Is Art Created by AI Really Art? | Hacker News Reader

Is Art Created by AI Really Art?

scientificamerican.com

22 pointsjrwan58 comments

My personal feeling is that art must at least attempt two things simultaneously: express an intent by the artist, and present an intent to the audience. The success and congruency of these intents is largely superficial, but in my opinion the intent must be present on both sides. The simple way of describing intent is by feel... a work of art e.g. should display the feeling of the artist and be able to be felt by the audience — this is what makes art a human quality. It is intended to be decoded in human ways.

I believe that AI, and any life form, can perhaps create beautiful works that affect audiences emotionally... but to me art is a fundamentally human to human transaction (before any conversation on technical merit or intelligence can even be waged).

Edit: even more simply, a computer can write “I love you” but what does that statement mean if the computer cannot feel love?

In other words, you deny AI the capability to create art, regardless of what it can objectively create. Because you can always say, "the machine had no intent". But this runs into a problem - if you don't know that the piece was created by a machine, you might assume intent and judge it as an art. Does it stop being an art when you learn that there was no intent? What if you learn that about a human piece of art?

> a computer can write “I love you” but what does that statement mean if the computer cannot feel love?

Actually, it's not different from humans. What gives "I love you" meaning is the actions, for example, caring about the other persons well-being. If a computer cares about someone, for example, by protecting it, that alone gives "I love you" the meaning, regardless of what computer can really feel or if the phrase "I love you" was just programmed into it.

It doesn't stop being art; it never was art. It was a picture that fooled the observing into thinking it wss art.

Take a chat bot that can pass the Turing Test. It seems human to the observer, but that doesn't mean it is. And when the observer learns of their mistaken belief, the chat bot doesnt just then become a bot.

I could give you the same reply I gave OP. If you determine what is art based on the process of its creation, and not solely on the result, then you deny AI the capability to create art.

I personally don't need to know anything about the circumstances of the creation of art piece to think of it as art (or sometimes not). If the author relies on this (for his work to be judged as art), he should have put it into the work itself.

Aren't we just quibbling over definitions?

"If you determine what is art based on the process of its creation, and not solely on the result, then you deny AI the capability to create art."

OK and?

> then you deny AI the capability to create art.

Yes. That's what is whole thing is about - AI cannot create art because it lacks a human component.

A tighter question would be can animals create art? I don't know the answer to that one.

> Yes. That's what is whole thing is about - AI cannot create art because it lacks a human component.

What I mean by "deny the capability to create art" is that you decided that whatever the AI might have created in the future, and without even looking at it, it's not art.

It's sort of an extreme position, I think.

>But this runs into a problem - if you don't know that the piece was created by a machine, you might assume intent and judge it as an art. Does it stop being an art when you learn that there was no intent? What if you learn that about a human piece of art?

I don't see this as that big of a problem? Something can be beautiful without being art, but art tends to elicit a different kind of discussion specifically because there is intent behind it.

As a thought experiment, consider a particularly beautiful natural formation (like corals or intricately eroded rock). It can be beautiful without it being art. If someone then told me that it was actually sculpted by a person, then to me it's now art. I can ponder what the person was trying to express when they created it. If someone else then told me the previous person lied and it's really just a natural formation, then it's back to being not art.

If we were able to detect "intent" in an algorithm (although that is a hairy discussion in and of itself - arguably we could consider objective functions intents, but in that case I defer to the individual's interpretation as to whether that's intent or just clean study of a mathematical process), then yes, it would become art.

You're right that we exclude "works of nature" from art, despite having objective artistic qualities (being beautiful, eliciting emotions, etc.). In that sense, art must be created by humans.

The question then becomes - is the thing created by AI still considered to be created by human, or by nature? And based on this, we can then classify it as art or not.

Mostly because nature presents little intent. This is also why fractals are not considered art.

If an AI is able to present intent clearly and consistently (uhh, intentionally) then it might be able to produce art.

