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Comment by ghusto | Hacker News Reader

This only re-enforces what I already believe; that most critics — and especially art critics — mistake what they don't understand for deeper meaning. There is a snobbery in the art world that arises from a lack of self-confidence, resulting in an emperors-new-clothes situation.

So an image like this — which by the way, I will admit I find on some level beautiful and interesting to look at — which doesn't have any intention behind it, is thought to probably be be some kind of deep art.

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> which doesn't have any intention behind it

Except that it does.

> "I have been exploring a special prompt that I will be publishing at a later date, I have created 100s of images using it, and after many weeks of fine tuning and curating my gens, I chose my top 3

A human made the '100s of images', and finessed it down to get what they're looking for. Then, this human picked their favorite. Presumably the human also named this. There's plenty of human intention here.

Not what I meant by intention, I meant intention in the individual pieces. In other words, the intention of the AI, not the user using the AI.

The AI is just a tool they used to produce an image. They could have written another type of computer program and produced something that would be called, for example, generative art.

The headline is clickbaity; a human won an art contest with a piece of art that was the output of a computer program.

This is like saying I used Paint Shop Pro in the 90s and applied a Gaussian blur and you asking "what is the intention of the computer program." There is no intention. It's a technology, not an active agent in society.

If that human had hired 5 painters to paint images (instead of the AI), told them what to paint, and refined his instructions to them over the production of 10 rounds of canvases - would anyone consider that human to be the artist? He's a client.

Yeah that's the point of the discussion, the lines are blurring. In your example, you cannot deny that the client has done at least some amount of artistic work, too. If you insist that they are 100% client and 0% artist, then let's look at other situations: What about an art director at a video game company? 0% artist?

> What about an art director at a video game company? 0% artist?

Yes. My CEO has excellent technical (and business) knowledge. He will often give me direction on my projects because he knows both the business requirements but also the technical implementations that might fulfill those requirements.

His input is very valuable, but to say he is a programmer or that he is creating these programs is wrong. He hasn't written a line of code in many years.

Being an Art director is a management position. Having domain knowledge is surely useful, but you're managing, not creating.

> Being an Art director is a management position.

Are you sure you know what an art director does? They might or might not be the line manager of the artists but that is not their main responsibility. To quote wikipedia: “It is the charge of a sole art director to supervise and unify the vision of an artistic production. In particular, they are in charge of its overall visual appearance and how it communicates visually, stimulates moods, contrasts features, and psychologically appeals to a target audience. The art director makes decisions about visual elements, what artistic style(s) to use, and when to use motion.”

I would call that creation.

Sure they don’t just grab a brush and start painting. (Except when they do, because that is the best way to communicate what they want from others.)

Would you also say that movie directors are not creating just managing?

> It is the charge of a sole art director to supervise and unify the vision of an artistic production. <snip>. The art director makes decisions about visual elements, what artistic style(s) to use, and when to use motion.”

I don't see how you can call it creation when they don't create anything. They make decisions about what to create, they provide input on how to create, but they do 0 creation themselves.

If I ask my partner to cook dinner, does that mean I made dinner?

> Would you also say that movie directors are not creating just managing?

Yes. It's in the name - they are directing. They are managing the creation of their team. They themselves just sit in a chair and bark orders - not creating anything.

> I don't see how you can call it creation when they don't create anything

The page was blank before they showed up.

>If I ask my partner to cook dinner, does that mean I made dinner?

Did you just ask "Cook dinner" and wait or did you stand behind them and tell them exactly the measurements and process and throw it out every time it didn't taste right?

Whether or not you consider movie directors to be artists, film students have been for around 75 years.

https://www.britannica.com/art/auteur-theory

For art predating films, see also: Richard Wagner and his concept of Gesamtkunstwerk

"Would you also say that movie directors are not creating just managing?"

No, but I wouldn't give them all the credit for the acting, set design etc. Which is what the guy in this article is claiming - when his picture is patently 99.9% the skill of the creators of midjourney, plus the millions of EXISTING artworks that were fed into it, to teach it what art is.

Yes, 0% artist. They're an Art Director, directing artists - not acting as an artist. (though they may well be one, of course)

Being an artist is a fusion of the creative impulse and the detailed creation of that work. typing a few words does not constitute detailed creation.

Art directors routinely execute artistic/creative tasks themselves. In many cases it's just title inflation.

If a producer hires actors, directors, and writers to create a movie, is that movie without intention and is the producer just a client? (Devil’s advocate stance here; I actually really like your argument).

