried about and prevent. You gotta think AHEAD of the AI developers and those who attempt to use it. This is not to dissimilar to nuclear proliferation where nuclear weapons should be cut back and curtailed. Same thing with AI since it can be abused easily. It's on YOU and your school to stand up and sound the alarm and point fingers at AI 'artists' to say " Don't even try it. Don't even think about it. Put in the time and effort if you want to be one, not game the system with AI ".
In the past, I’ve been criticized by other collegues for sticking to traditonal art instead of doing digital Illustration (think basically your generic “videogame character concepts” you see on DeviantArt & Artstation). This is probably the only instance in my life where I’m glad I was stubborn enough to never shift fully into digital means. Though I feel bad because I know so many people that are primarly way too dependent on digital tools. Can't either even draw in paper or haven't done so in years. Is there any way those people can still “make it”?
I’m begging to think AI will fill many commercial art roles that used to be filled by designers and illustrators…. Look at Mid Journey and imagine what that can do 5 years from now
I am one of those artists who relies heavily, and honestly just prefers, working digitally. Among other things, I really like having access to many types of media (paint, pastel, markers, etc) in a small space with no mess. It's allowed me to explore messy mediums I probably wouldn't have otherwise. That being said, I still wouldn't mind at all if there started to be more emphasis on traditional to weed out the people who really are just "prompters" I know I could prove who I am with traditional if I have to, and considering everything going on, I wouldn't mind the compromise.
Everyone thinks ai is a silly toy or they’re concerned about the impact of the current versions. But almost no one realizes how fast this is going to advance. It’s like worrying about the impact of a single asteroid when there 1,000,000 asteroids behind it
i agree, can't wait, i honestly think this will be huge for creative people, they might not see it yet but, it's just a diferent tool, like digital was back in the day.
We had no Art program at my high school. Just an Art class. Great teacher. He did the best he could with the limited supplies we had. Literally an art closet with old art supplies. We had to dig to find a tube of paint that wasn't dried out. A lot of Rubber Cement. Probably killed a few brain cells there.
I hope all of this AI stuff makes everyone reflect and discover what is really important to them, something beyond even the deep patterns of productivity that we lived for until now.
@@nicholash1278 did we had some good times at least once? never, every era, every societies and governments doing the same bad things for people, why think then that something would be different now? Industrialization happened, many people died from starvation because of being jobless and unable to adapt to new era and world. It's like a natural selection, but in our case it's more terrifying, because: 1. unlike nature, we have a mind, consciousness, so people (masses in society and governments) doing it on purpose by themselves. 2. unlike nature, we have a morality, which means that those people violating this morality on purpose, with full understanding and awareness of what they're doing and that it's bad and immoral. Artificial selection by idiots in society and few people in power of this world, who cares only about their money.
@@CamelliaFlingert I actually don't think Ai will make the world better. It will probably just make the world worse. I just hope it can have a positive impact... but it's not what I'd bet money on.
I think it's not so hard to determine if the work is their own. Have them interview, on video, if not in person, and have them present their three best works. If they can't discuss or answer questions about their motivation/process/technique, etc. it's probably not their work.
Definitely a good filter for making sure works are not generated by AI. Not 100% fool-proof, but it will generally get through a *lot* of BS quite easily. Program used, technique and tools used are big ones -- which people can BS if they know enough about working with said tools, but... they'd need to know what's up first. Puts quite a bit of pressure on the interviewer to know all of the programs and ins and outs of all of them though =/
You could also require that they submit one timelapse video of the creation of their work. That way there is no question whether the art was human or ai created
I spent thirty years turning photos into photorealistic drawings and paintings and found Midjourney when it was on Version 1. It allows me to see all the different art types that I only ever saw in private collections, now I am painting in styles of art that I only ever dreamt of experimenting with. just switched to using palette knives for the first time and I can tell you that it certainly is liberating. I don't envy your task of admitting students based on their portfolios, but you do have a pretty good grasp of detecting students who have been assisted by AI.
I love your videos. "The real" hit home with me, thanks for your insights. You really strike a great balance of being direct and quite serious alongside being hopeful and funny- a deadly combination!
A couple of responsorial thoughts: In terms of an Admissions Crisis, give your candidates a surpise medium at the interview and say, "make". There's already an Admissions Crisis in terms of documentation of work because a slick photo of a mediocre work submitted to Slideroom is more interesting than a mediocre photo of an unphotographable work. So good. Good for selection processes. Good at redirecting the admissions critique away from documentation of work and towards work. In terms of a professional reaction to AI via a return to materiality, CNC can dip a brush too, bro. I think the better strategy is to respond with an architectural workflow, producing compositions or instructions that can be executed by others, either with simple machines (such as a stick) or highly complex ones (such as AI).
I’m joining an art program next year (because AI be damned I wanna do it, even if it’s not for a career) and their policy on AI is that, if it’s caught being used, it results in an instant expulsion, which is pretty neat since it’s easy to tell if it’s ai
Interesting point about proctoring. I wonder if art tests will have to be conducted, similar to the process required to work at a game studio, for instance, but this will be tricky, because like you said (most of) these students are still learning. Makes you wonder what they would be able to accomplish within an observable timeframe.
as a 3D artist, I was always worried about AI, a lot of the tasks i was given when starting out i used to think "this is relatively menial, how is this process not yet automated?". Then years later, photogrammetry gained popularity, and while rough, they are super effective. BUT - how is one supposed to scan something that doesn't exist? Like a dragon for instance. You would need a skilled sculptor, and this reminds me of your point in bringing up a return to material aspects. Really good video as always.
The Japanese art school admissions process depicted in the show Blue Period seems like the obvious move here. For a fine art program (in this case oil painting) proctored prompt-driven painting sessions are conducted over a multi-day evaluation period. I think the problem arises in the multi-day concept, as students would still be able to access ai at some point during the examination period. Still though, the possibility of proctored creative sessions is theoretically possible, but it may interfere with Western ideas of creativity, because it focuses on "creation on demand" over the traditional slightly more atemporal portfolio submission process.
@@thejhonnie I've done something similar to the example you just gave. I 3D a small dragon toy, put it into blender, did some edits and scaled it up larger, added a few bones for small movements and the dragon looks like it's something i made from scratch.
@radicaledward101 For a large country such as the US, such proctoring is not feasible as there are travel and lodging expenses to factor in. Those become ridiculously expensive here, especially since our transportation systems are terrible across the country. More practical methods of filtering people out tend to be an essay prompt, innocent looking "about you" questions, and an interview -- the same people who will abuse AI for applications will tend to be same ones who BS answers to make themselves "look impressive." If we do end up with test proctoring, then the most practical method would be to have several different schools come together and set up testing in local areas across the country for applicants, similar to "Portfolio Day"s
@@gaerekxenos good point. I remember for my art diploma in high school I had to have a proctored art test. This was in 2013. They've since done away with the system I think. I also remember the chaos of the portfolio days at college get togethers (I forget what they're called, it was at the javits center). 1000's of people walking around with their portfolios trying to get a word in with the top schools. Maybe you're right, because flying out/travelling to schools just to do a test would be really difficult. My hope is that whoever is proctoring the exam for the college would have the technical know how to spot someone cheating with ai. Or maybe in the future using ai will be part of the curriculum 🫣
These are all very smooth images. When I went to art school it was all about mark-making and different effects created by different materials. I think human made art looks far better than AI as it is full of emotion and energy that to me seems to be lacking in AI. I think it would be difficult to completely reproduce an image that is in the human imagination just from some word prompts.
I also think human art is better because there's more versatility, more that's unique to the artist. I'm experimenting with a free online AI program to better understand how AI behaves, and the thing I've noticed is it has very narrow abilities to represent things. When I typed in 'woman', for example, it gave me only images of skinny white women with large breasts wearing bikinis. I then tried to get it to give me an image of a woman who was wearing something more modest, and it generated old timey black and white photos. I tried to get a terrifying sharp toothed mermaid, but as soon as it knew there was a mermaid, it would be unable to add the horror features onto the mermaid imagery. Basically, because it's dataset is just 'whatever art was posted online', it takes whatever imagery was the most frequent and amplifies it, making that the only imagery it will provide. Furthermore, I've found it cannot process two different characters doing two different things in an image. While the art is very pretty, it's also very much inferior to what a human artist can do.
I'm a high school art teacher listening to this a year after it was posted. Yesterday my district had staff sit through an entire day of "training" to use AI in the classroom. As you can imagine, my mind flooded with all that will be lost as this change takes over our schools. In searching for ways to maintain the integrity of my program and to continue to deliver opportunities of substance to my students, I began searching for other voices, particularly regarding art, on this topic and I found your video. I very much appreciate your thoughts. You gave me a lot to consider. Thank you!
Just stumbled upon this video by chance and as someone who had to go through an admission test (not a SAT) to apply entering to my country's highest art institution in the early 90s, I can agree with most of your points. Specially on the eventual, forthcoming return of "the real" in terms of verifiable proficiency through use of traditional art materials. I don't know how else will art directors or teachers will tell whether a candidate or student is cheating with AI or not. Even the CEO of openAi (ChatGPT) has openly admitted the overall value of digital-based jobs will decrease dramatically as a consequence of AI. So where does that leave us? As I'm approaching 50 now, I now dream of the remainder of my working life not requiring a computer...
Wouldn't the simplest solution be to request evidence of the process of creation and/or some writing demonstrating an understanding of what has been produced?
As an independent film producer/director my mission statement in creating art in a collaborative effort has evolved to explicitly exclude Ai in all aspects of the process of my filmmaking, from writing during pre-production to finishing the sound mix in post. I am fundamentally biased and prejudiced against Ai contribution to my work in any fashion and I'd better not catch any collaborator resorting to Ai. FULL STOP.
Art school applications will fall. Jobs in art and design will fall. Corporations will gleefully embrace the enormous productivity gains coming out of AI. Not many artists can support themselves outside of the corporate world. That's where most of them land, except for those who end up outside of the art and design field entirely. Portfolio padding is probably the least of the problems facing art schools in coming years.
I agree with you that non digital forms of art will be considered scarce. Hopefully a replacement for NFTs will be and increased demand for physical artwork from a broader base of independent artists distributed internationally 😅
@@StudioPractice1 I’m here to learn! Finally. So quiet in here now. Only an artist like you could have helped me. It’s hard for me to listen to non-schizophrenics haha
Dude, schools are dealing with this now. From highschool to University the staff are freaking out a little. Well at least for one prof I talk to, but the teens and college students are using Chat GPT for essay writing and these places ironically need AI to determine if the writing is fake or not. The old tools to determine pledgerism can't sort out the writing. Please do one on Adobe, because that has some huge impacts, especially art schools who push their products on to students.
I'd love to hear you explore more how you think art education might integrate or embrace these tools. I see there being an opportunity for composition, ideation, exploration of a subject, refinement, etc etc. as a part of the more traditional artistic process. But with how fast the space is moving, is there even value in building a curriculum around current tools that could be completely different by the time the course is over.
Thanks for the intelligent and educated take on ai art and its impact. A lot of individuals in art and design have a opinion on it but don’t even know the name or capabilities of these image gen. models, which always annoyed me. Thank you
Just wait, everything is about to get crazy. They are working on running ai in real time over simple models in video games and its wild. Photo realism switched on and off like a light. That's just one example off the top of my head I saw recently, the applications for where this can go are endless. This tech is going to change the world like radio or television or the telephone, but the price tag is going to be staggering. Everything is going to be automated and people are going to ape the fuck out when they realize what's happening.
Seeing the actual material will def be important. Something I've been thinking about when it comes to ai art is how a personal element is lost. I don't know if that would matter for commercial art because the customer will just want the product. But the community and relational aspect of art would be lost. I guess I'm thinking about a curator or personal collector, at least part of the reason they want the art is because of the person who made it right? Their time, effort, personality, maybe it injects the art with some kind of essence. One area where ai could disrupt that is if the person has a style easily replicated by ai, and they choose to assembly line it with ai, getting rid of the need for assistants or whatever. If someone is paying for that would they feel duped? Do they feel duped by assistant made work? I've always felt like ai has an "ai" look too that even if it copies the work well there is still that weird sheen on it. That could easily be fixed at some point tho with the exponential development.
I like how you admit just how good the AI image generations are. I've heard people dismiss it as "souless" and all other forms of dimissiveness. I think they are in denial.
The thing that worries me though, is that people would see person flaunting an image titled "Triumph of Joan of Arc" made solely by an AI, then claim that it's a human triumph over estabilishment or revolution. It's hypocritical. I asked my teacher daily, isn't art is just an illusion - since beauty is in the eye of the beholder? AI proves it correct. I bought myself a new Nvidia GeForce GTX 520 embedded motherboard as of today, because I'm supporting the graphic card, not the AI Artist. If the graphic card does all the work, then why should the prompt engineers see any of my money? But of course I rather commission someone to draw me and converse with so I can see how that art is actually being made. Hell breaks loose if Pixiv out of all places, is overrun by AI, especially since we acknowledge this is one site where Danbooru source all of our anime database. I can't expect people to do the same. I had enough of many acquaintances fail to see human in front of them, let alone the internet. The Dead Internet or Bot-pocalypse age is at hand, and thanks a f**king lot Microsoft for funding OpenAI.
