If that human had hired 5 painters to paint images (instead of the AI), told them what to paint, and refined his instructions to them over the production of 10 rounds of canvases - would anyone consider that human to be the artist? He's a client.
Actually yes. Lots of the masters had huge teams of people working with them. Not all paintings by X are done exclusively (or even mostly) by the hand of X.
Yes - the key word there being "masters". They were already established, so decided to cut some corners - but they could have done it themselves. That's very different to this guy, who is not a great artist, and has cut so many corners that his input is reduced to "draw a gnarly tree, that looks like Rembrandt". Such genius!
I really don't understand the level of hate this guy is getting.
At no point did he claim to be a genius, or a great artist.
He was perfectly upfront about his tools. He even posted about his full process before results were announced.
His only mission is to get a new 'AI Assisted' category in competitions.
As has been pointed out, often, many artists came up with concepts and then directed assistants to create based on a brief. Courts have weighed in and found that the original artist owns the work. All that has changed here is that the 'assistants' have been replaced by AI.
Your argument seems to be that only famous and established artists, "masters", ought to be allowed to do this - am I reading that right?
(FWIW I have no dog in this fight, just think these are some interesting questions around the very fuzzy border of art/not-art. I don't expect to resolve the issue here! I'm genuinely just curious about your opinion.)
Some issues are not discussed in order to be resolved! :-)
I wasn't familiar with Sol Lewitt, so looked him up - apologies if I miss the particular aspect of his work that caused you to pick him. He seems like an interesting artist - I like his wall paintings.
If I'm right, he created diagrams / instructions for the production of the wall paintings, and didn't paint them himself, so that's a deviation from what I said about an artist needing to create their own work. However I think on balance, the overwhelming majority of the creative work involved was still his.
One thought I had, was to consider what the difference would be if the artist was removed from the project, and it was completed without their input. Without Sol Lewitt's diagram, nothing comparable to his work would be made "by chance".
Contrast that to a DALL-E user. DALL-E could happily spit out great looking images all day, with prompts generated from random noise. It ONLY makes (reasonably) good looking images. If 9999 out of 10000 images were random noise, and only certain arcane prompts would create a masterpiece, then I could accept there was skill in hunting for the prompts. But as it stands, it's more akin to being a buyer of art in a vast gallery, in my view.
Yeah that's the point of the discussion, the lines are blurring. In your example, you cannot deny that the client has done at least some amount of artistic work, too. If you insist that they are 100% client and 0% artist, then let's look at other situations: What about an art director at a video game company? 0% artist?
> What about an art director at a video game company? 0% artist?
Yes. My CEO has excellent technical (and business) knowledge. He will often give me direction on my projects because he knows both the business requirements but also the technical implementations that might fulfill those requirements.
His input is very valuable, but to say he is a programmer or that he is creating these programs is wrong. He hasn't written a line of code in many years.
Being an Art director is a management position. Having domain knowledge is surely useful, but you're managing, not creating.
Are you sure you know what an art director does? They might or might not be the line manager of the artists but that is not their main responsibility. To quote wikipedia: “It is the charge of a sole art director to supervise and unify the vision of an artistic production. In particular, they are in charge of its overall visual appearance and how it communicates visually, stimulates moods, contrasts features, and psychologically appeals to a target audience. The art director makes decisions about visual elements, what artistic style(s) to use, and when to use motion.”
I would call that creation.
Sure they don’t just grab a brush and start painting. (Except when they do, because that is the best way to communicate what they want from others.)
Would you also say that movie directors are not creating just managing?
> It is the charge of a sole art director to supervise and unify the vision of an artistic production. <snip>. The art director makes decisions about visual elements, what artistic style(s) to use, and when to use motion.”
I don't see how you can call it creation when they don't create anything. They make decisions about what to create, they provide input on how to create, but they do 0 creation themselves.
If I ask my partner to cook dinner, does that mean I made dinner?
> Would you also say that movie directors are not creating just managing?
Yes. It's in the name - they are directing. They are managing the creation of their team. They themselves just sit in a chair and bark orders - not creating anything.
> I don't see how you can call it creation when they don't create anything
The page was blank before they showed up.
>If I ask my partner to cook dinner, does that mean I made dinner?
Did you just ask "Cook dinner" and wait or did you stand behind them and tell them exactly the measurements and process and throw it out every time it didn't taste right?
"Would you also say that movie directors are not creating just managing?"
No, but I wouldn't give them all the credit for the acting, set design etc. Which is what the guy in this article is claiming - when his picture is patently 99.9% the skill of the creators of midjourney, plus the millions of EXISTING artworks that were fed into it, to teach it what art is.
If a producer hires actors, directors, and writers to create a movie, is that movie without intention and is the producer just a client? (Devil’s advocate stance here; I actually really like your argument).
One way to measure it, might be to ask how badly off the rails would the project go (as measured by an external observer) if this person wasn't there. In the case of a Director and their film, it would probably not work out well, if at all. In the case of this guy and midjourney - the software could produce beautiful artworks all day long, purely by feeding in random numbers / prompts, and an external observer would likely be equally impressed.
Yes, look up Donald Judd, the patron saint of Marfa Texas. Much of his art involved hiring tradesmen to produce his large aluminum or concrete boxes and shapes. I recommend checking out some of his exhibits if you are passing through, well worth the stop.
Lots of high profile artists work this way even today. Especially those who make something large, then it's almost mandatory, but even something like Damien Hirst's infamous skull. He had the idea for it, everything else was outsourced to jewelers and sculptors.
This is pretty much the plot of Exit Through the Gift Shop, where an artist (or maybe "artist") invests tens of thousands of dollars into a factory production process, hiring a bunch of artists and crafts people to realize his ideas, many of which are rip-offs and derivatives of existing street art, graffiti, and pop culture.
Is he an artist, or an entrepreneur taking advantage of the art scene? It's hard to say, the result is quite fantastic in my opinion - it's like postmodern art that unintentionally mocks itself by being based on "stolen" ideas.
So either it's "real art" by expanding our conception of what "art" and "artist" mean; or it's "pretend art", only an imitation of art. I mean, modern art pretty much deconstructed itself, I'm not sure if there's even any difference between authentic ("natural" and "human") art, and inauthentic ("artificial" and "machine generated") art.
There is artistry in the vision and artistry in the execution. Execution without vision is likely to result in something quite banal (though any given person can derive their own meaning from any creation), but vision without execution is but a dream.
That would not surprise me to see from some blue chip artist at all - it's not exactly uncommon for artworks to be created by someone else based on more-or-less precise instructions.
That is what a lot of conceptual artists do nowadays (not new at all). Even Rembrandt had a workshop where other people would finish some details, apparently.
When an artist paints something awesome, do they give credit to the company that built the paintbrushes that they used? Or the company that made the canvas, or the paints? All of these are critically important and complex pieces of technology used by the painter, which has been honed over the course of thousands of years, but they're all just tools.
I don’t think this is a great analogy. The issue here isn’t the tool, per se; it’s that the tool is reproducing work from other artists found in its training set. The antecedents here are things like pop art, Duchamp’s readymades, sampling in hip hop, collaging.
paintings from different hands is as old as reinaissance at least. Many verrocchio are in minimal part from his hand, with much of the scenery and figures being painted by his apprentices.