One way to measure it, might be to ask how badly off the rails would the project go (as measured by an external observer) if this person wasn't there. In the case of a Director and their film, it would probably not work out well, if at all. In the case of this guy and midjourney - the software could produce beautiful artworks all day long, purely by feeding in random numbers / prompts, and an external observer would likely be equally impressed.

Actually yes. Lots of the masters had huge teams of people working with them. Not all paintings by X are done exclusively (or even mostly) by the hand of X.

Yes - the key word there being "masters". They were already established, so decided to cut some corners - but they could have done it themselves. That's very different to this guy, who is not a great artist, and has cut so many corners that his input is reduced to "draw a gnarly tree, that looks like Rembrandt". Such genius!

I really don't understand the level of hate this guy is getting.

At no point did he claim to be a genius, or a great artist.

He was perfectly upfront about his tools. He even posted about his full process before results were announced.

His only mission is to get a new 'AI Assisted' category in competitions.

As has been pointed out, often, many artists came up with concepts and then directed assistants to create based on a brief. Courts have weighed in and found that the original artist owns the work. All that has changed here is that the 'assistants' have been replaced by AI.

Your argument seems to be that only famous and established artists, "masters", ought to be allowed to do this - am I reading that right?

Okay, then what say you about Sol Lewitt?

(FWIW I have no dog in this fight, just think these are some interesting questions around the very fuzzy border of art/not-art. I don't expect to resolve the issue here! I'm genuinely just curious about your opinion.)

Some issues are not discussed in order to be resolved! :-)

I wasn't familiar with Sol Lewitt, so looked him up - apologies if I miss the particular aspect of his work that caused you to pick him. He seems like an interesting artist - I like his wall paintings.

If I'm right, he created diagrams / instructions for the production of the wall paintings, and didn't paint them himself, so that's a deviation from what I said about an artist needing to create their own work. However I think on balance, the overwhelming majority of the creative work involved was still his.

One thought I had, was to consider what the difference would be if the artist was removed from the project, and it was completed without their input. Without Sol Lewitt's diagram, nothing comparable to his work would be made "by chance".

Contrast that to a DALL-E user. DALL-E could happily spit out great looking images all day, with prompts generated from random noise. It ONLY makes (reasonably) good looking images. If 9999 out of 10000 images were random noise, and only certain arcane prompts would create a masterpiece, then I could accept there was skill in hunting for the prompts. But as it stands, it's more akin to being a buyer of art in a vast gallery, in my view.

Hope this makes sense!

I don't think it's necessary for someone to be a master in order to make art.

"Art" is a very low thresh-hold to meet. "Interesting" or "high-effort" is a higher threshhold to meet. Art doesn't need to be good to be art.

Jeff Koons did that (kinda)

Sounds like something andy warhol would have done tbh

There is artistry in the vision and artistry in the execution. Execution without vision is likely to result in something quite banal (though any given person can derive their own meaning from any creation), but vision without execution is but a dream.

If that human took found objects and newspaper prints and pasted them to a canvas would anyone consider that human to be the artist?

> would anyone consider that human to be the artist?

Yes. This has happened frequently across the history of art.

That would not surprise me to see from some blue chip artist at all - it's not exactly uncommon for artworks to be created by someone else based on more-or-less precise instructions.

Yes, look up Donald Judd, the patron saint of Marfa Texas. Much of his art involved hiring tradesmen to produce his large aluminum or concrete boxes and shapes. I recommend checking out some of his exhibits if you are passing through, well worth the stop.

Lots of high profile artists work this way even today. Especially those who make something large, then it's almost mandatory, but even something like Damien Hirst's infamous skull. He had the idea for it, everything else was outsourced to jewelers and sculptors.

Highly recommend seeing his work if you get a chance, it's honestly like going to a theme park.

paintings from different hands is as old as reinaissance at least. Many verrocchio are in minimal part from his hand, with much of the scenery and figures being painted by his apprentices.

Would you not call verrocchio an artist?

When an artist paints something awesome, do they give credit to the company that built the paintbrushes that they used? Or the company that made the canvas, or the paints? All of these are critically important and complex pieces of technology used by the painter, which has been honed over the course of thousands of years, but they're all just tools.

I don’t think this is a great analogy. The issue here isn’t the tool, per se; it’s that the tool is reproducing work from other artists found in its training set. The antecedents here are things like pop art, Duchamp’s readymades, sampling in hip hop, collaging.

