Today in Generative Media
AI acts human, or humans act mechanical? AI alters a Keith Haring; MidJourney video
A.I. Can Make Art That Feels Human. Whose Fault Is That? (New York Times) “I remain profoundly relaxed about machines passing themselves off as humans; they are terrible at it. Humans acting like machines — that is a much likelier peril…”
AI altered a Keith Haring painting about the AIDS crisis — and, for some, ruined its meaning (NBC) My personal thoughts on this below!
Midjourney Leaps into AI Video Creation (Decrypt)
I put Google Search AI image generator to the test on adding text to images — it was better than expected (Tom’s Guide)
LoRA training scripts of the world, unite! (HuggingFace)
Generate Text with MLX and 🤗 Hugging Face (GitHub) Should work for thousands of Mistral/Llama style models out of the box. (X)
Last week, we released an updated version of CoTracker, our transformer-based model for tracking any point in a video. It’s now capable of tracking 10x more points than before! (X) Demo on HuggingFace. Code on GitHub.
Up until now, I haven’t editorialized in this newsletter, but it’s more for lack of time than for lack of interest or ideas! However, today I’m going to wade into the treacherous waters of the “Is AI Art Art?” debate.
If you didn’t grow up in the 80s it’s hard to overstate how ubiquitous Keith Haring’s artwork was, on clothing, tote bags, MTV, and even Sesame Street. But in those pre-internet days, I’d wager the vast majority of consumers of his work outside of New York had no idea about the artist himself or his activism, especially regarding the AIDS epidemic. The version of Haring’s work that most of the world saw was merely colorful dancing block figures and energetic line work, sanitized of penises or political statements.
A modern take on Haring’s work acknowledges these contradictions, as well as recognizing his cultural appropriation. Jonathan Griffon writes: “Haring was an anti-capitalist who opened a shop selling self-branded merchandise to undermine ‘the “commodity-hype” art market’, as he wrote in his journals in 1985, and who let his work be used in product advertisements in order to connect with a broader public… He freely appropriated Indigenous and non-Western aesthetics in pursuit of universality, while seemingly not considering how his work would look to those whose cultures he had taken from.”
So let’s suppose you were an artist who wanted to make a statement about our current culture’s fears about AI replacing human creativity. You might look to adapt a work by such an artist accused of cultural theft, and whose appeal as a mass-market brand arguably eclipsed the causes he championed. You might choose a work that explicitly depicts the artist’s mortality, and then use a machine to erase that mortality from the work. You could even make a commentary on the heavily sanitized content filters placed on commercial AI generators, by making something “offensive” in a purely symbolic way. In doing so, you would also target that work to offend only those who understand the cultural context, whereas to everyone else it just looks like a pretty design. Indeed, some great art can often make very specific subsets of people upset - often those who wish to arbitrate what is allowed to be “art.” (See for example Marcel Duchamp, or Robert Mapplethorpe).
So I find myself in the awkward position of defending @DonnelVillager’s AI-altered version of Keith Haring’s “Unfinished Painting,” originally posted to Twitter/X with the quote “Now using AI we can complete what he couldn’t finish!”
Is it offensive? Undoubtedly.
Is it art? Yes!
Is AI the author of this art? No!
What makes this art are the choices made by the artist, in subject matter, media, tools, and presentation… just like any other work of art.