Why would you "keep AI out of every other category" and what would be the point? I was curious. I looked up the "Colorado State Fair" "Digital Arts/Digitally Manipulated Photography" rules. Are you ready? Division and/or Class for which it best qualifies. The Colorado State Fair or the judge may disqualify or transfer to the correct Class (at his/her discretion) any exhibit which is not a true representative of the Division or Class in which it is entered. It is not, however, the responsibility of the Colorado State Fair or judge to transfer an entry to the correct Division and/or Class. Once upon a time there was an artist who started using photographs as well as posed models in order to improve his paintings and the world was outraged. Once upon a time there was an artist who started using electrical amplification as well as acoustical and the world was outraged. This photo was taken in 1932. 90 years later, "artists" were dunking on it without having a clue what they were looking at. Cindy Sherman photos sell for millions and there is most definitely a crowd - a crowd well-represented at the Colorado State Fair - that firmly believes if you don't grind your own pigments you aren't really an artist. And I mean... there were like 12 people in competition. Here's second place. Which would you rather put on your wall, that... or this? Here's the core thing that will ALWAYS annoy the shit out of artists: - Frank Zappa First place? Yeah he might sell something someday but I mean... yeah. All that stuff is cheap and easy and nobody cares. Second place? Holy shit there's a lot of effort there for something that's truly wretched. What do you think the other 30 entries look like? 'cuz let's take a breath here - "Colorado. State. Fair." You've never given a shit about it before and you'll never give a shit about it again but oh holy crap every time the tools of art change, the calcified artists who have managed to convince themselves they're artists not craftsmen because they've gotten mediocre-to-passable at the existing tools all gather 'round and howl. Every guitarist in the '80s: "synthesizers aren't real music" Real music:1. A complete exhibit eligible in more than one Division and/or Class shall be entered and judged only in the
Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
You know... to beat a dead horse? You look at that for five seconds and go "yeah pretty neat. Looks like a sci fi cover." You look at that for ten seconds and go "what's going on with this lady? Is it a lady? Where's her torso?" You look at it for twenty seconds and you go "and what's up with the ceiling?" You look at it for thirty seconds and go "I'm not even sure this is a human" And if you look at it for a minute, you realize your time is not being rewarded. This is not a dig at all AI art. I follow a few artists who are doing interesting things. But the difference between what they do, and what was done with this state fair winner, is craft. I haven't seen much AI art that compares with, say, Vincent Di Fate or Michael Whelan. But the tools are new, the practitioners are experimenting and the future is bright. I think the principle difference between the art I enjoy and the art I don't is the artist has spent the time and energy to get good with their tools. I heard some dumb shit on television decrying what Mozart would think if he were to encounter a Synclavier. That's because he wasn't an artist he was an art critic and art critics are ALWAYS about "anything new sucks and anything my friends like is the only true art." Mozart was an experimentalist, a performer and a boundary pusher and I think Bill and Ted got it right even if that is supposed to be Beethoven. We're probably 18 months away from any dumb fuck with a pulse being able to put together a comic book or graphic novel that looks vaguely like a comic book or graphic novel if you don't look at it very carefully. And the thing is? If you're a mediocre artist? Technology has just caught up to your mediocrity. If all you were ever going to be was mediocre, guess what? The world just caught up to you. Know who did an album on Tascam 4-track that is considered a masterpiece? Know who did an album in GarageBand that was held against her until she did an album not in GarageBand? And the thing of it is? the minute Grimes became Grimes, it became okay to cut an album in GarageBand 'cuz I tell you what, there's more fucking power in GarageBand than there was in Electric Ladyland Studios and a willingness to use any tool doesn't make you a traitor, it makes you VITAL.
No, I get it. And I still disagree. There's no gradient here - if Dylan had come on stage and done a lick with a Fender the Newport Folk Festival would still have been outraged. It's binary - you either use the new tool or you don't, and if you use the new tool, a lot of the people whose worldview is built around the old tools are going to lose their minds. Content Aware Fill came out 12 1/2 years ago in April 2010. It's true that you don't use it by saying "siri, erase the telephone poles" but that's the UI, not the process. Fundamentally it's all Markov chains and the Markov chains in CAF have less training data. It's no less AI. "Digital art" was clearly added to appease all the painters and pencil artists who hated anything that had been inside a computer. There's a dividing line there - is it paint on canvas? Charcoal on paper? then it isn't digital. ...for now. Here's the thing, though - people paint manually because it's fun. People paint with robots because it's fun. "my fun is different than your fun" is pretty much what the state fair is about so it's pretty obvious to me that a pen plotter with an oil palate is "digital art" and I'll bet it's obvious to everyone else. When it comes to money? I mean, I know illustrators with wikipedia pages and six figure quotes and they were all trained in the classics, work half in Photoshop. When it comes down to professionals it comes down to efficiencies. When it comes down to amateurs it comes down to pissing on other amateurs. If you need to whip out a matte for a Netflix cartoon that will be seen for six seconds, AI gonna relieve a lot of suffering. If you need something that will stand up to scrutiny, there will always need to be a human tweaking it. The only thing that will change will be the level of scrutiny. One of my favorite digital artists can't hold a paintbrush because of health issues. But he shares his tools, shares his process, and posts prolifically. He also has a Twitter interface on one of his (self-coded) generators. As far as I'm concerned, AI provides tools for people who wouldn't be able to use tools normally. That improves everything. Saying "I made this without computers" is great, but it also prompts the question "why?" I learned drafting on paper with pencils. I still have my Staedtler Mars set, I still have my bitchin' compass, I still have lead holders. But I much prefer "show me the clearance around this pulley." "show me the clearance around this pulley" has the added advantage of being able to go "now render it in PETG I'll be back for it Thursday." I had a friend who adored blueprints. But they had to be BLUE. They had to be made using ferric ammonium, they had to fade in sunlight, they had to give you a headache if you shared a room with them for too long, they had to make you wash your hands if you held them for more than a few seconds at a time. Actually all that is a lie. He liked blueprints that looked like blueprints but were actually made on an inkjet printer because he was a fucking idiot who didn't know any better. When I gave him an actual cyanotype he recoiled in horror and remained chagrined for years afterwards. But then, he's an amateur. I'm a professional. It's usually amateurs and critics who insist they know what art is and you don't. You're fucking with their fun because they've defined themselves based on a fragile definition. I think if you look at the broad scope of history, every time we come up with a new tool, things advance. Not linearly? Not always at first? But once society has integrated that tool, society has improved.