Ever heard of Andy Warhol? He wasn’t known as a famous client, he was known as a famous artist.

Or Rembrandt.

That is what a lot of conceptual artists do nowadays (not new at all). Even Rembrandt had a workshop where other people would finish some details, apparently.

This is exactly what people like Jeff Koons do.

This is pretty much the plot of Exit Through the Gift Shop, where an artist (or maybe "artist") invests tens of thousands of dollars into a factory production process, hiring a bunch of artists and crafts people to realize his ideas, many of which are rip-offs and derivatives of existing street art, graffiti, and pop culture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_Through_the_Gift_Shop

Is he an artist, or an entrepreneur taking advantage of the art scene? It's hard to say, the result is quite fantastic in my opinion - it's like postmodern art that unintentionally mocks itself by being based on "stolen" ideas.

So either it's "real art" by expanding our conception of what "art" and "artist" mean; or it's "pretend art", only an imitation of art. I mean, modern art pretty much deconstructed itself, I'm not sure if there's even any difference between authentic ("natural" and "human") art, and inauthentic ("artificial" and "machine generated") art.

Honestly, after playing around with Midjourney for an hour, there's also plenty of AI intent here. It's not be sentient intent, but something else that's altogether unique and interesting. Put another way, if a million monkeys were to reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare, those works would be no less poignant.

Théåtre D'opéra Spatial is a beautiful work and really draws in me in.

Sometimes it feels like the need for a human to finesse the result into something appealing is a limitation of the current technology. As in, if it were possible to somehow create an algorithmic criteria for "what one is looking for" in regards to some specific subset of art and let it feed into the model and back ad infinitum, people would prefer that to doing the manual work of sifting through the rejects.

If that hypothesis becomes true, I think it will have severe implications for the value of human intention in art. Would we prefer that endless feedback loop over the painstaking labor of honing a skill for oneself? I don't think it's clear yet, because the technology is still too limited to test such a hypothesis. But would that become the norm if it were possible?

Of course, I don't know if such an subjective concept is encodable in an algorithm. But I'm not beyond believing that such an advancement would be highly desirable if the technology progresses far enough, to the point that something "good enough" for most people and aesthetic styles will emerge. People have already been taken by surprise from the developments in generative art so far.

I'm inclined to agree. I like the image, its pleasing to me. So that's all I personally care for. There seems to be a debate though over 'what is art?' more-so than anything else as alluded to in the article :

> Still, as long as new artistic tools emerge, the "Is it art?" debate will likely continue as long as there are people to have the discussion.

For me the question is moot.

> There seems to be a debate though over 'what is art?'

The question matters deeply to those trying to make art tradeable. Their business is about maintaining scarcity (a.k.a. non-fungibility), so they'll spend up to some portion of their profit margins on gatekeeping and defending terminology.

Making a parallelism with Fountain by "Duchamp". Duchamp is the Artist not the company that designed and produced the urinal. The same way the Artist is the person that summoned the AI to get that picture.

Fountain very particularly didn't try to be something it wasn't and didn't win a prize. It was genuinely disruptive to the concept of what is art. This is almost the opposite - something folks here say they would hang on their wall. But that would apply if it was a copy of someone else's picture. To some extent that is what it is. Not sure in that case it should win a prize.

You mean by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven? :)

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2014/11/01/did-marcel-ducham...

The people defending art aren’t the artists. They don’t care about the sanctity of the annotation. They create stuff that people value and buy, it doesn’t matter to them if people call it art or anything else.

The people up in arms are the critics, the gallery owners, the rich kids who collect items made by people good at making interesting stuff. Because if art isn’t special, if it doesn’t have some deep rooted special meaning that transcends reality. They are not better than the sports commentators and shopkeepers they so desperately try to elevate themselves above.

It looks like a nice image of concept art you would see on Deviantart or maybe the cover for a sci-fi book. I typically consider images used to sell other products "content" and not "art". In this case it was intended as "art" so it's therefore art.

That said, I think it's uninspired and derivative and does nothing for me. It does seems "skilled" in the sense that there's a decent use of anatomy, lighting, and composition. So on first glance it's a pretty image which might be all someone wants and to each their own.

I would love to see the high-res image though to see if it holds up in the actual details. AI tools seem to have a hard time with actually making sense in the details and has a really hard grasp on things like hands (which are difficult for humans).