Midjourney v5 is insanely good, especially for photorealism. I don’t use anything I generate as-is, but I do use it as references for my sketches and paintings so that I have unique references for my own artwork.
I’m editing my video about AI art now. I agree completely with so much of what you said! In my video, I also talk about the importance of the process, and learning through the failure of not ending where you expected. Hopefully, what will happen as artists we will focus more on curating a style, developing a specific voice through traditional medium and we will go back to old entrance exams. I ALWAYS had to create on demand based on a request, like “create an image of friends at a party.” And of course, an open minded instructor would accept a piece in any style I presented, even in the abstract, as long as it was created in the classroom. As art teachers, we’ll just have to work harder.
@@StudioPractice1 I agree, but good design was always few and far in between. I think itll change image making in general, then maybe eventually animation. But I think there will still be a place for the artist and Craftsman in the world. I mean I'm sure there's already many millions of ai images created, and some of the more advanced models have created very impressive stuff, and yet Ive only seen about 2 ai images I found to truly "have it". If that makes sense. And those images were made by artist who already "had it". Basically, ai tools can not turn petty minds into artists. (I'm using the word artist here in an honorific manner not a classificatory one)
I started painting inspired by midjourney. Of course, I am not looking to become an artist or to get into at school. The tool helped me a lot to get started but once I got able to replicate my model I did some stuff from photographies. But both ended having a taste like if you eat every day at the same Chinese restaurant. AI models helped me in the beginning before I understood composition because it removed one hard part of making something satisfying. At the same time. I stopped using it because it seemed to become more and more boring at composting things, putting subjects dead centered, limiting more and more the spectrum ratio. I think you should still be able to ask for a portfolio of still life and get something. Of course even at young age, everyone had his style, but those heavily relying on AI will end up looking similar in the process and some ( even using AI) you will spot song more of their character into the work.
You can train an AI, though. If you're not satisfied with its understanding of composition, you can feed it with examples that better fit with what you're looking for, including your own work.
@@asafoetidajones8181 Or better yet, LEARN the fundamentals instead of purely relying on the works other people. Using references can only get you so far. Sure it'll take more time than training ai, but the process is far more rewarding and the knowledge and skills will be transferable to other mediums. And especially since ai can only get so "creative" with the images it produces. People are capable of being far more imaginative than ai because current ai is incapable of thinking the way humans do (if you can even call it thinking to begin with).
@@chomcat1910 like I said though, you can train an AI on your own work. Exclusively, if you want, and produce derivative works from its output and retrain on them, etc. Whether or not you personally care to grow as an artist and learn good fundamental skills is irrelevant, certainly there's value in that if that's what you want out of your relationship with art. It's not how everyone relates to art, though. Some people are curators, consumers, collectors, or want it for specific utility as opposed to being interested in producing it in some hypothetically "pure" form, following a standardized academic path. Myself, I only want results, and am unwilling to build skill. That's my relationship with visual art. On say, ukulele, I'm different - I want the fundamentals, I put in the work, I practice technique. For visual art, I want what I want, in the easiest way possible. So for me that means using cut and paste paper techniques, photocopying, photoshop, an opaque projector, tracing, grid transfer, anything that works. It's more focused on utility. I would happily use AI for that, although I haven't gotten around to it.
@@asafoetidajones8181 Your comment is incredibly sad to me. I can't believe there are people who can say "I don't care about building a skill, I just want results"....
@@hind__ why? Do you repair your own car and home, do your own dental work? Or are you happy to just do the minimum required to get a good result? Is art a religion to you, that it commands a spiritual duty? Consider that for others, art can be functional, and that pathologizing that is evangelical.
Super insightful and mirrors so many concerns and worries in my mind about what the future holds. But I do like the idea of "the return of the real" ... and I hope that aspect does come true. I do worry about a huge swath of people that just accept the AI art for what it is - which might prevent many young people to ever START the long journey to mastery of an art form.
I saw this coming since I started playing with A.I two years ago. I knew advertisers would be the first to throw out artists for this cheaper version. Art schools are gonna be overwhelmed sadly and it’s going to be felt around the world for artists. It’s very unfortunate. Especially to those not in the know and purchasing works made by A.I. I’ve already seen artists faking with A.I. and I’ve already seen some unreal animations made with A.I. Midjourney isn’t the best. and it’s only getting better and better with training of the system. Been watching my partner fine tune and make things I would hang in the wall. It’s incredible and saddening.
In my University (Art Academy of Latvia) there are enrollment exams. They are a week long and applicants have to: make a composition task, paint a still life and draw a nude.
As a visual artist - I learned to code instead of learning digital graphics. All those gruelling years teaching web technologies regretting my path - but all the while holding a grip on my pencil for my traditional practice is I now know its the best decision I ever made! Phew!
I’ve been saying for years we need a neodada or similar movement and embrace illogic as software embraces logic, process, and optimization. These are all things computers do well, but they cannot match the intuitive leaps, fuzziness of the human mind.
I have felt similarly at times, but when it comes to commissioned design, I think most customers will go for the decent, cheap and functional option, which will probably be at least AI powered.. Neodada would be sick and exciting for sure and I'm all for it - funny thing is, when image AI was breaching the surface over the last couple of years it was highly uncanny and weird. I'm kinda let down by how 'good' it gets, I have had little time to play around with it when it sucked, which imo get the most interesting results. Fuzzy, intuitive, illogic. It was there, in the machine, but it learned to optimize.
@@katielowen yeah figured... interesting. could be like any other tool of creation then. DAWs in music make it possible to write for anything and get a decent performance of it. not to mention ai music lol
I applied to cooper union for art and the application process addressed alot of the concerns presented in this video. It required me to create 6 pieces of work, any kind of medium, all based off abstract prompts given by admissions. I had a month and needed to mail it in aswell.
Curious to know your thoughts on the role of social media and documenting the process publicly as a sort of “postage stamp” to prove engagement with the process over time. Essentially, will your Instagram feed (particularly video) become a vital part of “proof of work ethic”? Which, to me, brings up the conundrum of… making your work public serves it up to be scraped by AI. What a Catch-22.
this is a brilliant analysis, LOVE it, confronts a lot of the questions that need to find resolutions quickly - I wonder if one option for submissions would be to return to non-digital submissions only, in other words only handmade original works can be submitted - the other way this paradigm shift can be adapted to is to operate art education/submission under the assumption that ALL digital submission are AI generated and evaluate them from that basis?
I don't think returning to physicallity is a bad thing, in my country's art schoold you not only have to have your physical portfolio but have to partisipate in drawing sessions as well. Because, when you think about it, your work always could have been made by someone else, and if you put 100h in the art work it will be better than the 10h one. So a standart tests helps to see what is your real level.
to get into my school we took an art exam along with an in person portfolio. the test had us do several different types of figure drawings and compositional sketches.
There's an easy solution to this problem: Interviews. Preferably in-person. Pick an image from their submitted portfolio, and ask them why it's good. If they can defend the piece in depth without the use of chatGPT, it means they have the understanding to back up their creative process. And if they do, it doesn't really matter if their piece was made using AI or not. The difference between a good photographer and a bad one is not their gear, but their understanding of what makes a good photo. It's the same with art. In the end, it's all about communication and culture, not technical skill or even mastery of compositional concepts. It's about conveying an idea, emotion, concept etc. Everything else is just a set of useful tools to reach that end. I think the whole AI-revolution is doing the artworld and creative fields in general some good. It makes us realize what art and culture is all about. It's not about peacocking over who can make the prettiest, most polished piece. It's about communication between people, our cultural identities, sharing of ideas... that's how I see it anyways.
This was a fascinating video. Until now I was only thinking about how this is going to change things for commercial artists and thinking about the unethical way these AIs were trained. I had not even considered the wrench this might throw into the admissions process. That's a really sticky subject though. It will be interesting to see how art and design schools handle it. It seems like they will have to accommodate AI somehow or take a "show your process" audition kind of thing or something else entirely. I feel there is the chance that a school that takes the stance that they require hand made artifacts as the most weighty part of a submission will get heavy criticism. I can see arguments that a school like that is gatekeeping, or just stodgy and unwilling to embrace change. There's going to be the questions of what is art, and what makes a person an artist. I say this because AI generated images are the new "thing" and there's a whole lot of commotion and strong feelings for and against it. I teach art at the Elementary school level, and during meetings where high school art teachers are present I have not yet heard any talk at all about AI imagery.
How is the use of databases unethical? You know, they could've just attached a web scanner or even a webcam to the AI and let it browse a bunch of artsites and social media so that it could "see" through its "eyes" and learn to do things just as we do. This is, in essence, the same as using databases (just a little bit more inefficient). When you post something online, especially if you do it on a public site, you implicitly consent to a third party watching and using whatever you post to some degree. You can't stop others from being inspired by the stuff you upload. For instance, someone could easily let an AI scan this comment section and paraphrase your wording. I never heard the art community complain when chatbots were using their tweets as a learning tool. In any case, if you're against this process, you're against AI itself, but the thing is that you would've never questioned its use until it directly afflicted your work field.
I am kinda creative in my job and wished I had more time to draw. Artists have my greatest respect and I love buying and enjoing art. A real human artist will never be replaced by AI - as AI fails in personality, creating individual custom characters, not just generic wallpaper or fantasy tabletop art. However, if one is an artist and all he can do is generic... well yes AI will replace you.
I would add that AI it's reaching it's limit right now, and it only needs to keep evolving on replicate perfect photographies, So, with the time AI art will get boring in no time, because everyone is using it, everyone knows what kind of stuff can make, there's nothing to apreciate anymore, no talent, no vision, nothing... So people will slowly start to aprecciate human art, because art is a form of communication, and is funny to use chat gpt to emulate a conversation, but you will wanna talk with another human sooner or later.
@@fl7210 simply put, it would be like comparing a hand knitted sweater made of hand made wool yarn vs. Mass productions of machine made synthetic sweaters.
I guess the crisis is not so much in what AI can produce, but in the kind of people our society is producing. We should not be afraid of what AI can produce, we should be afraid of what AI can produce in the people our society is producing. If our society produces people without the basic virtues (and I use that outdated word on purpose, a "mental habit in harmony with reason and the order of nature"), which are Critical Thinking ("Prudence"), Integrity ("Justice"), Perseverance ("Fortitude") and Self-Discipline ("Temperance"), then what AI can produce in those people is disastrous, since it will enhance the deficiencies in those virtues feeding back in a negative way. So the solution doesn't happen so much, although we have to take precautions, in finding ways to prevent people from misusing AI, but in educate people so that they don't misuse AI, and that means that basic education has to produce people with those virtues. any other solution is going to be a patch that will lose effectiveness very soon (a temporal patch).
AI isn't taking away anyone's creativity or talent, only some people's ability to make a living at it. Which is terrible, jobs will disappear, people are going lose their homes, and there are going to be far less opportunities in the future. I would never flippantly tell people in his situation to just go learn to code. And not because coders are now facing the same sad reality, I wouldn't because it's a cruel and indecent thing to say to someone facing hard times and an uncertain future. But that is exactly what was told to a lot of the people I know not too long ago by many people in the creative community. I'm sure all of you have a sense of compassion, some just lack the talent to express it.
good video, but midjourney isn't created by OpenAI; that would be Dall-e 2. Stable Diffusion is also separate, made by Stability AI in the UK. I believe Midjourney is independent and doesn't collaborate with other AI research labs; making them somewhat opaque on what their AI algorithms are based off of.
Thanks for the clarification. I kinda realized that stable diffusion was another thing entirely after I hit publish. (Moving too fast). Thanks for the heads up. Cheers
I don't think people in general understand how revolutionary AI will be on society as a whole. Not just art, but all will change. AI has the potential to take over everything. AI is not just a tool - its the artist, engineer, scientist, consultant, etc. I'm both horrified and excited of what lies ahead. Things are changing so fast now.
As an art prof myself, if I ever see an AI generate image from a student or potential student, my question to that individual would be "what did YOU actually do to produce this image?" Keying in words to have an algorithm make the image for you isn't remotely part of any creative process. It's lazy and shows no respect for the profession you claim to be interested in pursuing... As you can tell AI art infuriates me.
do you think there will be a stifling of art produced due to the AI model stealing art, which less artist will produce art which will result in art stagnating, which will result in AI art start to look repetitive and alien? Or do you think the models will continue to steal art to keep the AI models updated? LOL sorry for my run-ons
One of the extremely important limitation to resolve in the world of digital art, AI or not, is the rasterization problem. Raster imagery is pixelated and not satisfyingly scalable. With the help of a dataset dictionary of compressed colors and patterns, just like AI models are, it could be possible to un-rasterize images and have a scalability more akin to vector imagery whereas you can zoom in vector images infinitely and always have sharp and straight edges. The models developed for AI could alternatively be used to de-rasterize images in a non-AI postprocessing routine.