So far, I haven't seen any purely AI work that meets this criteria. They can have style but lack the "story" quality of the art built on shared language, culture. Essentially grammar and semantics of given art form. Problem is similar to though harder than making AI really understand language.

These system generally end at style which is like an ensemble average of syntax.

I don't think we necessarily require intent to consider something as art.

If a pianist playfully improvises, mindlessly, without intent, does that mean she is not creating art? Sure, you can say that her intent is to maximize her own pleasure.. but then, how it is different from evolution?

It reminds me, is intent the same thing as objective? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXQPL9GooyI

The pianist still improvises within the grammar and syntax of the art form, say jazz or pop. (Our devises an entirely new vocabulary and grammar of their own.) This is different from just style add these kinds of improvisation have a set of rules and are very different from form free play.

Paintings aren't painted by humans, they're painted by paint brushes. Therefor, they are not art.

That statement is ridiculous on the surface, but humans have always used tools and machines to produce art, which have gotten more and more sophisticated over time. No matter what machine is used, there's still a human designing the thing.

There's no magical cutoff where you can say "This was not produced by a human". It's just that the degree of indirection has increased over time.

Is art created by an elephant really art?

https://www.elephantartgallery.com/

Or a monkey, or some other animal?

Sure, you can call it art if you want to, and someone would be happy to sell it to you. But is it really art?

Is there a reason why the answer to the question of an AI creating art is different from the answer to the question of an elephant creating art?

I can't think of one. And the question of animals creating art seems to have an answer. Although people will pay for it, I haven't seen the art world take it seriously. I live in NYC and go to art galleries all the time. Everything is created by humans. Many artists leverage technology in interesting ways to create something, but there is always a human being behind it.

I do think there is a path forward here though: If the art world considers the program itself as a piece of art, then that could be the artwork. I mean, if [Lawrence Weiner][1] can be considered an artist, then why can't Leon Gatys and his colleagues be artists? Contemporary Art is often [conceptual][2], so the concept communicated is more important than the physical form.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Weiner [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_art

Sometimes art is an umbrella for things that don’t obviously fit anywhere else.

I think art remains in the eye of the beholder. An AI can definitely create things I and others will consider art.

There are two options. Either the AI is intelligent and creative in the same sense as a human being, or the AI is an automaton doing nothing but following the instructions given to it by its creator(s).

In the first case, the art is Art; the AI is an artist.

In the second case, the art is also Art; the creator of the AI is the artist.

Well put.

Art is only ever in the mind, so anything can be art if that is how you experience it.

Better question: can an AI experience art?

A Caravaggio has inherent value because it's a cultural artifact. But today's "art" has little (if nothing) to do with Renaissance art. Modern art is such a subjective field it's meaningless to discuss what is and what is not.

If you asked a wealthy man living in 1500 whether he would mind his portrait being painted by a machine, most likely he wouldn't mind that because art was then a trade and "art for art's sake" wasn't really a thing at the time.

Humans like to put things into neat categories, so, for example, painting and music are often categorized as art, although they are inherently different things. It's a lot easier to answer the question "is music created by AI really music" than "is (modern) art created...".

The value isn't inherent. We overlay the value on to it, and we can also take it away.

A Caravaggio has inherent value because it's a cultural artifact.

I would argue that it has no inherent value because it's a cultural artifact. It's just paint on a canvas. It only has value because the culture thinks it does.

Thought experiment 1: suppose you took a Caravaggio -- say, The Musicians (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Musicians_(Caravaggio)), hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art -- and shipped it to a hunter-gatherer culture in Papua New Guinea. Would they value it to the same degree as the people of New York or Rome?

Thought experiment 2: suppose the same painting (back in the Met) were suddenly discovered to be a forgery. Would it still have the same value?

Modern art is such a subjective field it's meaningless to discuss what is and what is not.