> there's a decent use of anatomy

All of the arms in the scene are melted stubs. The subject in the middle has what looks like an insect's leg jutting out of her waist.

> I would love to see the high-res image though to see if it holds up in the actual details.

It clearly doesn't. The judges probably thought that there was something cool about the visual weirdness of the piece—which indeed there is. However, it's much less interesting when you know that the melting arms aren't the artist intentionally playing with form—it's just a machine not knowing what arms are.

> All of the arms in the scene are melted stubs. The subject in the middle has what looks like an insect's leg jutting out of her waist.

I think you're right but it's so hard to see in the Ars pic.

There was a big stunt few years back in modern art scene.

A locally famous guy was showing and selling modern art painting by his upcoming protege, it got some traction and interest from buyers and critics.

Then he revealed it was a chimp throwing paint at canvas.

(Especially modern) art scene is the emperors-new-clothes situation + speculation + tax avoidance blended together.

Now, that is performance art. :)

There is something to the "the emperor has no clothes" situation, but also, there is more than that to art.

> This only re-enforces what I already believe; that most critics — and especially art critics — mistake what they don't understand for deeper meaning.

To be fair to the AI, I believe it was trained on both real life and other art of high visual quality - I wouldn't be surprised if it has actually encapsulated deeper meaning without the developers intention to do so.

> So an image like this — which by the way, I will admit I find on some level beautiful and interesting to look at — which doesn't have any intention behind it, is thought to probably be be some kind of deep art.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I believe meaning is also the same. Many poems for example have been misunderstood from the poets original meaning, but that doesn't stop it being meaningful. Music is much the same.

Just because the AI didn't have intention when creating the art, doesn't mean that it didn't capture it. Nature didn't have intention of deep meaning over millions/billions of years, yet we can take a photo that has deeper meaning than the subject matter itself.

With the photo you may argue "the artistry is from the composition process", but one can argue that the person generating the AI art also went through a selection process, and chose three pieces that they found compelling.

I don't think AI art being chosen proves anything about critics. We have, also, not seen the competition either, and cannot come to _any_ conclusions about the result.

I think this is a wrong interpretation. If you think about it, the we convey meaning is through "compressing" the meaning as light and sound in a way that once received it will trigger meaning in similar to us organisms. Essentially, for us to transfer knowledge, the receiver end also needs to be trained to decode it and that's why it's impossible to have meaning transfer to a party that is not ready to understand it. Math equations mean nothing to a person not literate in math and a relationship advice means nothing to a person who never had one(can be capable to misinterpret it though) but also depend on who said it in what context. Your mother saying "I love you" is completely different from your SO saying "I love you", despite having the exact same structure no matter if its transferred through sound, ink, electronic display or braille.

This means, the light patterns that we call image mean completely different things depending on who created them. The art critics or curators don't simply look at the image and understand something from it, they know the artist they know the trends they know the word on the street and they try to understand how the artwork fits in all this. The same straight line image made by Picasso, made by Dali, made by a toddler and made by AI would have completely different meaning and value.

Most tech nerds have no decoders to decode artistic meaning and as a result they will look down on not only critics but also artists. Sometimes meaning can be conveyed by analogies but for that the artistic counterpart needs to special effort.

People keep trying to read into this as a reflection of the art world, but it was only a State Fair art contest. It's kind of interesting but no surprise that it doesn't have the most rigorous entry process. They probably based their rating on how detailed and unique the artwork is-- and Midjourney is known for making very complex and detailed scenes.

This is the type of image that is commonly found on paperback book covers. The figures and setting suggest a rich backstory to entice someone to buy the book, there is no deeper meaning to be gained and no self-respecting art critic would waste their time on this.

The grey tells me you're being downvoted, but I couldn't agree more. That being said, were this actually painted by a human it would display a high level of technical competence with brushes and paints.

Or this deeper meaning having no meaning or relevance.

I once was in a modern art museum featuring an enormous room. In one corner were 3 beach chairs.

That was the art. The curator encouraged me to think deeply about the piece, its meaning, its intent, the artist behind it.

Yes, I'd call that snobbery.

I don't think anyone is saying it doesn't exist.

I wouldn't assume that all AI creates is devoid of any meaning. The meaning can be there, copied off the source material is the same way it copies brushes, themes and other features.

Part of the art world is trying to understand what the artist means, sometimes there's a deeper meaning and sometimes not, and that's part of the fun of art interpretation. You just have to try to fine tune your BS alert.

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