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.
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 All that has changed here is that the 'assistants' have been replaced by AI.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?
(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.)
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!
"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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
https://www.britannica.com/art/auteur-theory
For art predating films, see also: Richard Wagner and his concept of Gesamtkunstwerk
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.
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.
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.
Yes. This has happened frequently across the history of art.
Would you not call verrocchio an artist?