Again, I disagree; almost the entire meaning of modern art is discussing what is and what is not art. Art has followed the path of many human endeavors -- it has expanded over time to fill all the cracks and crevices of the space of what could possibly be art, like a species evolving and adapting to fill every ecological niche. Think of a massive Venn diagram, where each circle represents an individual's view of what is "art". That Caravaggio would probably fall squarely in the intersection of the what the vast majority of (Western) humans would consider art. Picasso? Still very much "art" for most people. Pollock, Rothko? Hmm... How about Sol Lewitt's wall drawings? Anyway, you get the point. What's interesting about modern art (to me) is precisely that it shifts the discourse from "ooh, this person paints really nice pictures" to the much more fundamental question of "what the heck is art?" Modern art is experimental philosophy.

It's a lot easier to answer the question "is music created by AI really music"

How about an AI designed to replicate the work of John Cage? ;)

It's a lot easier to answer the question "is music created by AI really music"

https://soundcloud.com/user-95265362/symphonic-fantasy-in-a-...

Is it?

Of course it is and will be. It's like asking whether some unconscious scribble/chicken scratch by a live crab dipped in paint and allowed to walk on a canvas, for example would or would not be art.

Is a hamburger cooked and put together by a robot not a Hamburger sandwich?

Yep I tend to agree. The fact that someone programmed an AI to make that art is part of what make it art. The artist is the programmer essentially. But it's also ludicrous to me to think that AI art would somehow replace other art or music rather than just living along side it.

I feel like any time technology has advanced, we've had discussions like this. Back when Tron was originally released, it was excluded from an academy award nomination for visual effects because they felt that using computers was cheating.

While every iteration of tech makes it easier to accomplish an end result, that doesn't necessarily mean the end result will be better. What defines an artist is what they're able to create with the tools they have. Art created by an AI is really just art created by someone who wrote that AI. Who tuned it, taught it, and fed it information that steered the end result into something amazing. It doesn't make it any less of a work of art in my eyes.

Yes. Next question.

Edit to expand slightly for down-voters: I mean this very literally; "is it art?" is not a terribly interesting question, because it really doesn't admit very much satisfying discussion. You either think it is or you think it isn't, and it dissolves into metaphysics pretty quickly. I find it much more interesting to just accept that it is and examine the questions that then fall out from that, many of which are brought up in sibling comments here.

Depends on who's looking. Art is in the eye of the beholder.

Precisely. There's no such thing as art, except in the minds of people looking at it.

If people cannot understand it, it ceases to be art and begins to be a doodle.

It only needs to be art in the head of who's looking, not everyone else.

I think "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" basically applies here. Short answer is: no; it's devoid of any aura.

thanks for this reference, I am surprised that this is the first time I've heard of the book... I had an art history professor in college that was adamant that photography is not art, and I have to agree even though there are beautiful photographs out there.

I love Benjamin's writing, but looking back after the better part of a century, I don't think that his theses hold up well; he would reject as Not Art much of the latter 20th century's output, which is an appealing position for a curmudgeon, but not a very practical one.

I've come to believe that the only useful notions of Art are either the Supreme Court definition ("I know it when I see it") or the wildly all-encompassing ones; "anything arranged or interpreted according to aesthetic principle," is more or less my working definition. Any other definition either ends up rejecting vast swathes of things that clearly are art or setting you up for reductio ad absurdum.

So yeah, I think it's art. Now we can move onto more interesting questions, like "who is the artist?"

Note: anyone interested in this stuff should absolutely read Benjamin!

So what's the "aura" in this case, how do we measure it? Is it something that some humans ("artists") can produce but other humans ("non-artists") can't? Is it something that can only be created by something with mitochondria or which processes information using serotonin?

Popular and famous art are all single pieces -- they cannot be exactly replicated and that's what makes them invaluable. If all you are doing is taking a printout of a bunch of rendered math equations and coefficients, then: a.) no incentive for art collectors to collect it and b.) you cannot copyright it so anyone can make infinite "originals"

A true AI would constantly train itself and as such would never produce the same work again, thus making it unique and collectible. (Even if tasked to copy it. Unless forcefully reverted to given version.)

