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Comment by Ono-Sendai | Hacker News Reader

Plug of vaguely related work of mine: http://www.forwardscattering.org/post/42 http://www.forwardscattering.org/post/44

One thing interesting about this kind of automatic/AI-generated art is that it forces us to examine preconceptions about human creativeness. What does art mean when an algorithm can paint or draw as well?

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Art is an expression, not an artifact. I would say intent is a key aspect... creatively mapping emotions and ideas onto an intermediary medium with the intent of invoking them in the audience.

Today's AI can replicate works of art and simulate the technical processes, but we're far from the cognitive depth required for creative artistic expression.

Art is not a quantitative matter of skill, it's a qualitative matter of selection. I've seen crude drawings by children that had more art value than hyperrealistic oil paintings by masters of technique.

Human creativity is related to process and the experience of creating from nothing.

The process is more important than the end result.

> "The process is more important than the end result."

said no one ever about their favorite record, movie, painting, or book.

It feels like a taboo opinion to hold but I do think it changes something. I remember being completely blown away by "A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style" (e.g. https://github.com/jcjohnson/neural-style). I've always thought of creativity as a process which can't (yet) be described in terms of mechanical steps.

Only superficially. There's nothing technically special about any of my paintings, and in fact I'm vaguely curious to dump a bunch of them into this algorithm and see what happens if I just start cranking out endless mechanical variations on a theme. But that will get boring and predictable very quickly, notwithstanding that I may still find it pretty.

"What does art mean when an algorithm can paint or draw as well?"

means the same thing it does before. :) we're just not the exclusive authors of it.

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