I will say I very much enjoy AI both from a programming and an art perspective while using it for certain workflows. It's become an essential part of my current workflow for prototyping and coming up with concept art for 3D modelling in particular. Being able to draw a rough draft and making the AI give me a bunch of iterations that I can then photobash my favorite results together to model off of has been enjoyable and saves me a lot of time. The world is currently very drastically changing for anybody that makes ANYTHING involving a computer, it's scary and exciting to me. Writing, art, programming, animating, music.. it's hard to believe we're in relatively early stages. I really do hope we see a revival of the physical medium like you mention. I love using these new tools for certain workflows, but nothing will ever replace that feeling of looking at and feeling a canvas.
This is gonna weed out all the artists who aren’t that great. Great artists will continue to thrive, half of being an artist is having a good work ethic.
Thank you for doing this very indepth and thoughtful analysis on the topic. I haven't even considered the effect on art school that the AI tech will have.
I think the use case of these AI tools ends at ideation. AI art plagiarism isn't really a problem because the generated work reveals provenance on some level that's traceable if data sets are open. Aside from that their are dozens of tells that a work is generated by a diffusion model that most humans can cop onto after seeing a dozen. They are extremely powerful as a pinboard tool, throw up a bunch of ideas very quickly and curate the best out of all of them. They are very bad at making usable finished works or assets though, i feel like anyone who has tinkered with them has realized this.
@Jason Lees Uhh, this is a super subjective take my dude. You may objectively compare AI to human art but saying that AI can create a work leagues better than a human artist is up to who's viewing the art itself based on too many personal/individualistic factors.
I guess the crisis is not so much in what AI can produce, but in the kind of people our society is producing. We should not be afraid of what AI can produce, we should be afraid of what AI can produce in the people our society is producing. If our society produces people without the basic virtues (and I use that outdated word on purpose, a "mental habit in harmony with reason and the order of nature"), which are Critical Thinking ("Prudence"), Integrity ("Justice"), Perseverance ("Fortitude") and Self-Discipline ("Temperance"), then what AI can produce in those people is disastrous, since it will enhance the deficiencies in those virtues feeding back in a negative way. So the solution doesn't happen so much, although we have to take precautions, in finding ways to prevent people from misusing AI, but in educate people so that they don't misuse AI, and that means that basic education has to produce people with those virtues. any other solution is going to be a patch that will lose effectiveness very soon (a temporal patch).
I taught graduate level courses at the Academy of Art University for over a decade, all online. It was a constant struggle to keep up with plagiarism as it was; today I have no idea how I'd weed out the AI from those who spent 15 hours researching and digitally rendering an original design.
@@StudioPractice1 indeed. I think of the hundreds of students I taught over the years, all of whom entered into debt slavery for their dream of doing what I did in the 80s, '90s and naughts; work on major feature films. It was a tough market to begin with; now those positions have been slashed by 90% in studios like Disney and Dreamworks! Those who once wagged their fingers and said "learn to code!" Weren't any wiser; AI is swiftly snagging many of those gigs as well, as chat GPT can do in 20 seconds what took an experienced coder two weeks to do just a couple of years ago. Sure, they may still need the coder to comb through it's work, but for how much longer? And mere troubleshooting won't pay the bills. I'm not sure what the answer is. All white collar workers can't turn to working as landscapers, construction, domestics and plumbers, especially since far fewer people are able to afford homes.
It is definitely on the horizon. When a Sci-fi magazine had to suspend admissions for short stories because hundreds of submissions were being written by Ai on a daily basis, it is only a matter of time before this becomes prevalent. To be honest I think people who get accepted on their Ai "portfolio" will be sore to find out you have to actually demonstrate your art skills in classes, even digitally if relevant. The fact that they can't showcase their "skill" in-person is why prompt jockeys are fake artists.
Exactly! I was talking to my students about that today. Imagine getting in on the strength of your fake portfolio and then having nothing to show for it.
I had to show a physical portfolio to get into my BFA program and physical work to graduate. I would imagine of all majors in college, art would be the hardest to fake your way out of.
Elliot, sorry this is unrelated to AI, but i always wondered: Have you ever felt that ‘work ethic’ is actually an illusory phenomenon? that it’s really just a combination of other, possibly even negative, feelings or coping mechanisms? An example might be: an artist who works tirelessly only because 1. it’s simply an emotional safety-net/habit 2. They’re constantly avoiding something psychologically by choosing to work instead, or 3. Because it simply feels good in a compulsory/stimulating way! And then the spectator, or perhaps even the artist themselves, looks at the artist and says “good work ethic!” I imagine you’ll say something like ‘we all go through all sorts of troubling things all the time anyway, and the creation of art is so societally vital and so personally healthy that it could never be considered a questionable activity, or a questionable reaction to life’s events’. But i suppose I don’t have a problem with the glorification of the artist who works all the time so much as i have a problem with simply calling it a “good work ethic” and moving on. Do you have personal experience with this realm of thought or have you simply always been ‘a worker’? P.S. I’ll briefly add that there are many artists I look up to who seem, on closer inspection, to be generally toxic, and even destructive to themselves, and the people around them. I feel I’ve naturally become less productive as I’ve matured and strengthened my relationships
These are all interesting points. I personally work A LOT primarily becuse of the dopamine hit I get from the work itself. It’s amazing to take pleasure in the simple act of making. Then there is the component of attempting to achieve “something” (Magi’s) the pursuit of excellence. And third… there’s the money thing. Being paid for work (youre not supposed to talk about this) is really rewarding. It just is. I dont work as a form of self discipline or as a form of Protestant guilt or self torture. I personally work because of the massive amount of pleasure I derive from it. I get many of your points, and I think that in a lot of instances the dynamic that you speak of is very real… sadly
Certainly many people use art for catharsis, and when they're healthy, are naturally less productive. I'm putting effort into my marriage and parenting, and don't much to say musically. Usually I produced music when I was miserable or in a transitional state. At first I kind of mourned not recording anymore, but I've learned to live with the idea that it's not vital for me right now.
I think a good case against AI is that with copyright, you CANT COPYRIGHT an idea. You can copyright the expression of a piece of art. But typing in what you want to see with AI is not coming up with the expression of an idea. It's like paying an artist for a piece of art, they own the IP because through their hard work they deserve to own what they created and need to be protected to make a living off of it. an AI has no choice in making art and it does not need money so why should a person own the copyright to art using AI when copyright laws were meant for humans?
No doubt these image generation tools will have an impact but I don't think anyone is exactly sure how. Sure it's easier to fake a visual art portfolio but that has always been easy to do. Tracing, copying, photoshopping something will get you a decetully complete looking. Day one of art school give each student a pencil and paper and ask them to draw fruit.
Hey 👋. But. By then youre in. By then its too late. You have a commitment to someone who might not be so good. And i;m not so sure with tracing etc… its so easy to get a good portfolio
Yes, about return of the real. TH-camr memeanalysis, like freud psychoanalysis but for the internet and memes, writes about a "Cult of the Hand" in which things made by people which occupy material space will be venerated to an enormous degree over anything a computer makes. Like, God made us in his image, and we have his hands, so what comes of the hands must be a million times more divine and greater than the bot
I guess the crisis is not so much in what AI can produce, but in the kind of people our society is producing. We should not be afraid of what AI can produce, we should be afraid of what AI can produce in the people our society is producing. If our society produces people without the basic virtues (and I use that outdated word on purpose, a "mental habit in harmony with reason and the order of nature"), which are Critical Thinking ("Prudence"), Integrity ("Justice"), Perseverance ("Fortitude") and Self-Discipline ("Temperance"), then what AI can produce in those people is disastrous, since it will enhance the deficiencies in those virtues feeding back in a negative way. So the solution doesn't happen so much, although we have to take precautions, in finding ways to prevent people from misusing AI, but in educate people so that they don't misuse AI, and that means that basic education has to produce people with those virtues. any other solution is going to be a patch that will lose effectiveness very soon (a temporal patch).
There is no issue - want to weed out - do live examinations - when I applied to design school over a period of 3 days I had examinations. End of story end of being scared of AI I am as a design faculty annoyed by all this AI paranoia Oh yeah and this evening I will make another video for my students how to use AI for certain tasks in our design process … I am actually very excited about this new technology because it cuts down labor intensive tasks allows me to focus more on the creative part. Photography replaced portrait painting - 3d rendering replaced marker renderings - AI is going to replace photoshop etc The constant is however that there is always a human who needs to know what to do and how to use the tool. AI is here to stay - get used to it - implement it - or get out
Really enjoyed the video! “Return to analog” feels like it has been in the works culturally for a while now (see resurgence of vinyl records). I wonder if AI will lead to a need for an “air gapped” instructional environment where everything inside is analog/AI-free. May lead to the art version of the Chinese room experiment except we are receiving the inputs from the AI instead of the other way around :)
Vinyl is still tiny. The masses just moved from CDs to streaming. Also, I object. AI tools will improve and the skillset of creative humans will change, but stay digital.
I absolutely agree with your concerns and the sheer dilution of work ethic for the next generation is a problem. It’s a quick fix throwaway society we live in today and the big powerhouse companies don’t care how creativity is crafted; they just want results fast. I’ve been in Design for nearly 30years and from my observation- the next generation struggle with the basic fundamental techniques and their minds are elsewhere. As with all industries- if you can’t make it, fake it… it seems. Ai is here to stay and a lot of Art school funds are going to be put under extreme pressure to adapt to this new world changing technology software.
This is a very significant critique. This may simply separate the commercial art and design sector from artist’s purely personal exploration and experimentation. Unfortunately, as you point out, this is often a process that will have to have been embedded within the artist early in their careers and they accept that earning a living is quite separate from their own work.
I don’t know what the solution is. I use both physical art media and the computer to create. There has to be a way for these AI programs to use blockchain tech to embed a watermark that cannot be printed or removed so that AI art is more easily spotted. We, as artists, need to push back HARD against AI generated art.
The weirdest thing is that Chat GPT isn't aware that it's literally erasing copyright law. I tried to explain to it that if everyone is creating their own entertainment and art the law won't exist. It can't comprehend that. There is going to be so much art and entertainment, you'll have to pay people to see it. We're about to enter an inverted world where the one who pays the most to the audience gets famous.
I believe you’re right: schools must adapt. With regard to admissions, I encourage school admissions people to acknowledge the current admissions decision process is inadequate, even if AI had never existed. Today, students are often required to do a massive amount of work to apply for school (regardless of discipline), with very little evidence that much of that work is even used in the evaluation of their readiness for studies. My point is this: as admissions teams prepare to adapt, they should not compare future processes to current processes as if they’re perfect. This might free them up to develop admissions processes that allow students to demonstrate their potential while allowing schools to select the students that will best fit the programs.
In Hinduism there is a famous quote from Lord Krishna: "Thou hast the right to action, but not the fruits thereof" So basically it means that your job is the process but not the outcome. Applied to life in general it is extremely liberating because I cannot feel attached to the result. All of the beauty in being an artist is in the process - the action. If you just go for the outcome all the time without doing the work you are always going to be a failure. It's like getting a helicopter to the top of Mt Everest and then telling people you've been to the top of Mt Everest. But using AI art is worse because you are using copyrighted material. I believe that human nature requires evolution and inner progress.
I'm working with pencil, paper on sketching and then working the idea on wacom, phoshoshop with brush stroke. My foundation build on non-stop learning anatomy of human and animal. The emotional of brush could not be learnt. If you don't have it, don't work on it, you will never be able to do and have it in any way. We are mortal, those we do in the moment are unique.
This vlog understates the rapidity with which imagery can be produced by AI. If a self-hosted installation is used, then hundreds of images an hour can be generated from a single text prompt, image input, pose description and/or style description file. Furthermore, each generated image can be trivially modified with inpainting and outpainting to correct visual, color, compositional or anatomical aberrations to refine an output. The skill of generating a desired image is therefore a selective process (choosing one and ignoring the others) rather than an entirely additive process. My choice of words there is an attempt to compare image generation to manufacturing processes: additive vs subtractive machining. A generated image, once selected, can often still benefit from finishing touches that require the skills of Pre-AI image composition such as over painting. In this new paradigm, the most skillful technicians produce the most intentional results even if the quality is no better than that of any other AI generated image.
