Photography AI as art

[snusmumriken]

I didn't say that, as I just regard it with a different value to that produced directly by human beings.

My apologies, Clive, I misunderstood.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

One CAN input data. The developer has started it by inputting data.

You input photos taken by yourself or some else. Shutterstock, Getty Images, and other photo agencies will provide data base of photos for purchase or lease to create AI photos using their photos. You don't need a camera, film or sensor. Currently there are lawsuits whether images can be taken (stolen?) from the web to create new AI images.

 

[Sirius Glass]

Aaron Spelling also got rich by tapping into the lowest common denominator...I'd give an AI sitcom a try before watching one of his re-runs.

Is bad AI art as bad as bad human art?

Not a problem since AI art does not exist.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Here's a picture of me and my wife absconding from the Louvre with the real Mona Lisa leaving dozens of people admiring the fake one we left in the process. What rubes! Who needs AI?

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Here's the real one reframed at home. What a trip.

 

[Sirius Glass]

Here's the real one reframed at home. What a trip.

They are either too busy viewing it through their phone or taking selfies to notice. Run! Fast!

 

[chuckroast]

Digital photography and image manipulation is now a well accepted art form, but should photographic images produced by AI be considered in the same way? I don't think they should.

No. "Good" art is hard to define (though I have pretty firm views about this) but "art" itself isn't. "Art"at a minimum is - by definition - the intentional and directed activity of the human creative process. No, animals do not make art, though they may incidentally create beauty.

If an artist uses an computer to somehow augment what they are doing and fuses them together, that is one thing. But a wholly generated photo from a machine learning system (there is no such thing as "Artifical Intelligence" that's research funding blather amplified by marketing noise) isn't art.

If ML based output is to be considered art, then so too we would have to include:

- Tire treadmarks
- Oil slicks
- Dog vomit
- Random cloud formations

.. if any of these showed some sort of aesthetic,

In fairness, dog vomit could easily be understood to have more aesthetic value that a good deal of contemporary art particularly that being spewed forth by the postmodern generation. NOW GET OFF MY LAWN.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

The issue isn't whether AI created images is art. It's whether they're photography.

 

[MurrayMinchin]

You input photos taken by yourself or some else. Shutterstock, Getty Images, and other photo agencies will provide data base of photos for purchase or lease to create AI photos using their photos. You don't need a camera, film or sensor. Currently there are lawsuits whether images can be taken (stolen?) from the web to create new AI images.

The issue isn't whether AI created images is art. It's whether they're photography.

Computer generated digital media collage...comgendigicoll perhaps?

 

[VinceInMT]

You input photos taken by yourself or some else. Shutterstock, Getty Images, and other photo agencies will provide data base of photos….

I got to thinking, now that I have scanned every image I have shot since 1973 and have them all in database, most of them tagged in someway, what if I had an untrained version of the AI software and turned it loose on that collection of work and that was the basis for what it learned. If I then fed it a prompt to create a new image, would that be work attributed to me?

 

[MattKing]

I got to thinking, now that I have scanned every image I have shot since 1973 and have them all in database, most of them tagged in someway, what if I had an untrained version of the AI software and turned it loose on that collection of work and that was the basis for what it learned. If I then fed it a prompt to create a new image, would that be work attributed to me?

And how would you feel if after doing all that, the results looked like they came from the mind of Anne Geddes or the mind of William Wegman?

 

[Pieter12]

Is bad AI art as bad as bad human art?

If you ask for "bad" art, sure. AI has the entire internet to work with and believe me there's enough bad art out there to keep AI busy churning out even more for millennia.

 

[Pieter12]

I got to thinking, now that I have scanned every image I have shot since 1973 and have them all in database, most of them tagged in someway, what if I had an untrained version of the AI software and turned it loose on that collection of work and that was the basis for what it learned. If I then fed it a prompt to create a new image, would that be work attributed to me?

Sure. There are many established photographers doing just that right now.

 

[VinceInMT]

And how would you feel if after doing all that, the results looked like they came from the mind of Anne Geddes or the mind of William Wegman?

More than likely the work might reflect my inner soul and I feel like writer Anne Lamont:

”My mind is like a bad neighborhood, I try not to go there alone.”

 

[CMoore]

There will be a HCB or a AA app soon, you can take a photo and the app will instantly make it look like one of the dead photographers took and you can claim it as your own cause you used a camera in the process.

It is your own.
Is there a problem if a photo looks like it could have been taken by one of those people.?

If you play music that sounds like it were written, played, sung by.......
Beach Boys
AC/DC
Frank Sinatra
Tina Turner
Charlie Parker
Etc etc etc
Is that any more or less of a "problem"

Does it make the photo any less "legitimate" for some reason.?