One thing that's lost in all the AI discussions I've read so far is that where the artist (or whatever you want to call him/her in a specific context) matters a lot is in their ability to recognize something truly beautiful and capture it, distill it, and disseminate it in a way that people can relate to. I remember reading an interview with David Gilmour once upon a time where he was talking about writing Shine On You Crazy Diamond. As I'm sure you're aware, it has this iconic 4 note riff as its main theme, which, depending how you look at it, ends on a sharp 4th, which is weird and awesome. According to Gilmour, it was an accident, a bum note that he struck while messing around. Gilmour is Gilmour for a reason, one of the great masters of rock melody, so he hears that and immediately says, "This is genius!" If I did the same thing I'd probably scold myself silently for fucking up and move on, never thinking about it again. I guess my point is that so much "genius" in the world are happy accidents that the discoverer just happens to recognize as something new and fantastic. No doubt that AI generated images are going to change the nature of art, but art isn't about pigment on paper...we already have laser printers for that. I'm not sure I can say anything profound about what art is, exactly, but I know it isn't medium-specific. Early days of AI-generated images are going to suck (from a content POV--but fucking hell, movies sucked at first, too). Eventually the field will evolve and people will find awesome ways to use the powerful new tools in the toolbox.
I've heard some famous artist attributed with the quote "art is done when you give up on it" and some other famous artist say "art is done when you're ready to let go" and the thing of it is, the act of creating art is a process, lots of people are obsessed with process, and people with little self-confidence will happily pit their process against someone else's process as to why they're artists and the other person isn't. I've sold photography. Not for enough to make a career out of it? Not for enough to put up with the people who buy it? But enough to feel entitled to my opinion. And I once spent a fourteen day roadtrip shooting photos with a Pentax 6x7 and a Nikon F5 while my buddy lumbered out his Mamiya RZ. Pretty much every time we stopped, I'd rip a dozen photos in five-ten minutes and be done. My buddy? He'd spend half an hour setting up and then bracket 5x in exposure and 5x in DOF. Now - I had a lot more good shots. But if I had a shot of something, and he had a shot of something, his were better on average. Not every time? But enough of the time for me to acknowledge that four semesters of photography training had amounted to something. He would never get that Cartier-Bresson shot. The Parrish? Yeah, he could get the Parrish. One of the reasons I hate photographers is that for way way waaaaay too many of them, "pissing on other people's method" is how they prove themselves to be photographers. It's gone up radically since film has gone away, too, because it used to be a lot of work to get an image when you didn't know what it looked like until a couple days later. But even on this, the photographers are ahead because AI has been in photo editing for like ten fucking years. HERE'S MY HATORADE The guys who spend all fucking day in Photoshop are the ones who don't know how to point a fucking camera. And now, they're salty because the guys who aren't even trying to hold a fucking camera are better at the tools that they use. "Digital image manipulation, but only of a highly particular kind" is such an obscenely stupid hill to die on that I can't help but compare it to GamerGate. "ZOMFG you wrote a video game and also had a uterus" = "ZOMFG you digitally manipulated an image but didn't start in MS Paint."“When I woke up in the morning, the tape had run out,” Richards recalled many years later. “I put it back on, and there’s this, maybe, 30 seconds of ‘Satisfaction,’ in a very drowsy sort of rendition. And then it suddenly—the guitar goes ‘CLANG,” and then there’s like 45 minutes of snoring.” It wasn’t much to go on, but he played it for Mick Jagger later that same day. “He only had the first bit, and then he had the riff,” Jagger recalls. “It sounded like a country sort of thing on acoustic guitar—it didn’t sound like rock. But he didn’t really like it, he thought it was a joke… He really didn’t think it was single material, and we all said ‘You’re off your head.’ Which he was, of course.”