So... 2 questions: 1. What about the commercial arts (live film, 2D/3D animation, VFX and their sub-disciplines) and schools based on them? If I'm applying to an animation school in 2023 as a student, I probably don't have the resources to recreate 90s Disney animation sheet for sheet for a physical portfolio to art school, and if I did, well, I probably wouldn't need art school. Hyperbole aside, simply by necessity and practicality, those disciplines are digital, as are/would be porfolios based off of them. Which leads to: 2. This "return to the real" assumes that: - all artists have the resources (or funds for the resources) to pivot in the direction of the physical/traditional. -that (leaving AI aside) physical/traditional can keep up with the output of the digital (Photoshop/CSP for illustration, ToonBoom/Adobe Animate/TV Paint for animation, and Blender/Maya/Zbrush for Sculpting/3D) - that physical/traditional can keep up in a landscape where digital social media promotion is a necessity (working digital cuts out the middleman of having to upload your output) -that consumers have enough media literacy (design and communication principles) and production literacy (how things are made, and what that context says about the artist and society) to care about the art and artist beyond being an entertainment product to be consumed and stored/discarded. The point being, what happens if any of the above isn't true: -artists (or students) can't afford the tools, space or resources to "return to the real"? -artists choose iPads/tablets ($300-$3K once) over traditional/physical tool (or spaces [as a digital artist, I do NOT have the space for physical art creation]) for illustration/sculpture media? -artists decide being able to produce digital art for instagram/Twitter is more important than a physical gallery/market showing (given the global reach of the internet)? -consumers just want their distraction, not to think about the art or the artist (i.e. the divide between academic and cultural reads of mass media)? Because I think the latter scenario is closer to where we are now, he said, typing this up on a social media platform on the internet at a computer.
What a great take on this phenomenon. I could not agree more re: Hal Foster's prescient work (or its application in this scenario vs postmodernist work). 100% agree that the pendulum will swing back the way of the personal talismanic/brand effect-it is already true that something "in the style of Van Gogh" is less valuable than a Van Gogh fake is less valuable than an actual Van Gogh AND that the value of the actual Van Gogh is only augmented by the presence of the rest.
It should be easy to sort out mid journey images, people out say they look uncanny. There’s just something non human about its images so it’s pretty easy to sort out from human created art imo.
This makes me think that there should be schools that specifically teach and test work ethic and self-motivation that don't focus on the qualification to a certain skill, but rather a ability to stick with something to a masterful level. In other words graded on the ability to focus.
So the problem here lies in the fact that a lot of Art schools dropped practical exams and instead demand borderline professional portfolios in order to get admitted. There's 0 reason to submit a fake portfolio for art school because you will fail in the practical portion during the educational process, but also there's 0 reason because art school is meant to teach you how to build a proper portfolio and expand on your talents. If I can already do the work I do not need to waste several more years and hundred of thousand dollars to learn how to do it. Also you can just pay someone to make your portfolio so you don't even need AI. This video just underlines a huge problem of the way Visual arts education is handled. If you can produce viable and professional portfolio for art school, then you don't need art school because you already have the skills to work in the industry. Essentially the exams need to be narrowed down to basic techniques which have objective metrics to which one can be judged upon. This is not an AI problem, it's another amongst many problems with education, where we pointlessly have kids waste time and resources going through completely unnecessary processes convincing them it's for their own good.
This is an insightful and underrated comment. 👆🏻👆🏻👆🏻
That's an interesting point. Obviously, a clear understanding of fundamentals will make you a better artist, though in the work force it is your end result that counts, and if one artist uses AI to fill in the gap of understanding due to either a lack of knowledge or experience, is that artist therefore not worthy of being paid for his time?
Most people still approach AI from an artist perspective. But if you approach it form a company perspective, it's less about people padding their knowledge or fundamentals, but having the ability to automate all production art in their library. That aspect is going to be industry changing whether it's for the better or worse from the worker's perspective.
This is why the best education is work experience. Yeah, there are some professions that need a "professional learning" environment like those in health, science and law perhaps. But a lot of other things you can learn on the job and most in a year. No need for expensive courses where when you go into that field, they tell you to forget everything you learned and to learn it their way. Really the only 3 things you need is basic aptitude in maths, science and language, and the drive to pursue your career.
@@lanzer22 It's mostly experience and experimentation that make you better. Find a medium that cliques with you and go wild. You can produce amazing art without even knowing much about color theory, light and materials. Art Academies and a lot of Universities ended up being more about prestige rather than actually learning something or developing something. But prestige doesn't really get you much especially in the current day where University mass produce graduates.
This is still through the artists perspective. A company will only automate a task if there is a purpose to it. Big corpos will create multiple fluff positions where the person literally does 0, for the simple purpose of controlling the workforce in a specific sector making it harder for competitors. Right now with the advent of AI the only jobs that will be replaced are those and middle/upper management, because they serve no purpose and the AI can perform those functions without risks of HR cases or mishandling of company assets.
As someone who has studied Art, the purpose of portfolio screening is supposed to be for looking for people with creative and insightful design/thoughts, then take them in to help elevate their work and skills to the next level -- which, unfortunately does not happen in practice. Or rather, probably doesn't happen for scholarships, which is just as important as acceptance into the programs themselves, usually
If I were to do screenings for art schools, I would consider writing prompts alongside a portfolio submission, then a subsequent interview process for candidates if there is still need to filter more people out. There are many ways to try to screen out bad actors, and a lot of those methods aren't the most obvious. Some examples are rather innocent looking "about you" questions where... if you answer with rather generic but commonly "impressive" responses, will set off red flag markers -- with enough markers, would result in turning down the application. Eg. "What newspapers do you read" - if your response is only "New York Times" and you don't live anywhere near New York, that is an instant rejection because you are almost certainly BSing (Reason: Where's the actually relevant local paper? Or if New York Times was actually truly read, it was probably done digitally, so where are all of the other digital papers that you probably also ran into along the way?)
"Students cheat because the system values a grade more than they value student learning."- Neil deGrasse Tyson
Which also explains capitalism
@@tessawilkins4016 what no?
Really it defines an industrial society
Schools have halted for some reason and are stuck within that era
*the last thing a capitalist wants is a senario we’re his workers can’t even work together (especially for big tech)*
This is the exact opposite though. The issue described here is that the grades will sadly be the only measure left. Have you even watched the video before pasting a "profound" quote?
@@Gahanun just replace grade with 'commercial artwork' and it's the same idea.
@@thefatbob3710 lol that is only true if the workers are human, once we all get replaced they won't even have to pay minimum wage anymore. capitalism is just about profit profit profit. In the eyes of the capitalists wages have been eating into their margins for way too long they don't want workers that work together they want workers working at minimum wage and preferably less.
I think art schools should also be thinking about how to prepare students for the real working environment. I'm not sure myself what that environment will look like in 5 years for aspiring artists, the prospect of companies downsizing art teams and using ai instead makes me sad. This isn't the kind of future I want for my daughter, one in which we effectively encourage people not to bother trying to be creative anymore.
Its pretty clear that ALL knowledge work is on the verge of massive change. They’re was this whole thing where pundits spoke of how AI was giving to threaten Jo’s like truck driving. IF AI fucks up truck driving there are MASSIVE casualties. IF AI fucks up a book jacket, no on knows. The Creative Class is threatened… yikes
haha yeah, I certainly would be very hesitant to bring children into the age of AI.
@@StudioPractice1 Absolutely this. AI bros picking up on art first was a given considering this view: unlike other AI testing scenarios, they can't get sued / jailed for malpractice in art. After years of being said creative fields were going to be the last ones affected by AI, we didn't see this twist coming...
I’m using Midjourney and I find it offers far more possibilities for creativity. You’re not limited by having the right paint or pencils or canvas on hand, you’re not limited by requiring space to work or allow things to dry. AI frees you to create whatever is in your head right now, and to tweak it until it feels right.
@@I_Am_SciCurious You're not really creating what's in your head though. That is just lying to yourself if you really think that.
Reminds me of when I was learning Spanish and google translate was just getting good. It took a lot of discipline not to just google translate everything.
Nowadays translators use the translating programmes and just edit the final text. However, AI, for now, does not fill in for interpreters, but this job is brutal. :)
@@marikothecheetah9342 the translator job market was devastated because of it and it still has not recovered
@@mf-- unfrortunately, many people think they can translate and the AI only made them more sure of that. I won't even begin to speak about the level of translations I see today and I did not even put my foot into the job (although that was my dream job), because it is gatekept by people and I have better things to do, than to fight with those, who want to think they are elite and want to keep the industry as small as possible. :/ The AI is not a problem, people are.
@@marikothecheetah9342 it works for surface level stuff but as soon as you get into strange cultural references or things like that, the automatic translator just can't do anything.
@@w花b of course, hence the editing done by translators. If they are hired to do that, that is. :D
One of the only student questions I got when reading through my syllabus on the first day of this semester was, "Do you consider AI plagiarism?" I didn't know how to respond because I couldn't wrap my head around why anyone taking the time and spending the money to go to art/design school would want to use AI. I assumed (possibly naively) anyone pursuing a creative path would want to actually create.
I hope and believe that the excitement and novelty of all this will wear off quickly for the individuals once they realize that the rewards of making creative work or engaging with it were never about the outward results. Along with a return to real, I hope all of this will drive people toward the kind of work or endeavors that deliver inward results, increase thinking, stimulate growth, etc. If that happens, then there may be some hope that the people, organizations, and corporations that dive head first into all the hype as a shortcut or a means to make a quick buck will either fail or be forced to adjust and do better.
Yo bro. Crazy times. Kids are friggin lazy AF. NO WAY TO TELL how this shots is going to play out. Right? Just look for 6 fingers. LOL. AI fucks up hands and feet. LOL!!!
so much cope, my dude.
The problem is a societal focus on results over the process and that if you're not producing fast enough, cheaply enough then you will perish. The incentives in our socio-economic model has perversely pervaded all rungs and aspects of society and has led people to look for the easiest way to achieve what they want and what they've been taught to believe what they should have and deserve.
AI is a tool but only amplifies what is desired and what is wanted in our culture.
Well said.
This is an ad for the software he mentions.
AI art feels like the invention of dynamite. I don’t think we know how powerful it is at the moment and how much it will change the landscape. It’s possible to pull interesting ideas out of it and I am sure it could be a fascinating tool to integrate with craft. What is disheartening to see is how a lot of folks are willing to plug and chug with the program.
More like invention of car. And artists are the horse breeder..
@@FP19487 I picked my metaphor and stand by it.
@@FP19487 I think as an artist it's more like ai chess, you can play around with it but not in the tournament setting. in industry however more like automated machine, It's an invention for big movie studio, ad companies, and maybe game studios but I cant see it implemented in smaller or individuals level without being overcrowded
@@FP19487 yeah. like how the world is trying to move away from cars too and leaning towards bicycle more.
"Non" artists wil be able to create stories they have never before been able to even think of being able to create. It is going to be wonderful to see the stories of humans by the millions.
I liked your description of the process of sitting down and thinking about the process of making art, then fully partaking in making it. This is something only a teacher or a pro could tell you.
The process is the most important part, and it starts before putting brush to canvas/pencil to paper and continues on as the artist works on a piece.
I am an art teacher and an artist. The joy of creativity and discovery my students get using their ideas, hand and eye coordination, and emotions is the whole reason of being an artist. Hand knitted is coveted than machine made. One is a piece of art, the other could be mass produced. It is the process, focus, emotional mindset, and sensory factors that bring gratification. Having said that, I do like the quality and beauty of AI Art. Digital Art should be a class/genre of its own.
For submitting art to a school just have the students come in and do one life drawing session so the school can take the real art samples and compare the techniques with the submitted portfolio
I was thinking something exactly like this. I had a provisional admission to an art school after high school that required me to get a B in life drawing after the first quarter since my portfolio didn't include any (hadn't done it yet). So these kinds of requirements are not new and likely will just be more common for everyone regardless of portfolio. I didn't go to that school based on the uncertainty of whether or not I could meet that expectation married to the fact of the loan risk I would have taken on, as a whole in general, but especially if wasn't able to stay at the school. So I can imagine it's likely to catch those who really don't have faith enough in their ability to perform at the level required to enter, so much that they're putting AI images in their portfolio.
that is actually how art schools do it where i live. the portfolio has to be traditional as well. As much as I enjoy digital work a talented artist should be able to translate his techniques to any other medium
theirs a hell of a alot of artist you r incredibly shit at life drawing but crush it at everything else. when drawing the figure from life it uses different motor skills. you would have to test them across all fields of art
@@jeremyp2164 i would love to say you are right and you can definitely be a great designer and have great artistic skills without good muscle memory, but schools still try to prepare you for that and you still need to have a decent life drawing skills.
@@jeremyp2164 i for one have very limited experience with working on big canvases and have a hard time with them, but still my understanding of anatomy, form and composition puts me above people with much more traditional art experience
We asked for Artificial Intelligence but all we got was Artificial Creativity.
