> AI slop is to AI art what point and shoot amateur photography is to artistic photography.
Sorry... It's all slop buddy. The medium is the message, and genAI's message is "I want it cheap and with low effort, and I don't care too much about how it looks"
It is more useful to think about it in terms of what that effort actually entails.
If you haven't ever written a novel, or even a short story, you cannot possibly imagine how much of your own weird self ends up in it, and that is a huge part of what will make it interesting for people to read. You can also express ideas as subtext, through the application of technique and structure. I have never reached this level with any form of visual art but I imagine it's largely the same.
A prompt, or even a series of prompts, simply cannot encode such a rich payload. Another thing artists understand is that ideas are cheap and execution is everything; in practice, everything people are getting out of these AI tools is founded on a cheap idea and built from an averaging of everything the AI was trained on. There is nothing interesting in there, nothing unique, nothing more than superficially personal; just more of the most generic version of what you think you want. And I think a lot of people are finding that that isn't, in fact, what they want.
At the very least, art usually contains effort signifiers. Yes, an artist could potentially employ gingerbread men cut from construction paper in a work, but no, construction paper gingerbread men are typically not in the same league as David.
For fun I decided to try out the find and replace on this comment
> Sorry... It's all slop buddy. The medium is the message, and photography's message is "I want it cheap and with low effort, and I don't care too much about how it looks"
Hmm... it seems like you have failed to actually make an argument here
The logical implication of your view is that if someone or something has a halo, they can shit in your mouth and it's "good." The medium is the message, after all.
This is the same pretentious art bullshit that regular people fucking hate, just repackaged to take advantage of public rage at tech bro billionaires.
Pretending that "these two things are the same, actually" when in fact no, you can seperately name and describe them quite clearly, is a favorite pastime of vacuous content on the internet.
Artists, who use these tools with clear vision and intent to achieve specific goals, strangely never have this problem.
But that was the point the OP was making. Not that you couldn’t differentiate between white balance correction and generative fill, but rather that the intent of the change matters for determining if an image is “fake”.
For example, I took a picture of my dog at the dog park the other day. I didn’t notice when framing the picture but on review at home, right smack in the middle of the lower 3rd of the photo and conveniently positioned to have your eyes led there by my dog’s pose and snout direction, was a giant, old, crusty turd. Once you noticed it, it was very hard to not see it anymore. So I broke out the photo editing tools and used some auto retouching tool to remove the turd. And lucky for me since the ground was mulch, the tool did a fantastic job of blending it out, and if I didn’t tell you it had been retouched, you wouldn’t know.
Is that a fake image? The subject of the photo was my dog. The purpose of the photo was to capture my dog doing something entertaining. When I was watching the scene with my own human eyes I didn’t see the turd. Nor was capturing the turd in the photo intended or essential to capturing what I wanted to capture. But I did use some generative tool (algorithmic or AI I couldn’t say) to convincingly replace the turd with more mulch. So does doing that make the image fake? I would argue no. If you ask me what the photo is, I say it’s a photo of my dog. The edit does not change my dog, nor change the surrounding to make the dog appear somewhere else or to make the dog appear to be doing something they weren’t doing were you there to witness it yourself. I do not intend the photo to be used as a demonstration of how clean that particular dog park is or was on that day, or even to be a photo representing that dog park at all. My dog happened to be in that locale when they did something I wanted a picture of. So to me that picture is no more fake than any other picture in my library. But a pure “differentiate on the tools” analysis says it is a fake image, content that wasn’t captured by the sensor is now in the image and content that was captured no longer is. Fake image then right?
I think the OP has it right, the intent of your use of the tool (and its effect) matters more than what specific tool you used.
Everyone knows what is meant by a real vs fake digital photo, it is made abundantly clear by the mentions of debayering and white balance/contrast as "real" and generative fill as "fake". You and some others here are just shifting the conversation to a different kind of "fake". A whole load of semantic bickering for absolutely nothing.
Well you changed the photo from an accurate representation of the scene into what you felt like it should be. The photo is no longer "real" but a story. Stories tell us things that are true too, but not in a physical evidence kind of way.
And this is why I think intent matters more than the tools. Lets say I had framed the photo when I took it such that the turd was not in the frame. Is that a "fake" photo because I framed it in such a way as to exclude something that was there?
And if shot composition doesn't make it fake, what if I cropped the photo after the fact? I'm removing something the camera captured to better make the picture what I "felt like it should be" just using the removal tool. That's functionally no different from framing the shot differently, but it's modifying the actual captured image.
If we decide that removal, whether by framing or by post-hoc cropping is still "real" and it's the use of a tool that adds something that wasn't there, would the same apply to just cutting a square out of the photo without cropping the rest of the frame? A transparent square would be an interesting artistic choice for sure, but does that then get into the realm of "fake"? What if the square is black or white? Is adding a clearly "post process censor bar" crossing a line into making the photo "fake"?
If those are fine, it's the "adding content that looks like it should be there" is the problem, does that mean that dust or hair removal to remove something that was on the lens make it fake since that would also have to generate what the computer thinks is behind that hair or dust speck?
For what it's worth, I don't think there is a hard line here, like I said intent matters. But I do think that figuring out where ones personal and general lines are and when they might move that line or not is an interesting thought experiment.
I think you're right, framing of the shot absolutely tells a story, but at the same time, when you can trust the veracity of the frame content at least you can say something about the real world even if you have to acknowledge there is a possibility of something just off-screen that would change your interpretation of events. Sometimes, the contents of the image betray that the real world diverges significantly from the author's intent, for example, by allowing you to deduce that what is claimed is actually impossible. So there is significant value in "real" images.
I don't know, removing the turd from that picture reminds me of when Stalin had the head of the NKVD (deceased) removed from photos after the purge. It sounds like the turd was probably the focus of all your dog's attention and interest at the time, and editing it out has created a misleading situation in a way that would be outrageous if I was a dog and capable of outrage.
I bought a used thinkcentre tiny off of eBay. It's got great GPU decoding/encoding support, great driver support for all the peripherals, and can boot from an m2 NVME or a SATA drive, it has a very normal bootloader. It can even run Windows. The mostly-aluminum enclosure is very nice and well-engineered, it's easy to pop open, it has a power button. It was under $100 and makes me question why any hobbyist bothers with SBCs like these.
The tv series Silicon Valley has a good episode where they discuss the importance of a start-up not having any revenue. Being pre revenue apparently means unlimited potential, with any level of revenue being bad, as you always have to grow it.
I don't exactly disagree. But the word "obvious" doesn't work very well during a bubble. Sure, yes, the current revenue doesn't justify the purchase price. But that doesn't mean that anything justifies the purchase price.
We can't work backward rationally from "this deal makes sense" and get to "here's why". Corporate acquisitions often don't work that way, even when there's no bubble. The price is often just not justified at all. By anything.
In many cases they're just capitalizing testosterone.
I wonder how we'll deal with the inability to tell what's true or not in the coming years. Even without full deepfakes.. just a gradual hypothetical restoration turning subtle hallucination in many many places.
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