Big fan of Sarah Andersen but this is a terrible argument.
It’s like a white man in the 1930s saying, “You’re telling me getting a job is a privilege? Then how come I can get many different kinds of job?”
Because you aren’t the one struggling here.
Not following you? Artist is stating art is accessible to anyone. Even if you do it terribly at least you did it. Yes people who do it well and practice should get paid well for it.
Doesn’t change that the masses have access to making art with a random marker and a notebook. They always had access. Yes they shouldn’t get paid or anything. Just enjoy your own art.
What AI does is give people art without soul or the discipline. Skipping A all the way to Z. Like handing an AK-47 to a child and saying now you’re a soldier because you can kill people! A lot more nuance to get there.
One of the issues is a lot people don’t want to do amateur stuff. They aren’t comfortable even starting because then they’ll start comparing themselves to others and begin self loathing.
“Ugh, I’m 32 years old and I draw like a 3 year old. Fuck this.”
This applies to more than just art.
“I can barely manage to operate the basics of a computer there is no way I’ll ever code.”
“I have no sense of rhythm and I’m out of shape I’ll never be able to dance and not look terrible.”
“Can barely socialize platonically at all, there is no way I’ll ever talk to that cute girl/boy, I’m going to die alone.”
Agreed! The people I knew who had the deepest and most varied skillsets were:
- not afraid to look foolish while learning something
- able to spend a lot of time learning it.
That’s all it really takes. Sounds easy but it’s not.
Its weird, being smart can also bite a person in the ass in this respect. If you are a ruminator or over analyze you’ll spiral yourself away from trying new stuff at a hair trigger.
Trying new stuff is also acquiring a new skill. It can also help you get your mind off of something.
able to spend a lot of time learning it.
This is subjective, you have to spend some time to be somewhat proficient in whatever skill, but you don’t have to be a master carpenter to screw two pieces of wood together.
Yeah, I remember the first time I tried archery in a VR game. I sucked so bad. But I kept going for 10 hours anyway. I still sucked so bad… but then I went to bed and woke up in the morning and it had all sunk in while I slept. I was immediately pretty good at it then, literally over night. But I had to put in the 10 hours of sucking. Hard to do. I have now put about 100 hours into that character and I pretty much never miss a shot within 50 meters.
Other skills take way longer. Archery in VR limits alot of variables, no draw weight, the arrow knocks to the same place every time, and the string draws to a fixed max pull back distance. So every shot is the same power level and the arrow flies out at exactly the same horizontal and vertical offset. So it’s actually a pretty relatively easy skill to pick up.
It’s really this, people don’t want to dabble in something anymore, just do something for the sake of doing it. My wife always ‘complained’ about me learning to play the guitar for a few weeks, then start painting, but after some time it was writing or programming followe by playing darts. Whatever it was, it was alway pursued as a hobby. Today my wife will comment that our (teenage) kids have it made, since whatever they want to try for a hobby, we will have some stuff laying around to try it.
I think op fight a strawman here, AI is just like a tool, it can speed up the process .A lot of people can think of a cool thing but can t actually make it/ draw it. In this sense you could see that just like photoshop ,a tool that speed thing up . I saw the prompts/ software that people use on r/stablediffusion and AI in itself need work to do a good art.
Exactly. Sarah is well aware that it’s not a pencil and paper that’s out of reach for most people, but the time, effort, and talent it used to take for an individual to produce anything worthwhile.
She doesn’t like that the ability to make the pictures in your head appear in real life has been opened up to everyone. She’s strawmanning to gatekeep just like the boomers who say “I had to pay for my school loans and so you should too”.
Yeah, it’s not that A1 is making “art” accessible, it’s making stuff that artists can do accessible like comic strips.
Bereft of context, I can understand the appeal of typing a description and getting an image (I know you can get more fine-grained than that). I remember when it first was upon us, me and my friends obsessively toyed with it to see what we could get it to produce.
Personally, I lost interest pretty quickly, especially when it became clear that a handful of companies were looting the commons to enrich themselves and put professional and amateur artists out of work.
The older versions of AI image generation were really cool
Yeah, I was really looking forward to google making more of those neat images with all the eyes and the dog faces. Additional fingers were always a plus for me, like cracking an egg and finding two yolks.
Now, instead of AI creating man-made horrors beyond my imagining (which are alien and rainbow colored), AI creates man-made horrors within my imagining (excuses for corporate layoffs, aggressive ads, etc, all excused by internet posters who don’t value art to begin with and have no idea what it is. Quit abdicating the human experience to matrix algebra).
AI images may may or may not be art, but it will never be YOUR art, any more than the art of artists I employ is my art. It just isn’t.
However, I think any AI argument that doesn’t mention capitalism as a factor is incapably reductive. As other commenters indicate, even very physically restricted individuals can and will create art.
Because they often have the means that many under capitalism do not: they often have time because they aren’t under full time employment. They have extra mental energy, the “spoons”.
Once again, the issue is ultimately a deflection from systemic issues that the upper class insist they aren’t intentionally worsening 🫠
I generally dislike AI for a swathe of fairly generic reasons, but their rebuttal doesn’t refute the accessibility argument. AI art is miles more accessible than any other art. You just shouldn’t be comfortable claiming it as your art.
image generation ran on at least 4 gigabytes of gpu chugging datasets of millions of artists - accessible VS Picking up a pen accesible. Ai media generation is not more “accesible” to make art, people don’t need an education to make art. people don’t need technical talent or proficiency to make art. Generative media is a convenient vending machine to churn out something resembling a product. The whole point of our current generative art systems is in making something that has some kind of production or market value without a care of where that content was scraped.
I’m going to argue that stealing and masquerading to manufacture a product is a lot more effort than just picking up a pencil.
What is more accessible, staying in a shack or your own home? The shack is several miles away, but required only hours to construct for the small family that crafted it. Your home required months to finish by a large team of skilled laborers. Which is more accessible to you?
What is more accesible for me at the moment is pointing out that you are really straining this metaphor. This is typical, we are talking about accessibility IN ART and all of the sudden it’s all about living in a shack, skill laborers and the most out there metaphors one could muster!
What makes it accessible?
I would think a pencil and paper is much more accessible than a thousand dollar phone or computer.
[edit] Is it that people with hand tremors can type instead of draw?
In the west, education and time are less accessible than electronics. It’s, unfortunately, that simple. There are arguments to be made elsewhere and elsewhen, but that is the current state of things.
Oh.
In that case, I don’t think this is an accessibility I respect.
Skill in any medium is accessible only to those who have been educated in that skill. I get that it’s expensive, but that is unfortunately just how attribution works.
I’m not interested in the musings of a philosopher whose philosophy is written for them. I’m not interested in the artistic expression of someone whose expression is decided for them. Your ideas have to come from you.
If someone wants a colorful backdrop to something else they’re doing, then images are more accessible, but art is not.
It sounds like you’re agreeing with my original comment, in that case.
I did just re-read it, and yes, kind of.
I guess I just disagree with what it should be called.
I just went outside, picked up a rock and drew a stickfigure on the street with that rock
AI art requires a smart device and internet connection. You can do pixel art with the same