It's really coming down to what my math teacher used to say, "Show your work".
There are likely talented young artist that have grown up using only a tablet or computer and may be completely blindsided by a rising demand for physical media. I hope teachers and mentors can help yong artist navigate this monumental change in the art world.
True. May the return of Oil Paitings be Glorious.
I remember the days of works on illustration board and vellum.
script kiddies in the vain of art (or script engineers as they are now known in social narratives)
I’m just turning 21. I graduated Highschool during covid. I’ve been drawing with the intention of being a professional for at least 12 years or so. In the span of about 5 months, I’ve watched AI far surpass what I having been working over a decade on. I watch new Deviantart accounts that have only been created weeks ago amass thousand of watchers. For me, who cannot make a living with my art, I watch as these people make hundreds of dollars a week selling ai commissions and adoptables. Making a minimum wage.
These ai are made with the drawings that artists have listed online. Artists like myself. It can be gauranteed that even my art has been used by many data sets at this time. My art is used, but I am not paid. My future seems more and more hopeless. I have no other skills in this life and am also very disabled. This was fine before ai existed. It was a hard path, but one that I could pave towards success.
I wonder how if the only way to succeed artistically is to steal others stolen work by using ai. I feel depressed. I wish ai didn’t exist.
I guess the crisis is not so much in what AI can produce, but in the kind of people our society is producing. We should not be afraid of what AI can produce, we should be afraid of what AI can produce in the people our society is producing.
If our society produces people without the basic virtues (and I use that outdated word on purpose, a "mental habit in harmony with reason and the order of nature"), which are Critical Thinking ("Prudence"), Integrity ("Justice"), Perseverance ("Fortitude") and Self-Discipline ("Temperance"), then what AI can produce in those people is disastrous, since it will enhance the deficiencies in those virtues feeding back in a negative way.
So the solution doesn't happen so much, although we have to take precautions, in finding ways to prevent people from misusing AI, but in educate people so that they don't misuse AI, and that means that basic education has to produce people with those virtues. any other solution is going to be a patch that will lose effectiveness very soon (a temporal patch).
In the university where I'm currently teaching in (Aalto ARTS, Finland), we have ba applicants send in a digital work on the basis of which around 90 are invited to campus for a 3-day entrance exam, where they work under supervised conditions and turn in original work. Around 30 are then accepted into the programme based on the exam + an interview. It's not a perfect system - it tends to favour people with strong painting skills over analytic/typographic skills - but at least we get to see work we know for certain was produced by the applicants.
Thanks for taking the time to write… That sounds like a great way to really get a sense of who you’re dealing with. It reminds me of Benetton’s system at Fabrica in the 1990’s/2000’s (not sure what they are currently doing). When I was a guest artist there, they would invite students for a two week trial. they would end up “sending about half off.” (Not accepting about half). Brutal process but led to good results. t seems lime the school would have to pay the student for their time. No? that would make it a near impossibility in America. What problems if any do you see with your system?
Finnish and US higher ed are so different that it makes comparisons a little tricky - here, there is no tuition (at least for EU passport holders) and Finnish students get a small monthly stipend from the state on top. As such the applicants are not paid to sit through the exams - I think they have to pay travel & accomodation costs themselves as well. Def something we should work on though.
Maybe the biggest challenge we're facing is finding, as you put it, self-actualised (or almost self-actualised) human beings. It seems that Finnish high schools have become extremely goal-oriented in the past decade and as a result we find that many students are primarily focused on 'ticking boxes' in order to complete courses and get their degrees - expecting the next set of doors (employment) to magically open once they've done so.
In terms of the admissions system & the exams, they make it quite easy to identify applicants with high-level craft skills in painting and drawing, but on the other hand simple craft skills don't mean that one has things to say and an interest in the outside world/visual communication in general. Partly this is a problem of briefs and grading (both of which we're working on), partly it's a problem of time and resources (work undertaken by 90 people during the span of 3 days is a lot to assess & grade for our staff).
A thing that IMO is only seldom brought up in discussions about the ramifications of AI in higher ed is that if we want to create assignments and exams that truly measure the skills of the student (and not just a semblance of those skills), we'll have to dedicate considerable time and effort on both coming up with AI proof briefs and/or their grading (as well as other forms of feedback to students). And I'm not sure if this equation is workable given the insane cohort sizes in many art schools...
I guess the crisis is not so much in what AI can produce, but in the kind of people our society is producing. We should not be afraid of what AI can produce, we should be afraid of what AI can produce in the people our society is producing.
If our society produces people without the basic virtues (and I use that outdated word on purpose, a "mental habit in harmony with reason and the order of nature"), which are Critical Thinking ("Prudence"), Integrity ("Justice"), Perseverance ("Fortitude") and Self-Discipline ("Temperance"), then what AI can produce in those people is disastrous, since it will enhance the deficiencies in those virtues feeding back in a negative way.
So the solution doesn't happen so much, although we have to take precautions, in finding ways to prevent people from misusing AI, but in educate people so that they don't misuse AI, and that means that basic education has to produce people with those virtues. any other solution is going to be a patch that will lose effectiveness very soon (a temporal patch).
@@huveja9799 very well said
Interesting take Elliott. The Art Academy of Latvia has been known to have in person exams for their courses. For BA Graphic design course for example there are three tasks: Classical drawing, 2D composition task (poster) and a 3D composition task (sculpture). Then there’s also a portfolio review and an interview. Quite a tricky one.
It is tricky. The American context makes it nearly impossible to see if students will work well in the studio prior to admissions.
@@StudioPractice1 You don't have entrance exams with drawing an object or composition? O.o Everything seems to be based on portfolio.
That for me should be standard, everywhere, all the time.
@@marikothecheetah9342 A lot of the top schools around the world require only portfolio and an interview as means for admission. It's an extremely stupid system.
@@StudioPractice1 Not that tricky actually. It's VERY simple. Ask them to show a sketchbook with drawings done by hand to compare their natural style to the finished pieces that may look too polished ( ie. AI ) for their admitted age of 18 right out of high school or close to early 20s. That's how you smoke them out. This will force wanna be frauds to think twice before trying to fake their way into art school OR rather the real working world to cut in front of the line like a punk. The latter IS the threat that art and design schools should be worried about and prevent. You gotta think AHEAD of the AI developers and those who attempt to use it. This is not to dissimilar to nuclear proliferation where nuclear weapons should be cut back and curtailed. Same thing with AI since it can be abused easily. It's on YOU and your school to stand up and sound the alarm and point fingers at AI 'artists' to say " Don't even try it. Don't even think about it. Put in the time and effort if you want to be one, not game the system with AI ".
In the past, I’ve been criticized by other collegues for sticking to traditonal art instead of doing digital Illustration (think basically your generic “videogame character concepts” you see on DeviantArt & Artstation). This is probably the only instance in my life where I’m glad I was stubborn enough to never shift fully into digital means.
Though I feel bad because I know so many people that are primarly way too dependent on digital tools. Can't either even draw in paper or haven't done so in years. Is there any way those people can still “make it”?
I’m begging to think AI will fill many commercial art roles that used to be filled by designers and illustrators…. Look at Mid Journey and imagine what that can do 5 years from now
I am one of those artists who relies heavily, and honestly just prefers, working digitally.
Among other things, I really like having access to many types of media (paint, pastel, markers, etc) in a small space with no mess. It's allowed me to explore messy mediums I probably wouldn't have otherwise.
That being said,
I still wouldn't mind at all if there started to be more emphasis on traditional to weed out the people who really are just "prompters"
I know I could prove who I am with traditional if I have to, and considering everything going on, I wouldn't mind the compromise.
It's incredibly naive to think that this won't move over into traditional art too, I 110% think it will.
@@jag764 you are right, sorry if came off naive like that.
@@jag764 yeah robots can paint
Everyone thinks ai is a silly toy or they’re concerned about the impact of the current versions. But almost no one realizes how fast this is going to advance. It’s like worrying about the impact of a single asteroid when there 1,000,000 asteroids behind it
Oh believe me, that’s *why* I’m worried
Text To Video is coming now. 2 to 3 second clips, yet its on its way.
in 5 years you'll be able to pop out an avenger style movie from a synopsys. it's the apocalypse for creative jobs.
Best comment on the entire thread!
i agree, can't wait, i honestly think this will be huge for creative people, they might not see it yet but, it's just a diferent tool, like digital was back in the day.
We had no Art program at my high school. Just an Art class. Great teacher. He did the best he could with the limited supplies we had. Literally an art closet with old art supplies. We had to dig to find a tube of paint that wasn't dried out. A lot of Rubber Cement. Probably killed a few brain cells there.
I hope all of this AI stuff makes everyone reflect and discover what is really important to them, something beyond even the deep patterns of productivity that we lived for until now.
I hope so also. Hopefully some positive things come from this and we can restructure society to be centered around humans instead of around profits.
@@nicholash1278 did we had some good times at least once? never, every era, every societies and governments doing the same bad things for people, why think then that something would be different now? Industrialization happened, many people died from starvation because of being jobless and unable to adapt to new era and world. It's like a natural selection, but in our case it's more terrifying, because: 1. unlike nature, we have a mind, consciousness, so people (masses in society and governments) doing it on purpose by themselves. 2. unlike nature, we have a morality, which means that those people violating this morality on purpose, with full understanding and awareness of what they're doing and that it's bad and immoral. Artificial selection by idiots in society and few people in power of this world, who cares only about their money.
@@CamelliaFlingert Nope we never did have a fair society, did I imply otherwise?
@@nicholash1278 nope, you didn't, but you think that this would somehow change them and our world will become better
@@CamelliaFlingert I actually don't think Ai will make the world better. It will probably just make the world worse. I just hope it can have a positive impact... but it's not what I'd bet money on.
I think it's not so hard to determine if the work is their own. Have them interview, on video, if not in person, and have them present their three best works. If they can't discuss or answer questions about their motivation/process/technique, etc. it's probably not their work.
Definitely a good filter for making sure works are not generated by AI. Not 100% fool-proof, but it will generally get through a *lot* of BS quite easily. Program used, technique and tools used are big ones -- which people can BS if they know enough about working with said tools, but... they'd need to know what's up first. Puts quite a bit of pressure on the interviewer to know all of the programs and ins and outs of all of them though =/
You could also require that they submit one timelapse video of the creation of their work. That way there is no question whether the art was human or ai created
text to video prompt: make me a video of me painting this painting
chatgpt: explain how i would make this painting
@@roboko6618 text to video wouldn’t work, ai cannot generate videos that would obviously resemble something a human made (not yet)
I spent thirty years turning photos into photorealistic drawings and paintings and found Midjourney when it was on Version 1.
It allows me to see all the different art types that I only ever saw in private collections, now I am painting in styles of art that I only ever dreamt of experimenting with.
just switched to using palette knives for the first time and I can tell you that it certainly is liberating. I don't envy your task of admitting students based on their portfolios, but you do have a pretty good grasp of detecting students who have been assisted by AI.
I love your videos. "The real" hit home with me, thanks for your insights. You really strike a great balance of being direct and quite serious alongside being hopeful and funny- a deadly combination!
A couple of responsorial thoughts:
In terms of an Admissions Crisis, give your candidates a surpise medium at the interview and say, "make". There's already an Admissions Crisis in terms of documentation of work because a slick photo of a mediocre work submitted to Slideroom is more interesting than a mediocre photo of an unphotographable work. So good. Good for selection processes. Good at redirecting the admissions critique away from documentation of work and towards work.
In terms of a professional reaction to AI via a return to materiality, CNC can dip a brush too, bro. I think the better strategy is to respond with an architectural workflow, producing compositions or instructions that can be executed by others, either with simple machines (such as a stick) or highly complex ones (such as AI).
I’m joining an art program next year (because AI be damned I wanna do it, even if it’s not for a career) and their policy on AI is that, if it’s caught being used, it results in an instant expulsion, which is pretty neat since it’s easy to tell if it’s ai
Interesting point about proctoring. I wonder if art tests will have to be conducted, similar to the process required to work at a game studio, for instance, but this will be tricky, because like you said (most of) these students are still learning. Makes you wonder what they would be able to accomplish within an observable timeframe.
as a 3D artist, I was always worried about AI, a lot of the tasks i was given when starting out i used to think "this is relatively menial, how is this process not yet automated?". Then years later, photogrammetry gained popularity, and while rough, they are super effective. BUT - how is one supposed to scan something that doesn't exist? Like a dragon for instance. You would need a skilled sculptor, and this reminds me of your point in bringing up a return to material aspects.
Really good video as always.
The Japanese art school admissions process depicted in the show Blue Period seems like the obvious move here. For a fine art program (in this case oil painting) proctored prompt-driven painting sessions are conducted over a multi-day evaluation period. I think the problem arises in the multi-day concept, as students would still be able to access ai at some point during the examination period. Still though, the possibility of proctored creative sessions is theoretically possible, but it may interfere with Western ideas of creativity, because it focuses on "creation on demand" over the traditional slightly more atemporal portfolio submission process.
