Sometimes I think about the first piece of AI art that fooled me. It was a series of portraits... Anime women drawn in the style of medieval paintings, big boobed and yet painted with such apparent care, mimicking the classics in composition and pose and lighting
And I was really interested! Such detail would have required a lot of research... A lot of passion and interest in the original paintings! What did the artist think of them? What were they saying, replacing the plain women of the original with these anime ladies? What did they want to say about the subjects then, the subjects today, the meaning in portraying them?
The answer, as it turned out, was nothing. It meant nothing. No one cared about the original paintings, no one had any thoughts about their meanings. Someone thought old paintings are masterpieces but it should have some big titted anime blondes, and that was all. An artist would have had to think about what they were doing; an AI just needed replicable data. That impression has stuck with me every time I've seen AI images since.
The second piece that really fooled me left a similar feeling. It was an image of one of those plastic deck chairs, rendered in a beautiful jade colored glass, labelled as if was a photo of a legitimate sculpture.
It was so lovely, and so evocative... Taking a cheap, common thing, rendering it in a medium so hard to work with to make it beautiful! Highlighting the curves and design work that made it art, turning it into something that could no longer even be used for sitting... Ironically, making it as delicate as the actual deck chairs have been known to be!
And then I saw that the swirls didn't quite match up right and realized I'd been fooled. And again... realized I had put more thought into it than the person prompting the AI. This was just... something that'd look cool.
And it sucks because there are legitimate sculptors making the statements I wanted to dig into! There IS an actual real life wooden chair modeled after the cheap ones, turning a disposable item into an heirloom piece of furniture! I remember clearly visiting a museum where I saw intricately crafted ceramics made to look like styrofoam takeout containers and shoes! There are so many real life artists who see the design of things around us and highlight the care and artistry in them by replicating them in art!
Again! It's the emptiness! The lack of thought! The facade of intention falling away at closer look! The simple act of creation adds meaning, intentional and not, and stripping that out sucks ass!!!
