Original The Lament for Icarus (1898) by Herbert James Draper for those curious
this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2025
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Digital Art
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This is really amazing. And I am so pleased to hear it is not ai generated. Wonderful work.
I have to ask this, & it might sound bad, but...
If 'real' art, created by a living artist, is indistinguishable from AI art, what is the difference? Especially if the art is digital, as this appears to be, so cannot exist in '3d space'?
I'm not trying to be an ass, it's a genuine question on my part because you expressed relief that this is a 'real' piece, but, why?
Can't speak for the person you're asking, but a lot of us who appreciate art appreciate the talent and skill it takes to translate a vision into whatever medium. Lots and lots of people get cool ideas, but artists take those ideas and bring them to life. Just typing the idea into a prompt box and having the result spit out doesn't seem like the same thing.
I don't know the answer but I do know that I enjoy a live concert or play because of the talent on display. There's something special about seeing it happen in real time. I think real art might point to something similar.
While I agree, I also wonder how much art has not been conceived as the person with the idea had no way to realise it. We now have tools that non artists can use to create art. A lot is awful, but some is wonderful. When photography first started, it was not considered art.
I appreciate what you're getting at, but there's just a lot of "vibes" here.
AI art doesn't "seem" like the same thing as hand crafted, but you also can't really pin down why, right?
Like what difference does the amount of labor put into a piece matter unless that's specifically part of the point of the piece? Moreso for a case like this where the concept is really what's important & it's digital anyways. Do you see what I'm saying?
I guess what I'm asking is what's the difference between AI slop & hand drawn slop (not meant to be insulting to this artist, this is a good piece)?
Artists are going to have work & get creative enough to distinguish themselves, imo.
My earlier reply had nothing to do with "vibes." I was saying that for many folks (not all), it's the talent and skill that go into a piece that adds to our appreciation of it. Have you ever seen a statue by a great sculptor, like the Pieta by Michelangelo? Yes, the thing itself is beautiful, but part of what makes it amazing is that it's carved out of stone. If Michelangelo was able to make it happen just by describing it, it wouldn't be renown as something truly great.
So sure, cool image, but not a work of art in my mind because there was no artistic talent to make it happen. Doesn't mean I can't enjoy the image.
They also said that they appreciated the effort and talent that went into creating the piece. Can I stick you in a sweatshop, chained to a table by the ankle, and force you to do work for me with no pay? Why not? "Vibes?"
We're humans, and we have appreciation for things that go beyond measurable, quantifiable metrics. One of these is an speciation of artistry, and skill, neither of which is required to prompt your way through an AI generated image.
I don't entirely understand your argument concerning working for no pay?
There is loads of mass produced "art" made by humans, probably in China or India. Is this superior to AI art? Do you all appreciate the "time & effort" put into these?
I may have missed your point, though, like I said I don't think I completely grasp your argument.
Art is largely dependent on the viewer. If you come across a curiously artificial, but aesthetically pleasing, pile of rocks in the forest, is it art if it was created by nature? Is Half Dome art?
Personally, there's a difference to me whether an animal created something for aesthetic reasons, vs the wind just jumbling branches into a randomly pleasing arrangement. Flowers are not "art." They're pretty, but not art. A human could make a chair to sit in, utterly uniting aesthetics, and although it might be pleasing to the eye, it's not art.
In my definition, the intention of the creator matters, and is a part of what defines art.
Great, but then is AI art generated by a human not entirely intention? Would that not endear you more towards it?
The piece OP posted is a great example of art that is entirely conceptual, which seems to me the best use case for AI art.
So, first: I'm not the person you originally started arguing with; I have no objection to AI art, except vaguely in that is the worst kind of commercial plagiarism designed to steal other people's work and turn it into profits. It's like pirating music, but then selling CDs of the copy. Obviously much worse.
But that's only a vague objection because I'm no kind of artist. I support them and their fight, but abstractly as it doesn't affect me.