@@thejhonnie I've done something similar to the example you just gave. I 3D a small dragon toy, put it into blender, did some edits and scaled it up larger, added a few bones for small movements and the dragon looks like it's something i made from scratch.
@radicaledward101 For a large country such as the US, such proctoring is not feasible as there are travel and lodging expenses to factor in. Those become ridiculously expensive here, especially since our transportation systems are terrible across the country. More practical methods of filtering people out tend to be an essay prompt, innocent looking "about you" questions, and an interview -- the same people who will abuse AI for applications will tend to be same ones who BS answers to make themselves "look impressive." If we do end up with test proctoring, then the most practical method would be to have several different schools come together and set up testing in local areas across the country for applicants, similar to "Portfolio Day"s
@@gaerekxenos good point. I remember for my art diploma in high school I had to have a proctored art test. This was in 2013. They've since done away with the system I think.
I also remember the chaos of the portfolio days at college get togethers (I forget what they're called, it was at the javits center). 1000's of people walking around with their portfolios trying to get a word in with the top schools. Maybe you're right, because flying out/travelling to schools just to do a test would be really difficult.
My hope is that whoever is proctoring the exam for the college would have the technical know how to spot someone cheating with ai.
Or maybe in the future using ai will be part of the curriculum 🫣
thanks so much for getting rid of the room reverb in these recordings, it makes a huge difference in my ability to follow along and is appreciated!
These are all very smooth images. When I went to art school it was all about mark-making and different effects created by different materials. I think human made art looks far better than AI as it is full of emotion and energy that to me seems to be lacking in AI. I think it would be difficult to completely reproduce an image that is in the human imagination just from some word prompts.
I also think human art is better because there's more versatility, more that's unique to the artist. I'm experimenting with a free online AI program to better understand how AI behaves, and the thing I've noticed is it has very narrow abilities to represent things. When I typed in 'woman', for example, it gave me only images of skinny white women with large breasts wearing bikinis. I then tried to get it to give me an image of a woman who was wearing something more modest, and it generated old timey black and white photos. I tried to get a terrifying sharp toothed mermaid, but as soon as it knew there was a mermaid, it would be unable to add the horror features onto the mermaid imagery.
Basically, because it's dataset is just 'whatever art was posted online', it takes whatever imagery was the most frequent and amplifies it, making that the only imagery it will provide. Furthermore, I've found it cannot process two different characters doing two different things in an image. While the art is very pretty, it's also very much inferior to what a human artist can do.
I'm a high school art teacher listening to this a year after it was posted. Yesterday my district had staff sit through an entire day of "training" to use AI in the classroom. As you can imagine, my mind flooded with all that will be lost as this change takes over our schools. In searching for ways to maintain the integrity of my program and to continue to deliver opportunities of substance to my students, I began searching for other voices, particularly regarding art, on this topic and I found your video. I very much appreciate your thoughts. You gave me a lot to consider. Thank you!
Just stumbled upon this video by chance and as someone who had to go through an admission test (not a SAT) to apply entering to my country's highest art institution in the early 90s, I can agree with most of your points. Specially on the eventual, forthcoming return of "the real" in terms of verifiable proficiency through use of traditional art materials. I don't know how else will art directors or teachers will tell whether a candidate or student is cheating with AI or not. Even the CEO of openAi (ChatGPT) has openly admitted the overall value of digital-based jobs will decrease dramatically as a consequence of AI. So where does that leave us? As I'm approaching 50 now, I now dream of the remainder of my working life not requiring a computer...
Wouldn't the simplest solution be to request evidence of the process of creation and/or some writing demonstrating an understanding of what has been produced?
That seems like a possibility
As an independent film producer/director my mission statement in creating art in a collaborative effort has evolved to explicitly exclude Ai in all aspects of the process of my filmmaking, from writing during pre-production to finishing the sound mix in post. I am fundamentally biased and prejudiced against Ai contribution to my work in any fashion and I'd better not catch any collaborator resorting to Ai. FULL STOP.
I hear ya…. I’m not sure how I feel about it quite yet…. But obviously pretty negative
Art school applications will fall. Jobs in art and design will fall. Corporations will gleefully embrace the enormous productivity gains coming out of AI.
Not many artists can support themselves outside of the corporate world. That's where most of them land, except for those who end up outside of the art and design field entirely.
Portfolio padding is probably the least of the problems facing art schools in coming years.
I agree with you that non digital forms of art will be considered scarce. Hopefully a replacement for NFTs will be and increased demand for physical artwork from a broader base of independent artists distributed internationally 😅
“The return of real” got me to click… not disappointed with your channel, my internet compatriot.
Nice! I’m glad you did
@@StudioPractice1 I’m here to learn! Finally. So quiet in here now.
Only an artist like you could have helped me. It’s hard for me to listen to non-schizophrenics haha
Dude, schools are dealing with this now. From highschool to University the staff are freaking out a little. Well at least for one prof I talk to, but the teens and college students are using Chat GPT for essay writing and these places ironically need AI to determine if the writing is fake or not. The old tools to determine pledgerism can't sort out the writing. Please do one on Adobe, because that has some huge impacts, especially art schools who push their products on to students.
ok but we already have software that rewords the ai output to be less sus like at that point gl xD
So I’ll focus on work ethic; showing actual materials, showing behind the scenes.👌🏻 Thank you for this informative video!❤️
I agree ( I actually can't put into words how much I agree). You had me at "work ethic"
I'd love to hear you explore more how you think art education might integrate or embrace these tools. I see there being an opportunity for composition, ideation, exploration of a subject, refinement, etc etc. as a part of the more traditional artistic process. But with how fast the space is moving, is there even value in building a curriculum around current tools that could be completely different by the time the course is over.
Thanks for the intelligent and educated take on ai art and its impact. A lot of individuals in art and design have a opinion on it but don’t even know the name or capabilities of these image gen. models, which always annoyed me. Thank you
My pleasure!
Just wait, everything is about to get crazy. They are working on running ai in real time over simple models in video games and its wild. Photo realism switched on and off like a light. That's just one example off the top of my head I saw recently, the applications for where this can go are endless. This tech is going to change the world like radio or television or the telephone, but the price tag is going to be staggering. Everything is going to be automated and people are going to ape the fuck out when they realize what's happening.
That’s a possibility for sure
Oh yes. It's all happening as we speak.
@@StudioPractice1 It's an eventuality.
Happening in government rn, every other worker I know is using ChatGpt
Seeing the actual material will def be important. Something I've been thinking about when it comes to ai art is how a personal element is lost. I don't know if that would matter for commercial art because the customer will just want the product. But the community and relational aspect of art would be lost. I guess I'm thinking about a curator or personal collector, at least part of the reason they want the art is because of the person who made it right? Their time, effort, personality, maybe it injects the art with some kind of essence. One area where ai could disrupt that is if the person has a style easily replicated by ai, and they choose to assembly line it with ai, getting rid of the need for assistants or whatever. If someone is paying for that would they feel duped? Do they feel duped by assistant made work? I've always felt like ai has an "ai" look too that even if it copies the work well there is still that weird sheen on it. That could easily be fixed at some point tho with the exponential development.
If real world painting comes back i would be so happy 😊
Thank You so much for this upload and comment on the matter!!! So Thought Provoking!!
Thanks for taking the time to write
I like how you admit just how good the AI image generations are. I've heard people dismiss it as "souless" and all other forms of dimissiveness. I think they are in denial.
yeah, it blows my mind how good they are, especially stable diffusion.
The thing that worries me though, is that people would see person flaunting an image titled "Triumph of Joan of Arc" made solely by an AI, then claim that it's a human triumph over estabilishment or revolution. It's hypocritical.
I asked my teacher daily, isn't art is just an illusion - since beauty is in the eye of the beholder?
AI proves it correct.
I bought myself a new Nvidia GeForce GTX 520 embedded motherboard as of today, because I'm supporting the graphic card, not the AI Artist. If the graphic card does all the work, then why should the prompt engineers see any of my money?
But of course I rather commission someone to draw me and converse with so I can see how that art is actually being made. Hell breaks loose if Pixiv out of all places, is overrun by AI, especially since we acknowledge this is one site where Danbooru source all of our anime database.
I can't expect people to do the same. I had enough of many acquaintances fail to see human in front of them, let alone the internet. The Dead Internet or Bot-pocalypse age is at hand, and thanks a f**king lot Microsoft for funding OpenAI.
There's a lot of pics i have seen that look good at first glance. But look longer and you start spotting weird errors.
@@ghoulchan7525 yeah, they are terrible if you are looking for scientific or engineering accuracy in design. But amazing for abstract compositions
Midjourney v5 is insanely good, especially for photorealism. I don’t use anything I generate as-is, but I do use it as references for my sketches and paintings so that I have unique references for my own artwork.
I’m editing my video about AI art now. I agree completely with so much of what you said! In my video, I also talk about the importance of the process, and learning through the failure of not ending where you expected. Hopefully, what will happen as artists we will focus more on curating a style, developing a specific voice through traditional medium and we will go back to old entrance exams. I ALWAYS had to create on demand based on a request, like “create an image of friends at a party.” And of course, an open minded instructor would accept a piece in any style I presented, even in the abstract, as long as it was created in the classroom. As art teachers, we’ll just have to work harder.
Having students submit real work as well as digital work would weed a lot of of impersonators. That's a good thing.
I been waiting for you to touch on this for a while hell yeah
I think its a huge thing… I think its going to fundamentally alter design in maybe not such a good way
@@StudioPractice1 I agree, but good design was always few and far in between. I think itll change image making in general, then maybe eventually animation. But I think there will still be a place for the artist and Craftsman in the world. I mean I'm sure there's already many millions of ai images created, and some of the more advanced models have created very impressive stuff, and yet Ive only seen about 2 ai images I found to truly "have it". If that makes sense. And those images were made by artist who already "had it". Basically, ai tools can not turn petty minds into artists. (I'm using the word artist here in an honorific manner not a classificatory one)
I started painting inspired by midjourney. Of course, I am not looking to become an artist or to get into at school. The tool helped me a lot to get started but once I got able to replicate my model I did some stuff from photographies. But both ended having a taste like if you eat every day at the same Chinese restaurant.
AI models helped me in the beginning before I understood composition because it removed one hard part of making something satisfying.
At the same time. I stopped using it because it seemed to become more and more boring at composting things, putting subjects dead centered, limiting more and more the spectrum ratio.
I think you should still be able to ask for a portfolio of still life and get something. Of course even at young age, everyone had his style, but those heavily relying on AI will end up looking similar in the process and some ( even using AI) you will spot song more of their character into the work.
You can train an AI, though. If you're not satisfied with its understanding of composition, you can feed it with examples that better fit with what you're looking for, including your own work.
@@asafoetidajones8181 Or better yet, LEARN the fundamentals instead of purely relying on the works other people. Using references can only get you so far. Sure it'll take more time than training ai, but the process is far more rewarding and the knowledge and skills will be transferable to other mediums. And especially since ai can only get so "creative" with the images it produces. People are capable of being far more imaginative than ai because current ai is incapable of thinking the way humans do (if you can even call it thinking to begin with).
@@chomcat1910 like I said though, you can train an AI on your own work. Exclusively, if you want, and produce derivative works from its output and retrain on them, etc.
Whether or not you personally care to grow as an artist and learn good fundamental skills is irrelevant, certainly there's value in that if that's what you want out of your relationship with art. It's not how everyone relates to art, though. Some people are curators, consumers, collectors, or want it for specific utility as opposed to being interested in producing it in some hypothetically "pure" form, following a standardized academic path.
Myself, I only want results, and am unwilling to build skill. That's my relationship with visual art. On say, ukulele, I'm different - I want the fundamentals, I put in the work, I practice technique. For visual art, I want what I want, in the easiest way possible. So for me that means using cut and paste paper techniques, photocopying, photoshop, an opaque projector, tracing, grid transfer, anything that works. It's more focused on utility. I would happily use AI for that, although I haven't gotten around to it.
@@asafoetidajones8181 Your comment is incredibly sad to me. I can't believe there are people who can say "I don't care about building a skill, I just want results"....
@@hind__ why? Do you repair your own car and home, do your own dental work? Or are you happy to just do the minimum required to get a good result?
Is art a religion to you, that it commands a spiritual duty? Consider that for others, art can be functional, and that pathologizing that is evangelical.
Super insightful and mirrors so many concerns and worries in my mind about what the future holds. But I do like the idea of "the return of the real" ... and I hope that aspect does come true. I do worry about a huge swath of people that just accept the AI art for what it is - which might prevent many young people to ever START the long journey to mastery of an art form.
