It’s not about having the most imagination. It’s about imagining something that means something.
When people have some common life experience that is difficult to describe, that’s where the best artists can create something that speaks to the heart in a way other people understand.
Stable diffusion is completely incapable of generating something like that on its own - something that speaks to something we all feel but struggle to describe. Yes a human can use SD to generate art that does have this meaning, but in that case the deep meaning comes from the mind of the human creating the prompt and selecting the output. SD may surprise us in interesting ways, but ultimately powerful art relates to the human experience in a way that algorithms will never fully understand.
Mostly, the meaning of art depends on who is looking at it. When encountering an art piece for the first time, we should give that meaning priority and only then receive "spoilers"; the stories about the creation of the work which may be unrelated to how we experience the work.
Under Stable Diff, the same prompt can generate countless images which are substantially, even completely different from each other. Nobody would guess they are from the same prompt. Speaking of guessing about prompts, people are not always able to guess prompts; a common question is "what prompt did you use?", especially from people who don't yet understand that you need the exact seed value and version of the model to reproduce that image. The very dimensions of the image influence the content too, and some other parameters.
You could blindly generate or select text for a prompt (meaning that you don't read the prompt and don't know what it is), feed it to Stable Diff, and obtain some images which invoke a meaning that you could allow to unfold without the interpretation being influenced by the prompt.
The prompt isn't all that important; it sets a general thematic direction in that there will be identifiable elements in the result which are related to the prompt. Someone who believes they have a good prompt, and are after a specific result may have to generate hundreds of images with that prompt to just get one good image which matches their intent. Plus there are inpainting techniques and whatnot. Basically the prompt doesn't encode a specific, detailed meaning.
You’re right that SD can create images which stir in the viewer some sense of meaning. But there is a type of art where the artist is intending to communicate a message. These are usually messages about the human experience. SD has no human experience and has no intention thus it cannot intentionally craft a message for others to receive. I’m not saying SD can’t create valuable art, but that SD cannot fully displace human art. Even if we had complete AGI, those beings would create their own art and there would still be room for human art.
And then there’s things like photography. I take photographs of real places and things. It’s not about having a nice looking picture, which SD can create, but about capturing a real moment. You could have a robot capturing images and deciding based on some criteria what might look pleasing, but there will still be room for human artists to capture something they find meaningful.
There is other art, like physical art installations, music, club mixes for dancing, and more which are all meant to touch people. Picking a random song, for some reason I’m thinking of Garth Brooks’ “Thunder Rolls” about a man who cheats on his wife. The choice of topic, of lyrics, and of intonation and timing and delivery of this is all based on some human experience.
I mean hell, I grew up in California. I could try to write a song about growing up in Japan, or England, or Kenya. But the people from those places would find something missing. I might be able to fool another Californian in to believing what I wrote, I could even find success with it. But it’s not going to replace real stories from the people who really grew up there.
It’s the same with algorithms with no internal experience. Even with AGI that has its own internal
experience, that experience will be so different from humans that there will still be room for human art. We might appreciate each others art and share in experiences like being abused by corporations and longing to be free, but there will still be differences. And those differences create opportunity.
Just to reiterate: SD is cool! I’ve run it at home and played with it a bunch. I’m not saying it isn’t useful nor am I saying it won’t be world changing. What I am saying is it will never fully displace human art.
My use of weird in this sense is tautological. I’m supposing you have to be in some sense weird in order to create art that moves people. This weirdness is what allows the creator to see what we’re all seeing in a slightly different way which makes their art meaningful.
My only problem with what you're saying is that you seem to be coming from the perspective that there already is some kind of influence of artists that buck trends, or push the boundaries of art today, or simply provide a new perspective.
I'm much more cynical, or idealistic, in that I don't believe that's the case. My argument is that currently we have no such artists, or they're buried under rubble. We do have a lot of people who claim to, or are claimed to, be pushing the boundaries of art, but they actually don't have any effect at all.
What we have is a lot of smoke being blown up people's butts, when the truth is that we're culturally stagnant. Going to the Tate Modern in London is like a masochist challenge to see who can emerge from it with enough energy to say things like "wow, that's cool" and desperately try to find one piece of art where they can say "that's my favorite, it really made me think".
I can tell you that personally I've already said these things about some AI generated art with real enthusiasm. I still have one AI painting burned into my brain because it showed something really new to me.
That's why I believe it's exactly those ambitious artists who will be hurt the most, at first. It'll be a painful realization that they can't hide from anymore, and only then will truly "weird" artists emerge.
My partner is an artist. It’s just something they do at home, for their own benefit. They post some of it to instagram as well, but they don’t have a lot of followers. Their art is deeply meaningful. It relates to what they’re going through at any given time. What they’re feeling. Most of it is in their personal journal that they don’t usually show off. When I do get to see it, I find it moving. It’s very abstract but each piece carries emotion in a way I’d never be able to reproduce.
I met a guy on the street. He’s homeless. Lives in his van by a tent city in Oakland. He wasn’t selling his paintings or anything. I dropped off some donations to these folks and got to talking with this guy. I saw his art in his van and asked to see it. It was really deep stuff emotionally. He put a lot in to it. And you know someone pushed to the sidelines who finds his best option is living in his van with folks at a tent city is going to have some interesting thoughts on the human condition.
I have a few friends that DJ for music at clubs. Nothing big. They’re doing it out of passion. It’s a local scene. People appreciate them. They get paid a small stipend but it’s not about that. They want to connect with people through music. It’s about creating a moment and dancing.
I remember when the local radio station lost the DJs on air that fielded calls from listeners, selected music they wanted to hear, and provided some personality for the station beyond just playing a series of tracks. They got replaced by a playlist of music. I don’t know who created the playlist or who decided how to change it day to day. I stopped listening to the station.
I have never been to the Tate Modern. But there are weird artists out there making art because they feel they need to. For themselves mostly, and for others too. They have something to say, or something to explore.
Stable diffusion is a wonderful tool. I’ve installed it locally on my desktop and I’ve spent countless nights prompt engineering and playing with the results. It’s really going to help artists find new ways of expression. But the human artist using the tool is what channels meaning from real life in to the medium. We may in some ways find ourselves working alongside the AI as it gets more capable. We may find ourselves in partnership with the algorithms. But human artists - the weird ones on the streets or at home making secret collages in their journals - they have a story to tell which will never go away. Those people cannot be replaced by Stable Diffusion. My partner makes collage with old photos they find from the second hand store of people they have never met, combined with cut outs of construction paper and pieces of art that come through the mail from online artists through a weekly mailer. It is the process of creating the art that has meaning for my partner. And it’s done with paper and scissors.
Maybe some day they will print out some AI generated art and include it in a collage. But they will never stop making collages.
