Yeah, I agree, it’s kind of a blurry line. If someone draws something and uses AI to enhance it it’s not the end of the world, and I think it’s still art unless the “enhancement” is totally replacing big parts, or all, of the input. Otherwise, it’s no different than any other tool that has made art easier to make.
But I think in most cases generative AI can’t make anything that could reasonably be considered art, because the substance they’re taking from to make the output isn’t even the user’s. It’s nothing more than a very advanced plagiarism machine where your prompt tells it which works to plagiarize from.
It’s nothing more than a very advanced plagiarism machine where your prompt tells it which works to plagiarize from.
Probably an unpopular opinion but I disagree. People have been learning from other artists for so long that I want to say art is iterative and not just transformative. Just because an art style is copied doesn’t make it less art in my opinion. As soon as you create art you are creating a template to be copied and to be iterated upon. It’s why we have genres in art, it’s why so many songs use the same chords, and why art progresses.
In my opinion AI doesn’t create art not because it copies but because it doesn’t understand what it is making. But if you were to use samples from AI work to piece together something it could have that understanding and it could be art. The same way a photographer might create art of a landscape they didn’t create but they didn’t just copy it. I wouldn’t doubt if 200 years ago there were artists who accused the camera of just copying art but I think we can look at pictures that we can see as art and others that aren’t.
I think the photographer example you put does touch upon an interesting point since there really were people who ridiculed photography as not art. And honestly the criteria I had said kinda would disqualify photography, which is unfair.
Would AI be able to create art if it really did understand how the pieces it’s putting together are part of what the user wants? I think it might be an useless question, because skeptics (like me) can keep shifting the goalposts of what understanding really means. So it’s unfalsifiable in a way. Some techbros claim AI can understand it because they are capable of minimizing a loss function. But I’m not satisfied by that because it amounts to making the claim that if a system performs a task well, the system has the property of having a cognitive understanding of the task. It’s a non sequitur, and I’ve seen AI enthusiasts make the same form of non sequitur a thousand times.
Maybe the conclusion we can draw from it is that trying to define what exactly is and isn’t art is hard, but clearly, the OP is not.
It is incredibly difficult and even among art made by people there are some who would say it isn’t art. Honestly I feel like art is only art when the audience can understand how it was made at least roughly. Personally I think that art can be more than nonsensical that it can have purpose like a smart phone can be art. People will disassemble and hang smartphones or electronics because they see beauty in collection of components.
I don’t know enough to say what is or isn’t art only that I have an opinion of what I see as art. I don’t think that the OP posted art not because a machine made it but because it looks wrong to me. I’m sure there are some who might see it as art and I think we’re allowed to disagree. But here we are with cameras on our person that most of humanity would have killed for and we use it to take shitty selfies of ourselves and the food we’re eating. The tool can not make art 99.99% of the time but still be capable of making art.
The same fundamental tech can and has been tuned to do both
Yeah, I agree, it’s kind of a blurry line. If someone draws something and uses AI to enhance it it’s not the end of the world, and I think it’s still art unless the “enhancement” is totally replacing big parts, or all, of the input. Otherwise, it’s no different than any other tool that has made art easier to make.
But I think in most cases generative AI can’t make anything that could reasonably be considered art, because the substance they’re taking from to make the output isn’t even the user’s. It’s nothing more than a very advanced plagiarism machine where your prompt tells it which works to plagiarize from.
Probably an unpopular opinion but I disagree. People have been learning from other artists for so long that I want to say art is iterative and not just transformative. Just because an art style is copied doesn’t make it less art in my opinion. As soon as you create art you are creating a template to be copied and to be iterated upon. It’s why we have genres in art, it’s why so many songs use the same chords, and why art progresses.
In my opinion AI doesn’t create art not because it copies but because it doesn’t understand what it is making. But if you were to use samples from AI work to piece together something it could have that understanding and it could be art. The same way a photographer might create art of a landscape they didn’t create but they didn’t just copy it. I wouldn’t doubt if 200 years ago there were artists who accused the camera of just copying art but I think we can look at pictures that we can see as art and others that aren’t.
I think the photographer example you put does touch upon an interesting point since there really were people who ridiculed photography as not art. And honestly the criteria I had said kinda would disqualify photography, which is unfair.
Would AI be able to create art if it really did understand how the pieces it’s putting together are part of what the user wants? I think it might be an useless question, because skeptics (like me) can keep shifting the goalposts of what understanding really means. So it’s unfalsifiable in a way. Some techbros claim AI can understand it because they are capable of minimizing a loss function. But I’m not satisfied by that because it amounts to making the claim that if a system performs a task well, the system has the property of having a cognitive understanding of the task. It’s a non sequitur, and I’ve seen AI enthusiasts make the same form of non sequitur a thousand times.
Maybe the conclusion we can draw from it is that trying to define what exactly is and isn’t art is hard, but clearly, the OP is not.
It is incredibly difficult and even among art made by people there are some who would say it isn’t art. Honestly I feel like art is only art when the audience can understand how it was made at least roughly. Personally I think that art can be more than nonsensical that it can have purpose like a smart phone can be art. People will disassemble and hang smartphones or electronics because they see beauty in collection of components.
I don’t know enough to say what is or isn’t art only that I have an opinion of what I see as art. I don’t think that the OP posted art not because a machine made it but because it looks wrong to me. I’m sure there are some who might see it as art and I think we’re allowed to disagree. But here we are with cameras on our person that most of humanity would have killed for and we use it to take shitty selfies of ourselves and the food we’re eating. The tool can not make art 99.99% of the time but still be capable of making art.