On AI Art

So I’m in Blender and I’m generating asteroids using the Add Mesh -> Rock Generator tool (part of the “Add Mesh: Extra Objects” add-on) with an Asteroid template.

Each of these rocks is created using a few overlapped mathematical algorithms. The math is pure math, procedurally understood, with no hidden-node neural network in play.

The results are sufficient to serve the purpose of putting a rock in a game or image with maybe a little polish. The whole script is here.

I can click this button ten thousand times and get ten thousand convincingly-different distinct blobs of rock, suitable for inclusion in a game or visual artwork.

I couldn’t tell you, precisely, if it’s kosher that the author of this plugin made this plugin. He credits a tutorial at blenderguru that is a dead-link (probably because the site was re-organized, but the likely tutorial is easy to find by search at https://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/how-to-make-a-realistic-asteroid; a quick jog around the FAQ and other info doesn’t suggest the author has created this tutorial for the purpose of creating an automated tool to obviate the need for the tutorial.)

The author also credits this tutorial (http://saschahenrichs.blogspot.com/2010/03/3dsmax-environment-modeling-1.html), which also has no obvious information on whether or not the author is okay with someone creating an automated tool to obviate the need for hand-building rocks. Broadly speaking though, both tutorials show the user how to wire up a procedural algorithm in to create the rocks by transforming numbers; the plugin mostly scripts the process of recapitulating that pipeline and then adding some constrained random numbers as input. The “artistry” is in the connection of the pipeline pieces and the choice of RNG constraints to make something ‘sandstone’ vs. ‘asteroid’ by modifying the height of peaks, the depth of holes, and the frequency of their repetition.

And, of course, my input to this process, which is when I stop clicking this button because I’m happy with this asteroid being my asteroid, for this game.

Where am I going with all this? not exactly sure. The questions it raises for me are around art and automation as a microcosm, obviously, for the larger discussion around Stable Diffusion and DALL-E. Taking this as perhaps an exemplary problem, we could ask questions like:

• Does it matter that the script author extracted the essence of these tutorials without explicit consent of the tutorial authors, or does “tutorial” imply that it doesn’t matter how they’re used?

• In some sense, I’m now “competing” with those artists because I can crank out 100,000 asteroids a second… But I’m not? Because I don’t want to, I just want one? Has work been ‘stolen’ from them because I can now crank my own out on my laptop instead of commissioning one of them to make me one? But if so, why write such tutorials?

• Is the real issue with computer automation the use of other people’s work without their consent, or was consent given to something like this without thought of how a machine could extrapolate learning a style to a pushbutton process? Because if the only issue is consent, what happens when someone builds DALL-E on top of a thousand paid artists… And those are the last artists ever paid for that kind of art?

• Is the real issue with computer automation that I’m not really an artist if I’m just clicking a button? And who cares if I’m really an artist if my goal isn’t to compete with Picasso, it’s to get a lump of pixels that a game player will see as “space rock” and behave accordingly?

These questions aren’t discrete; all of these technologies exist on a continuum that we’ve been walking since Ada Lovelace hypothesized that a machine that transforms numbers can transform notes. I don’t think we find happy answers on a path that precludes us from using those machines, but I don’t think we find happy answers ignoring the question of what it means when humans “make art” either.

In any case, I think I have my space rock.

(click file saved)