 

[VinceInMT]

There will be a HCB or a AA app soon, you can take a photo and the app will instantly make it look like one of the dead photographers took and you can claim it as your own cause you used a camera in the process.

Sort like the “Ken Burns effect” in Premiere that Adobe has instructions for.

 

[VinceInMT]

It is your own.
Is there a problem if a photo looks like it could have been taken by one of those people.?

If you play music that sounds like it were written, played, sung by.......
Beach Boys
AC/DC
Frank Sinatra
Tina Turner
Charlie Parker
Etc etc etc
Is that any more or less of a "problem"

Does it make the photo any less "legitimate" for some reason.?

I don’t think so. If one works within a genre, whether in photography or music, that is a just a classification or a label.

However, if, in music, someone covers/recreates the work of those artists, in other words, are a “cover band,” that’s generally not a compliment and probably why I’ve seen the label changed to “tribute band” to escape the derogatory connotation.

I wonder if, in photography, is someone tries to recreate Adams’ “El Capitan” or similar works, if they would be called a “cover photographer” or “tribute artist?”

As an aside, I joked with an acquaintance who plays in the local symphony that plays classical selections that “Oh, you’re in a cover band.”

 

[awty]

I don’t think so. If one works within a genre, whether in photography or music, that is a just a classification or a label.

However, if, in music, someone covers/recreates the work of those artists, in other words, are a “cover band,” that’s generally not a compliment and probably why I’ve seen the label changed to “tribute band” to escape the derogatory connotation.

I wonder if, in photography, is someone tries to recreate Adams’ “El Capitan” or similar works, if they would be called a “cover photographer” or “tribute artist?”

As an aside, I joked with an acquaintance who plays in the local symphony that plays classical selections that “Oh, you’re in a cover band.”

Tribute artist is a great term.

The problem is society don't see any value in something they cant immediately identify with, so we are constantly streamed the same old stuff.
So predictable a computer can do it.

 

[Pieter12]

- Tire treadmarks
- Oil slicks
- Dog vomit
- Random cloud formations

All of those have been presented as serious art in the past.

 

[Pieter12]

Tribute artist is a great term.

So is unoriginal and derivative. Or copycat.

 

[Mike Lopez]

....

If ML based output is to be considered art, then so too we would have to include:

...
- Random cloud formations

.. if any of these showed some sort of aesthetic,

Have you seriously never heard of Alfred Stieglitz?

 

[chuckroast]

Have you seriously never heard of Alfred Stieglitz?

I meant clouds themselves as art, not photographs of clouds which clearly are an artform.

 

[chuckroast]

All of those have been presented as serious art in the past.

By artists somehow capturing them. I meant these things standing on their own being claimed as art.

 

[Alex Benjamin]

All of those have been presented as serious art in the past.

With Richard Misrach, just to name one photographer (and an extraordinary one at that), you get at least three out of four: tire threadmarks, oil slicks and random cloud formations. Beautiful work, btw.

 

[CMoore]

I don’t think so. If one works within a genre, whether in photography or music, that is a just a classification or a label.

However, if, in music, someone covers/recreates the work of those artists, in other words, are a “cover band,” that’s generally not a compliment and probably why I’ve seen the label changed to “tribute band” to escape the derogatory connotation.

I wonder if, in photography, is someone tries to recreate Adams’ “El Capitan” or similar works, if they would be called a “cover photographer” or “tribute artist?”

As an aside, I joked with an acquaintance who plays in the local symphony that plays classical selections that “Oh, you’re in a cover band.”

Perhaps i misunderstand what is going on.
In the post i quoted, what is meant by "look like"

A cover band or tribute band and the symphony are good examples.
If i play a song by.....
The Beatles
Steely Dan
Genesis
Bach or Chopin
......... you get paid, people like you and say "you guys are a great band"

If you claim you wrote the music, that is a whole other story.

Is THAT what is being proposed with this photo app.?
I thought it was to manipulate a photo you took, to suggest it is in the style of a "famous" photographer, not to make a copy.

"Hey man, cool photo. Looks like something Annie Lebovitz would do."

Digital tech has made it very easy to copy any photo for the last 20 years.
Using AI would be the long way home, wouldn't it.?
You would have to go to Yosemite, take a picture of Half Dome, and then let a Phone/Computer do the rest..

But why use either method.?
Nobody is going to believe you painted "The Mona Lisa"
Nobody is going to believe you took any one of Thousands of well known photos.
Just like nobody will believe you wrote Beethoven's 7th or The Stones Sympathy For The Devil