This is the same as "is music in digital format art". It can be copied after all, perfectly if so desired.

The AI will just create a file that you can then put on BitTorrent for anyone to have exact copy. Unless of course you know of an AI can use a paintbrush and canvas. Please do share if so.

"Once we've answered those questions, we can tackle the really big one: When an AI-composed song wins the Grammy, who gets the trophy?"

Answer: If that happens, then 1 million other songs will win as well. The Grammy would be as meaningless as trying to judge which AlphaGo game is better played.

Trick question, considering there's already no consensus about what what "art" means.

at this point in time, admirers of 'art' generated by 'AI' are like parents proud of their child's inspired scribbles posted on the refrigerator... a notable accomplishment for the progeny but an unremarkable contribution to society

Take a look at my previous comment about pro wrestling; I think it has some merit. The idea that we like to have some human connection and see growth in someone's work gets tainted when you say it was built by a bot

There would have to be an element of originality to it.

I could write a winforms program to generate Mondrian paintings, but that wouldn’t make my program Mondrian.

Is a photograph really art?

(I don't mean in the choice of subject, etc. but just the process and result.)

I think so but the artist is the AI's creator.

Art is what you can get away with.

Andy Warhol

In that sense, all AI is art. :-)

No, because as soon as you can get away with it, it's no longer AI. :P

it is called artificial intelligence so yes these are artful artefacts

I would say if AI can produce original, deeply meaningful art, that's as good as a turing test. Most humans cannot do this.

Well that’s the key word isn’t it, “meaningful”? I think what makes art interesting is the story behind it, the statement the artist is trying to make. Art made by a machine is simply following an algorithm. I can find the process itself interesting from an academic point of view, but I’d find it difficult to call it “meaningful.” AI has no idea what kind of art it’s generating, no way to discern what is beautiful or not, no understanding of its effect on the viewer, no story to tell, no emotional backdrop. This doesn’t mean the end product can’t be beautiful, but meaningful? Eh.

Precisely.

Actually the GAN systems do have a way to check if art is beautiful. This is why they can produce novel results via experiments. So yeah, such system have a sliver of an idea of what they're creating.

The problem is not in discrimination at all, but in generation of novel and correct output. (grammatically and syntactically) Discerning correct syntax and grammar has eluded all AI so far. (Even specialized translation systems are worse than babies at it.)

I was speaking more about the concept of art from a philosophical point of view. I don’t see how a machine can “check” if a work of art is beautiful, a necessarily subjective and human process. Certainly given detailed enough criteria an algorithm might be able to predict whether a viewer might be likely to think a work of art is beautiful, but the criteria themselves are implicitly or explicitly derived from humans — computers have no inherent sense of beauty.

The whole idea of using the terms “correct” and “check” with things like art seems flawed out of the gate.

But doesn't meaning of art come from the spectator, at least in part?

Maybe it needs to pass the Turing test only halfway. Then humans will fill in the rest and will think of it highly as art. For instance, take a computer which can create photo-realistic image - boring, not art. Take a computer that can, because of its imperfections, create crazily wrong, impressionist or cubist type of stuff - art!

In that case, the computer is producing decoration, something that can hang on a wall, but not 'art'.

I don't think so. Decoration is something else entirely, something that evokes a sense of beauty, perhaps. A nice fractal is a "decoration". But a Picasso painting is not, because it's not "pretty".

What if computer produces a Picasso painting? Or impressionist one? And it does, look up "neural network dreams". These things are not pretty. But they are satisfying, because we can look at them as puzzles and fill in the details.

decoration can also be a style and I feel like AI learning impressionism would just be it picking up the impressionist 'style' ... there are already image filters that people can apply to photographs for that sort of thing, but I don't think applying those filters turns their photos into art ... also I should mention that I am setting the bar very high for what qualifies as art

Art is overrated

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