I saw this coming since I started playing with A.I two years ago.
I knew advertisers would be the first to throw out artists for this cheaper version.
Art schools are gonna be overwhelmed sadly and it’s going to be felt around the world for artists.
It’s very unfortunate.
Especially to those not in the know and purchasing works made by A.I.
I’ve already seen artists faking with A.I. and I’ve already seen some unreal animations made with A.I. Midjourney isn’t the best.
and it’s only getting better and better with training of the system. Been watching my partner fine tune and make things I would hang in the wall. It’s incredible and saddening.
In my University (Art Academy of Latvia) there are enrollment exams. They are a week long and applicants have to: make a composition task, paint a still life and draw a nude.
As a visual artist - I learned to code instead of learning digital graphics. All those gruelling years teaching web technologies regretting my path - but all the while holding a grip on my pencil for my traditional practice is I now know its the best decision I ever made! Phew!
Ai is coming for us all.
One of the best techs on the implications, hands down. Sober and rational
I’ve been saying for years we need a neodada or similar movement and embrace illogic as software embraces logic, process, and optimization. These are all things computers do well, but they cannot match the intuitive leaps, fuzziness of the human mind.
oh great point. Neodada it is
I have felt similarly at times, but when it comes to commissioned design, I think most customers will go for the decent, cheap and functional option, which will probably be at least AI powered.. Neodada would be sick and exciting for sure and I'm all for it - funny thing is, when image AI was breaching the surface over the last couple of years it was highly uncanny and weird. I'm kinda let down by how 'good' it gets, I have had little time to play around with it when it sucked, which imo get the most interesting results. Fuzzy, intuitive, illogic. It was there, in the machine, but it learned to optimize.
Idk about that.. It’s pretty easy to use the AI to get you 90% of the way there, and then put your final 10% of ‘fuzziness’ to it
@@katielowen yeah figured... interesting. could be like any other tool of creation then. DAWs in music make it possible to write for anything and get a decent performance of it. not to mention ai music lol
@@katielowen with 90% of the process removed what stops AI to make it to 100%?
I applied to cooper union for art and the application process addressed alot of the concerns presented in this video. It required me to create 6 pieces of work, any kind of medium, all based off abstract prompts given by admissions. I had a month and needed to mail it in aswell.
Curious to know your thoughts on the role of social media and documenting the process publicly as a sort of “postage stamp” to prove engagement with the process over time. Essentially, will your Instagram feed (particularly video) become a vital part of “proof of work ethic”? Which, to me, brings up the conundrum of… making your work public serves it up to be scraped by AI. What a Catch-22.
this is a brilliant analysis, LOVE it, confronts a lot of the questions that need to find resolutions quickly - I wonder if one option for submissions would be to return to non-digital submissions only, in other words only handmade original works can be submitted - the other way this paradigm shift can be adapted to is to operate art education/submission under the assumption that ALL digital submission are AI generated and evaluate them from that basis?
I don't think returning to physicallity is a bad thing, in my country's art schoold you not only have to have your physical portfolio but have to partisipate in drawing sessions as well.
Because, when you think about it, your work always could have been made by someone else, and if you put 100h in the art work it will be better than the 10h one. So a standart tests helps to see what is your real level.
to get into my school we took an art exam along with an in person portfolio. the test had us do several different types of figure drawings and compositional sketches.
Digital art is NOT AI art!!!
There's an easy solution to this problem: Interviews. Preferably in-person. Pick an image from their submitted portfolio, and ask them why it's good.
If they can defend the piece in depth without the use of chatGPT, it means they have the understanding to back up their creative process. And if they do, it doesn't really matter if their piece was made using AI or not. The difference between a good photographer and a bad one is not their gear, but their understanding of what makes a good photo. It's the same with art. In the end, it's all about communication and culture, not technical skill or even mastery of compositional concepts. It's about conveying an idea, emotion, concept etc. Everything else is just a set of useful tools to reach that end.
I think the whole AI-revolution is doing the artworld and creative fields in general some good. It makes us realize what art and culture is all about. It's not about peacocking over who can make the prettiest, most polished piece. It's about communication between people, our cultural identities, sharing of ideas... that's how I see it anyways.
This was a fascinating video. Until now I was only thinking about how this is going to change things for commercial artists and thinking about the unethical way these AIs were trained. I had not even considered the wrench this might throw into the admissions process. That's a really sticky subject though. It will be interesting to see how art and design schools handle it. It seems like they will have to accommodate AI somehow or take a "show your process" audition kind of thing or something else entirely.
I feel there is the chance that a school that takes the stance that they require hand made artifacts as the most weighty part of a submission will get heavy criticism. I can see arguments that a school like that is gatekeeping, or just stodgy and unwilling to embrace change. There's going to be the questions of what is art, and what makes a person an artist. I say this because AI generated images are the new "thing" and there's a whole lot of commotion and strong feelings for and against it.
I teach art at the Elementary school level, and during meetings where high school art teachers are present I have not yet heard any talk at all about AI imagery.
How is the use of databases unethical? You know, they could've just attached a web scanner or even a webcam to the AI and let it browse a bunch of artsites and social media so that it could "see" through its "eyes" and learn to do things just as we do. This is, in essence, the same as using databases (just a little bit more inefficient). When you post something online, especially if you do it on a public site, you implicitly consent to a third party watching and using whatever you post to some degree. You can't stop others from being inspired by the stuff you upload. For instance, someone could easily let an AI scan this comment section and paraphrase your wording. I never heard the art community complain when chatbots were using their tweets as a learning tool. In any case, if you're against this process, you're against AI itself, but the thing is that you would've never questioned its use until it directly afflicted your work field.
We should gatekeep and to heck with the naysayers, if you want quickly done things then so be it but actual art should be held to a higher standard.
I am kinda creative in my job and wished I had more time to draw. Artists have my greatest respect and I love buying and enjoing art. A real human artist will never be replaced by AI - as AI fails in personality, creating individual custom characters, not just generic wallpaper or fantasy tabletop art. However, if one is an artist and all he can do is generic... well yes AI will replace you.
I would add that AI it's reaching it's limit right now,
and it only needs to keep evolving on replicate perfect photographies,
So, with the time AI art will get boring in no time,
because everyone is using it,
everyone knows what kind of stuff can make,
there's nothing to apreciate anymore, no talent, no vision, nothing...
So people will slowly start to aprecciate human art, because art is a form of communication,
and is funny to use chat gpt to emulate a conversation,
but you will wanna talk with another human sooner or later.
All artwork will need an "organic" certification that it was made entirely by a human.
You assume the audience will care
@@fl7210 I care
@@fl7210 When the once conspiracy idea of dead internet will occur as things go, people will care. But it might be too late.
@@fl7210 simply put, it would be like comparing a hand knitted sweater made of hand made wool yarn vs. Mass productions of machine made synthetic sweaters.
I guess the crisis is not so much in what AI can produce, but in the kind of people our society is producing. We should not be afraid of what AI can produce, we should be afraid of what AI can produce in the people our society is producing.
If our society produces people without the basic virtues (and I use that outdated word on purpose, a "mental habit in harmony with reason and the order of nature"), which are Critical Thinking ("Prudence"), Integrity ("Justice"), Perseverance ("Fortitude") and Self-Discipline ("Temperance"), then what AI can produce in those people is disastrous, since it will enhance the deficiencies in those virtues feeding back in a negative way.
So the solution doesn't happen so much, although we have to take precautions, in finding ways to prevent people from misusing AI, but in educate people so that they don't misuse AI, and that means that basic education has to produce people with those virtues. any other solution is going to be a patch that will lose effectiveness very soon (a temporal patch).
AI isn't taking away anyone's creativity or talent, only some people's ability to make a living at it. Which is terrible, jobs will disappear, people are going lose their homes, and there are going to be far less opportunities in the future. I would never flippantly tell people in his situation to just go learn to code. And not because coders are now facing the same sad reality, I wouldn't because it's a cruel and indecent thing to say to someone facing hard times and an uncertain future. But that is exactly what was told to a lot of the people I know not too long ago by many people in the creative community. I'm sure all of you have a sense of compassion, some just lack the talent to express it.
good video, but midjourney isn't created by OpenAI; that would be Dall-e 2. Stable Diffusion is also separate, made by Stability AI in the UK. I believe Midjourney is independent and doesn't collaborate with other AI research labs; making them somewhat opaque on what their AI algorithms are based off of.
Thanks for the clarification. I kinda realized that stable diffusion was another thing entirely after I hit publish. (Moving too fast). Thanks for the heads up. Cheers
I don't think people in general understand how revolutionary AI will be on society as a whole. Not just art, but all will change. AI has the potential to take over everything. AI is not just a tool - its the artist, engineer, scientist, consultant, etc. I'm both horrified and excited of what lies ahead. Things are changing so fast now.
As an art prof myself, if I ever see an AI generate image from a student or potential student, my question to that individual would be "what did YOU actually do to produce this image?" Keying in words to have an algorithm make the image for you isn't remotely part of any creative process. It's lazy and shows no respect for the profession you claim to be interested in pursuing... As you can tell AI art infuriates me.
Exact same thing I say to anyone that uses a computer for any type of artwork.
Thsnk you! Excellent presentation and overview.
do you think there will be a stifling of art produced due to the AI model stealing art, which less artist will produce art which will result in art stagnating, which will result in AI art start to look repetitive and alien? Or do you think the models will continue to steal art to keep the AI models updated? LOL sorry for my run-ons
One of the extremely important limitation to resolve in the world of digital art, AI or not, is the rasterization problem. Raster imagery is pixelated and not satisfyingly scalable. With the help of a dataset dictionary of compressed colors and patterns, just like AI models are, it could be possible to un-rasterize images and have a scalability more akin to vector imagery whereas you can zoom in vector images infinitely and always have sharp and straight edges.
The models developed for AI could alternatively be used to de-rasterize images in a non-AI postprocessing routine.
I will say I very much enjoy AI both from a programming and an art perspective while using it for certain workflows. It's become an essential part of my current workflow for prototyping and coming up with concept art for 3D modelling in particular. Being able to draw a rough draft and making the AI give me a bunch of iterations that I can then photobash my favorite results together to model off of has been enjoyable and saves me a lot of time.
The world is currently very drastically changing for anybody that makes ANYTHING involving a computer, it's scary and exciting to me. Writing, art, programming, animating, music.. it's hard to believe we're in relatively early stages. I really do hope we see a revival of the physical medium like you mention. I love using these new tools for certain workflows, but nothing will ever replace that feeling of looking at and feeling a canvas.
I see it all the time in school and at the work place. one still needs to be able to pull their weight at work after getting their foot in the door.
This is gonna weed out all the artists who aren’t that great. Great artists will continue to thrive, half of being an artist is having a good work ethic.
Thank you for doing this very indepth and thoughtful analysis on the topic. I haven't even considered the effect on art school that the AI tech will have.
I think the use case of these AI tools ends at ideation. AI art plagiarism isn't really a problem because the generated work reveals provenance on some level that's traceable if data sets are open. Aside from that their are dozens of tells that a work is generated by a diffusion model that most humans can cop onto after seeing a dozen. They are extremely powerful as a pinboard tool, throw up a bunch of ideas very quickly and curate the best out of all of them. They are very bad at making usable finished works or assets though, i feel like anyone who has tinkered with them has realized this.
"hey are very bad at making usable finished works or assets" - for now. This technology is in its infancy, mind you.
@Jason Lees I totally agree.
@Jason Lees Uhh, this is a super subjective take my dude. You may objectively compare AI to human art but saying that AI can create a work leagues better than a human artist is up to who's viewing the art itself based on too many personal/individualistic factors.
I guess the crisis is not so much in what AI can produce, but in the kind of people our society is producing. We should not be afraid of what AI can produce, we should be afraid of what AI can produce in the people our society is producing.
If our society produces people without the basic virtues (and I use that outdated word on purpose, a "mental habit in harmony with reason and the order of nature"), which are Critical Thinking ("Prudence"), Integrity ("Justice"), Perseverance ("Fortitude") and Self-Discipline ("Temperance"), then what AI can produce in those people is disastrous, since it will enhance the deficiencies in those virtues feeding back in a negative way.
So the solution doesn't happen so much, although we have to take precautions, in finding ways to prevent people from misusing AI, but in educate people so that they don't misuse AI, and that means that basic education has to produce people with those virtues. any other solution is going to be a patch that will lose effectiveness very soon (a temporal patch).
I taught graduate level courses at the Academy of Art University for over a decade, all online. It was a constant struggle to keep up with plagiarism as it was; today I have no idea how I'd weed out the AI from those who spent 15 hours researching and digitally rendering an original design.
