7d ago

I keep saying that, but y'all keep hatin'

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I'm not gonna lie, in a post-capitalist world, I would have absolutely no issue with AI that isn't "AI art". Art is the product of human creative decisions and human creative expressions. Removing the human source of said art (in my view) strips it of being art.
- This is an interesting topic to me. If I paint a landscape, I think most people would say that's art. What if I close my eyes and splash random paints at a canvas? What if I encourage my cat to track paint over the canvas with its paws? What if it's a robotic toy instead of a cat? If I create a program like Minecraft to produce aesthetically-pleasing vistas, is that art? Is a swallow's nest art? What if I physically do the painting, but I allow a random number generator to dictate my actions?
  e: Elephants that paint recognizable objects were trained to do so by their handlers. When given access to paint and a canvas, elephants will happily smear the paint around with no apparent logic behind it. No non-human animal has been recorded reproducing an object visually of their own compulsion. Are the random paint smears of the elephant art? If I teach an elephant to paint a house, is that painting art? Who is the artist?
  
  The viewpoint you're responding to also disregards all the art made by elephants.
  People are so desperate to hate on AI art that they will justify it a billion ways, but as an artist, let me tell you that art exists in nature. Art exists in a vacuum. Art can be found anywhere, made of anything, and it's not just the creator who imbues it with meaning. Ultimately, the lens through which the consumer is engaging the art is the final measure of it's meaning.
  I wholly subscribe to the idea that it doesn't matter if an artist or an author or a musician meant to evoke a feeling- whatever feeling invoked is valid.
  It's one thing for a bunch of people to say that AI art is meaningless because it's same-y or because it elicits no feeling in them or whatever. To dismiss the entirety of it because it had no connection to something as ephemeral as a human soul during it's creation is, at best, ignorant, and at worst, the kind of close-minded nonsense I'd expect from reactionaries who have no actual artistic experience.
  To take it a step further- if a person has a reaction, any kind of reaction, to AI art, their feelings are not invalidated because of who or what generated that art.
  
  That's a view I haven't heard before, that art is in the eye of the beholder in a very literal way, so that even an ordinary rock can itself be art if it causes someone to feel a certain way. That's not in accordance with the current dictionary definition of art, but it's certainly valid to argue that the definition should be broadened.
  Elephant paintings are a perfect subject for the question of what art is, and I'll edit my previous post to reflect that.
  
  As an artist myself as well, I fully support the idea that the meaning of art is ultimately in the eye of the beholder. I simply think that a fundamental characteristic of art is its human source and the human expression imbedded into it, however that art is then interpreted. I may be mistaken, but you seem to view art as something that is defined by its experience, which is something that I disagree with. I would also love to hear your reasoning behind that.
  
  It only becomes art once a mind observes it and appreciates it. If AI generates a picture but no one sees it, it's not art. Generated images become art when observed, because that's when it gains value. They don't even have to like it, per se, but someone needs to experience it.
  Value still comes from labor.
  
  What if a blind person draws something to the best of their ability, but keeps the image in a private journal where no sighted person ever experiences it? (For the purposes of this hypothetical, they haven't used a marking method that allows them to experience their creation via texture.)
  
  They still experienced their creation as they drew it, though. Art is still art even if it is only experienced once by a single person.
  
  That's very interesting, thank you. Do you include non-human minds? I assume a Roomba detecting an obstacle doesn't count because it doesn't have a meaningful internal reaction, right? I'm thinking about a future iteration of AI experiencing art, either via creation or observation. If nature has programmed my mindless cells to feel things, it stands to reason that we should be able to program mindless rocks to feel things.
  
  AI could experience art, but nothing we have right now is AI. Roombas can't experience art and ChatGPT can't experience art. They aren't even close tbh
- AI art is purely derivative. People want to consume what's already been done. I think there will always be a demand for true novelty but that market is already extremely small.
  Edit: maybe the argument isn't actually about art, instead it's about robots taking human jobs. If AI could actually replace you then yes, you should be very worried.
- It can be used to create art (though that involves manual editing, most of the time), like any other medium, most of it is not. Just typing a prompt into a machine does not make someone an artist

138 comments