Rotating banners on /r/piracy

db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com · edit-2 8 months ago

Rotating banners on /r/piracy

knightly the Sneptaur@pawb.social · 8 months ago

Hate to break it to you, but programming is creative

I do automation for a living, I’m well aware that computer engineering can be a creative process, but it is not an artistic one.

I don’t like making visual art manually.

I don’t like seeing visual art automated.

Where the fuck are you getting these number mate?

I don’t know what’s in your computer, but some high-end graphics cards can pull more than 300W at full load all on their own. 400W total power output seems a pretty conservative estimate to me.

db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 8 months ago

I do automation for a living, I’m well aware that computer engineering can be a creative process, but it is not an artistic one.

Great? I find the automation creative.

I don’t like seeing visual art automated.

I don’t care?

I don’t know what’s in your computer, but some high-end graphics cards can pull more than 300W at full load all on their own. 400W total power output seems a pretty conservative estimate to me.

Most high-end graphic cards actually use close to 100W when not in demanding workloads. Mine certainly does.

400W total power output seems a pretty conservative estimate to me.

You said double that. Most people’s PCs idle at 200-W300W as a total. And even if 400W was the total PC usage, as I said, my PC is already on.

knightly the Sneptaur@pawb.social · 8 months ago

I don’t like seeing visual art automated.

I don’t care?

If you didn’t, then you wouldn’t be in this thread defending your creative choices. You could have ignored me like a person who doesn’t care would do.

Most high-end graphic cards actually use close to 100W when not in demanding workloads. Mine certainly does.

As per Tom’s Hardware, the average high-end card comes in somewhere north of 250W. But even if we half the total power estimate again we’re still talking about an eigth of a watt-hour, or 50,000 times more than a 4mb download, per image.

You said double that.

I revised my estimate while you were replying.

Most people’s PCs idle at 200-W300W as a total. And even if 400W was the total PC usage, as I said, my PC is already on.

My PC idles at about 75W, and tops out just shy of 600W with all cores, cards, and drives running.

db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 8 months ago

If you didn’t, then you wouldn’t be in this thread defending your creative choices. You could have ignored me like a person who doesn’t care would do.

I am autistic. I actually hate that my brain is forcing me to reply to this drivel.

My PC idles at about 75W, and tops out just shy of 600W with all cores, cards, and drives running.

Great, so a generated image would be done at 2-10 seconds at like 200W usage. Anyway, this is a stupid argument. Even if it’s not as an mp3, it’s like a movie, what-the-fuck-ever.

knightly the Sneptaur@pawb.social · 8 months ago

I am autistic. I actually hate that my brain is forcing me to reply to this drivel.

I am also autistic, but I enjoy a good argument and will never pass up the chance to complain when people put generated images on my screen. There’s more real art out there in the world to see than could be seen in a lifetime, so why should anyone waste time with computer-generated approximations of art?

Anyway, this is a stupid argument. Even if it’s not as an mp3, it’s like a movie, what-the-fuck-ever.

We are comparing apples to oranges here, but the fact remains that serving existing content will always be cheaper than serving content one has to generate first.

db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 8 months ago

And generated content can be randomized and automated, which you can’t do with existing content, which is what I wanted to do

knightly the Sneptaur@pawb.social · 8 months ago

Sure you can, you just need a sufficiently diverse database of images at which to point your random number generator. No generation necessary, just aggregate human artistic output.

db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com · edit-2 8 months ago

That’s orders of magnitude harder in a bad non automated than what I’m going now for worse results and more risk. It’s a frankly terrible idea

knightly the Sneptaur@pawb.social · 8 months ago

Randomly generated content is usually a bad idea on public-facing websites. Generating and displaying it automatically means you only get to inspect the results after the fact, so you’re relying on the image generator to never produce something unacceptable.

Having a DB of prepared images means you can pick through and remove all the unacceptable ones before they have a chance to be displayed.

Melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone · edit-2 8 months ago

I can understand the concern with the ethics of AI art and plagiarism, but you’re painting with a broad brush when you say that computer engineering can’t be art.

Without considering AI, you can certainly make art through code. Math can be beautiful. Shaders in particular are a ripe avenue for programmatically generating art.

There are a lot of artists out there creating art through code, and there have been for significantly longer than the AI fad has been around. The act of creating the art is simply in writing the code, rather than in picking up a paintbrush. I doubt you accuse people who paint in Photoshop of “letting the computer paint for them”, even if they use filters or something like the bucket fill tool. That’s code creating art right there. But someone still had to input creativity, and writing code to create art that looks good requires creativity and effort and is absolutely art.

AI art has different problems with it, but “programming isn’t art” isn’t one of those reasons.

knightly the Sneptaur@pawb.social · 8 months ago

An artist preparing a brush to paint with is not doing art, they’re doing engineering to make art tools.

They employ those art tools to make art, but the tools themselves are works of engineering, not art.

That isn’t to say that art tools cannot be art, such as source code that’s formatted like poetry or ASCII images, but that’s a very different sort of design work than the development of base functions.

Melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone · edit-2 8 months ago

My analogy was off the mark a bit, you’re right. But for example, have you seen some of the stuff people have made on Shadertoy? Incredible art, made from pure shader code.