This is at least in part the problem. The other major problem is the downstream effects on our labor - on what we do. Or what we can do for money
@@StudioPractice1 indeed. I think of the hundreds of students I taught over the years, all of whom entered into debt slavery for their dream of doing what I did in the 80s, '90s and naughts; work on major feature films. It was a tough market to begin with; now those positions have been slashed by 90% in studios like Disney and Dreamworks! Those who once wagged their fingers and said "learn to code!" Weren't any wiser; AI is swiftly snagging many of those gigs as well, as chat GPT can do in 20 seconds what took an experienced coder two weeks to do just a couple of years ago. Sure, they may still need the coder to comb through it's work, but for how much longer? And mere troubleshooting won't pay the bills.
I'm not sure what the answer is. All white collar workers can't turn to working as landscapers, construction, domestics and plumbers, especially since far fewer people are able to afford homes.
It is definitely on the horizon. When a Sci-fi magazine had to suspend admissions for short stories because hundreds of submissions were being written by Ai on a daily basis, it is only a matter of time before this becomes prevalent. To be honest I think people who get accepted on their Ai "portfolio" will be sore to find out you have to actually demonstrate your art skills in classes, even digitally if relevant. The fact that they can't showcase their "skill" in-person is why prompt jockeys are fake artists.
Exactly! I was talking to my students about that today. Imagine getting in on the strength of your fake portfolio and then having nothing to show for it.
I had to show a physical portfolio to get into my BFA program and physical work to graduate. I would imagine of all majors in college, art would be the hardest to fake your way out of.
Elliot, sorry this is unrelated to AI, but i always wondered:
Have you ever felt that ‘work ethic’ is actually an illusory phenomenon? that it’s really just a combination of other, possibly even negative, feelings or coping mechanisms?
An example might be: an artist who works tirelessly only because 1. it’s simply an emotional safety-net/habit 2. They’re constantly avoiding something psychologically by choosing to work instead, or 3. Because it simply feels good in a compulsory/stimulating way!
And then the spectator, or perhaps even the artist themselves, looks at the artist and says “good work ethic!”
I imagine you’ll say something like ‘we all go through all sorts of troubling things all the time anyway, and the creation of art is so societally vital and so personally healthy that it could never be considered a questionable activity, or a questionable reaction to life’s events’.
But i suppose I don’t have a problem with the glorification of the artist who works all the time so much as i have a problem with simply calling it a “good work ethic” and moving on.
Do you have personal experience with this realm of thought or have you simply always been ‘a worker’?
P.S.
I’ll briefly add that there are many artists I look up to who seem, on closer inspection, to be generally toxic, and even destructive to themselves, and the people around them.
I feel I’ve naturally become less productive as I’ve matured and strengthened my relationships
These are all interesting points. I personally work A LOT primarily becuse of the dopamine hit I get from the work itself. It’s amazing to take pleasure in the simple act of making. Then there is the component of attempting to achieve “something” (Magi’s) the pursuit of excellence. And third… there’s the money thing. Being paid for work (youre not supposed to talk about this) is really rewarding. It just is. I dont work as a form of self discipline or as a form of Protestant guilt or self torture. I personally work because of the massive amount of pleasure I derive from it. I get many of your points, and I think that in a lot of instances the dynamic that you speak of is very real… sadly
Certainly many people use art for catharsis, and when they're healthy, are naturally less productive. I'm putting effort into my marriage and parenting, and don't much to say musically. Usually I produced music when I was miserable or in a transitional state. At first I kind of mourned not recording anymore, but I've learned to live with the idea that it's not vital for me right now.
I think a good case against AI is that with copyright, you CANT COPYRIGHT an idea. You can copyright the expression of a piece of art. But typing in what you want to see with AI is not coming up with the expression of an idea. It's like paying an artist for a piece of art, they own the IP because through their hard work they deserve to own what they created and need to be protected to make a living off of it. an AI has no choice in making art and it does not need money so why should a person own the copyright to art using AI when copyright laws were meant for humans?
No doubt these image generation tools will have an impact but I don't think anyone is exactly sure how. Sure it's easier to fake a visual art portfolio but that has always been easy to do. Tracing, copying, photoshopping something will get you a decetully complete looking. Day one of art school give each student a pencil and paper and ask them to draw fruit.
Hey 👋. But. By then youre in. By then its too late. You have a commitment to someone who might not be so good. And i;m not so sure with tracing etc… its so easy to get a good portfolio
I think you mean that if they are invited for like a test day...
Great video! Its ok to stutter and you don't need to cut out the pauses and dead space, we will still enjoy your content!
Yes, about return of the real. TH-camr memeanalysis, like freud psychoanalysis but for the internet and memes, writes about a "Cult of the Hand" in which things made by people which occupy material space will be venerated to an enormous degree over anything a computer makes. Like, God made us in his image, and we have his hands, so what comes of the hands must be a million times more divine and greater than the bot
Exactly.
You know they can attach a brush and paint to a robotic arm and let the AI do its thing, right? People won't even notice.
@@AA-lz4wq "made by people..."
I guess the crisis is not so much in what AI can produce, but in the kind of people our society is producing. We should not be afraid of what AI can produce, we should be afraid of what AI can produce in the people our society is producing.
If our society produces people without the basic virtues (and I use that outdated word on purpose, a "mental habit in harmony with reason and the order of nature"), which are Critical Thinking ("Prudence"), Integrity ("Justice"), Perseverance ("Fortitude") and Self-Discipline ("Temperance"), then what AI can produce in those people is disastrous, since it will enhance the deficiencies in those virtues feeding back in a negative way.
So the solution doesn't happen so much, although we have to take precautions, in finding ways to prevent people from misusing AI, but in educate people so that they don't misuse AI, and that means that basic education has to produce people with those virtues. any other solution is going to be a patch that will lose effectiveness very soon (a temporal patch).
Spot on … back to traditional art for fine artists. Where as graphic design will get good use out of ai for streamlining flows.
There is no issue - want to weed out - do live examinations - when I applied to design school over a period of 3 days I had examinations.
End of story end of being scared of AI
I am as a design faculty annoyed by all this AI paranoia
Oh yeah and this evening I will make another video for my students how to use AI for certain tasks in our design process …
I am actually very excited about this new technology because it cuts down labor intensive tasks allows me to focus more on the creative part.
Photography replaced portrait painting - 3d rendering replaced marker renderings - AI is going to replace photoshop etc
The constant is however that there is always a human who needs to know what to do and how to use the tool.
AI is here to stay - get used to it - implement it - or get out
Really enjoyed the video! “Return to analog” feels like it has been in the works culturally for a while now (see resurgence of vinyl records). I wonder if AI will lead to a need for an “air gapped” instructional environment where everything inside is analog/AI-free. May lead to the art version of the Chinese room experiment except we are receiving the inputs from the AI instead of the other way around :)
Vinyl is still tiny. The masses just moved from CDs to streaming.
Also, I object. AI tools will improve and the skillset of creative humans will change, but stay digital.
I absolutely agree with your concerns and the sheer dilution of work ethic for the next generation is a problem. It’s a quick fix throwaway society we live in today and the big powerhouse companies don’t care how creativity is crafted; they just want results fast.
I’ve been in Design for nearly 30years and from my observation- the next generation struggle with the basic fundamental techniques and their minds are elsewhere. As with all industries- if you can’t make it, fake it… it seems.
Ai is here to stay and a lot of Art school funds are going to be put under extreme pressure to adapt to this new world changing technology software.
This is a very significant critique. This may simply separate the commercial art and design sector from artist’s purely personal exploration and experimentation. Unfortunately, as you point out, this is often a process that will have to have been embedded within the artist early in their careers and they accept that earning a living is quite separate from their own work.
I don’t know what the solution is. I use both physical art media and the computer to create. There has to be a way for these AI programs to use blockchain tech to embed a watermark that cannot be printed or removed so that AI art is more easily spotted. We, as artists, need to push back HARD against AI generated art.
The weirdest thing is that Chat GPT isn't aware that it's literally erasing copyright law. I tried to explain to it that if everyone is creating their own entertainment and art the law won't exist. It can't comprehend that. There is going to be so much art and entertainment, you'll have to pay people to see it. We're about to enter an inverted world where the one who pays the most to the audience gets famous.
It can't comprehend anything. It doesn't think. It's basically a complex linguistic calculator.
@@choptop81 Well du LOL
I believe you’re right: schools must adapt. With regard to admissions, I encourage school admissions people to acknowledge the current admissions decision process is inadequate, even if AI had never existed. Today, students are often required to do a massive amount of work to apply for school (regardless of discipline), with very little evidence that much of that work is even used in the evaluation of their readiness for studies. My point is this: as admissions teams prepare to adapt, they should not compare future processes to current processes as if they’re perfect. This might free them up to develop admissions processes that allow students to demonstrate their potential while allowing schools to select the students that will best fit the programs.
In Hinduism there is a famous quote from Lord Krishna:
"Thou hast the right to action, but not the fruits thereof"
So basically it means that your job is the process but not the outcome. Applied to life in general it is extremely liberating because I cannot feel attached to the result. All of the beauty in being an artist is in the process - the action. If you just go for the outcome all the time without doing the work you are always going to be a failure. It's like getting a helicopter to the top of Mt Everest and then telling people you've been to the top of Mt Everest. But using AI art is worse because you are using copyrighted material. I believe that human nature requires evolution and inner progress.
Good. They should learn what art is. It’s not just craft.
An interesting and fairly well reasoned bit of analysis.
I'm working with pencil, paper on sketching and then working the idea on wacom, phoshoshop with brush stroke. My foundation build on non-stop learning anatomy of human and animal. The emotional of brush could not be learnt. If you don't have it, don't work on it, you will never be able to do and have it in any way. We are mortal, those we do in the moment are unique.
This vlog understates the rapidity with which imagery can be produced by AI. If a self-hosted installation is used, then hundreds of images an hour can be generated from a single text prompt, image input, pose description and/or style description file. Furthermore, each generated image can be trivially modified with inpainting and outpainting to correct visual, color, compositional or anatomical aberrations to refine an output. The skill of generating a desired image is therefore a selective process (choosing one and ignoring the others) rather than an entirely additive process. My choice of words there is an attempt to compare image generation to manufacturing processes: additive vs subtractive machining. A generated image, once selected, can often still benefit from finishing touches that require the skills of Pre-AI image composition such as over painting. In this new paradigm, the most skillful technicians produce the most intentional results even if the quality is no better than that of any other AI generated image.
So... 2 questions:
1. What about the commercial arts (live film, 2D/3D animation, VFX and their sub-disciplines) and schools based on them? If I'm applying to an animation school in 2023 as a student, I probably don't have the resources to recreate 90s Disney animation sheet for sheet for a physical portfolio to art school, and if I did, well, I probably wouldn't need art school. Hyperbole aside, simply by necessity and practicality, those disciplines are digital, as are/would be porfolios based off of them. Which leads to:
2. This "return to the real" assumes that:
- all artists have the resources (or funds for the resources) to pivot in the direction of the physical/traditional.
-that (leaving AI aside) physical/traditional can keep up with the output of the digital (Photoshop/CSP for illustration, ToonBoom/Adobe Animate/TV Paint for animation, and Blender/Maya/Zbrush for Sculpting/3D)
- that physical/traditional can keep up in a landscape where digital social media promotion is a necessity (working digital cuts out the middleman of having to upload your output)
-that consumers have enough media literacy (design and communication principles) and production literacy (how things are made, and what that context says about the artist and society) to care about the art and artist beyond being an entertainment product to be consumed and stored/discarded.
The point being, what happens if any of the above isn't true:
-artists (or students) can't afford the tools, space or resources to "return to the real"?
-artists choose iPads/tablets ($300-$3K once) over traditional/physical tool (or spaces [as a digital artist, I do NOT have the space for physical art creation]) for illustration/sculpture media?
-artists decide being able to produce digital art for instagram/Twitter is more important than a physical gallery/market showing (given the global reach of the internet)?
-consumers just want their distraction, not to think about the art or the artist (i.e. the divide between academic and cultural reads of mass media)?
Because I think the latter scenario is closer to where we are now, he said, typing this up on a social media platform on the internet at a computer.
What a great take on this phenomenon. I could not agree more re: Hal Foster's prescient work (or its application in this scenario vs postmodernist work). 100% agree that the pendulum will swing back the way of the personal talismanic/brand effect-it is already true that something "in the style of Van Gogh" is less valuable than a Van Gogh fake is less valuable than an actual Van Gogh AND that the value of the actual Van Gogh is only augmented by the presence of the rest.
It should be easy to sort out mid journey images, people out say they look uncanny. There’s just something non human about its images so it’s pretty easy to sort out from human created art imo.
Mastering your craft comes in many forms as a creative Artist I can see this going side ways quick
This makes me think that there should be schools that specifically teach and test work ethic and self-motivation that don't focus on the qualification to a certain skill, but rather a ability to stick with something to a masterful level. In other words graded on the ability to focus.
It sounds like a really good thing, people get much better at composition.