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Comment by oceanghost | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

Precisely.

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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