Changed my mind about AI art after visiting a gallery in Austin

I went to a small art show at the East Austin Studio Tour last weekend. There was this one piece made by an AI that caught my eye - it was a landscape that mixed real photos with generated textures. The artist explained how he used a custom model trained on his own paintings. I always thought AI art was just typing words and getting lazy results. But seeing how much work went into curating the data and tweaking the output changed my view. He spent over 200 hours on that single piece. Has anyone else had a moment where they saw AI used in a way that surprised them?

2 comments

2 Comments

jade27111d ago

Is it really art if the machine is doing the heavy lifting though? That 200 hours seems like a lot of time to polish a turd if the core idea is just a selected filter. I mean, the photographer still has to frame the shot, and the painter has to mix the colors. With this, you're just bossing around an algorithm until it spits out what you want. Feels more like project management than actual creation to me.

noah_barnes12d ago

Oh wow, that's actually a really cool story but I gotta gently push back on one thing. The whole "200 hours on a single piece" thing - that's totally possible but way more common than people think. I've seen digital artists spend that long on a single painting without AI too, you know? The time investment isn't really what makes it impressive to me. What got me was when my buddy showed me his process using AI to generate texture references for his oil paintings. He'd take photos of actual bark and leaves, run them through some neural network thing to get like 50 variations, then paint from those. That blew my mind more than the 200 hour number. The whole "typing words and getting lazy results" thing - yeah, that's most of what's out there, but the real artists are using it like a fancy brush, not a magic wand.