I like a lot of the AI gen stuff. Very pretty, visuals catered to your whims, on demand. Turn that mind's eye vision of the Dark Tower into a real image, despite having no artistic skill! But I don't respect it. I don't think it's "Art", anymore than a random Mandelbrot is "Art." Take that Mandelbrot and paint it using pointillism, and that would be Art.
When AGI comes along, and has an inner world and an imagination, then I'll start thinking of it as Art.
Art is a record of emotion; it exists to express something felt by the creator. When we look at art, we often feel connected in some way to whatever the creator was feeling when they made it. But AI doesn't feel anything; it just takes inputs and produces something that its machine learning algorthm thinks it will be rewarded for. It's like if you had a very deep and meaningful conversation with someone online, only to later find out you were being catfished; it leaves you feeling hollow inside. Sure, you could argue that the conversation itself still had some meaning to you even if your partner was disingenuous, but it destroys the veneer of sentiment and human connection surrounding it, casting it in a much darker light. And if you strip away the connection and sentiment from art, what do you even have left?
This is of course to say nothing of the massive amounts of theft from other human artists that AI art is built upon, but I feel that's not really what you were asking.
Well that's just not true at all!
Artists have lots & lots of motivations to work & many are not even remotely emotional about what they produce.
This piece in particular is a concept piece, so I don't know why the technique used to create it has any bearing at all? This is the core of my confusion. I feel like people are just kind of reactionary towards AI art, whether it really matters or not.
That said, I 100% agree on your points about stolen work & I personally believe every single model should be public domain.
Maybe I'm getting too deep into semantics at this point, but I would argue that art created without emotion is not art, it's a product. Like I said, art expresses something. Maybe it's something banal, or trivial, but it's still something. AI art doesn't express anything, it's purely mechanical - you put something in, you get something out. The whole is never any greater than the sum of its parts.
Here's another analogy for you: Let's say you take that one old saying literally and you leave a (presumably immortal) monkey in a room with a typewriter for a million years, then you come back to find that it has written Shakespeare. You could read the play and be impressed that the experiment worked, but you couldn't actually engage with the content in any meaningful way because you know there is no content. You couldn't say, "What do you suppose the monkey meant by, 'All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players'?", because the monkey didn't mean anything by it. The monkey had no intention behind this "art"; it just did monkey shit for a million years and happened to accidentally create Shakespeare. AI art is a lot like that, except AI works way, way faster than a monkey, which is why it doesn't take it a million years for it to create something that sounds like Shakespeare, just a few minutes.
Having said that, I do also think people react the way they do to AI art because it forces them to confront the deeply existential question of what it means to be human, and if it even means anything at all. Seeing AI do something so distinctly human as creating art, and doing it in such a distinctly human way, makes us wonder if we're not all just machines made out of meat. If AI is indistinguishable from human intelligence, then the reverse must also be true: Human intelligence is indistinguishable from AI. And that itself raises all kinds of uncomfortable questions about life, purpose, morality, etc.
It's not indistinguishable. Bad details, particularly in the background, always give away AI art.
Always? You sure?
Zoom into the background really far on AI art and you can dot patterning from the noise diffusion, but it's harder to spot in "photorealistic" styles; it's very obvious when AI is trying to recreate painted or 3d art.
Alright, well I suppose that is an answer, then. I'm not sure I am convinced, but I can appreciate that you've got a solid reason.
It's not 100% foolproof everytime, but since the core technology generative AI uses is denoising, that leaves artifacts you can spot if you look hard enough. Think of it like the process of remembering a dream: what AI creates has the look of someone trying to remember a place from memory, so it messes up little details that it's trying to fill in, versus art made by humans, where every piece of the visual space had time, effort and thought put into crafting details. There's always an unintentionality to AI pieces that isn't present when a human is creating it.
You can really see this if you poke around Art Station and DeviantArt in the sci-fi concept art category. You'll see pieces where every bit of the giant space machine makes visual sense: no crossed perspective lines, wires that don't actually connect, people in the background have the right number of limbs and are in realistic poses.