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Comment by AlotOfReading | Hacker News Reader

This is a debate that existed long before LLMs with things like action painting. If I give you a Jackson Pollock and a piece from someone who randomly splattered paint on a canvas until it looked like Jackson Pollock, are they the same?

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Same in what sense? That is the real question, and perhaps not even the important one when it comes to art. Because, if the Pollock is more "important," there is an implication that it's better because it's by a more famous person, while art should be able to come from anywhere and anyone.

The same in whatever sense you want to compare the art rather than the creators. Pollocks try to convey the action and emotion of the creation process. Our hypothetical copycat lacks that higher level meaning, even though they've created an otherwise similar physical product.

As an aside:

    ...art should be able to come from anywhere and anyone.

is an immensely political view (and one I happen to agree with). It's not a view shared by all artists, or their art. Ancient art in particular often assumes that the highest forms of art require divine inspiration that isn't accessible to everyone. It's common for epic poetry to invoke muses as a callback to this assumption, nominally to show the author's humility. John Milton's Paradise Lost does this (and reframes the muse within a Christian hierarchy at the same time), although it doesn't come off as remotely humble.

It depends what the copycat was thinking, maybe they wanted to follow in Pollock's footsteps, maybe they wanted to showcase the point you're making, whether a copycat is as good as the real thing and therefore also considered art, perhaps even as important (apprentices often copied their masters, such as da Vinci's), maybe they are just creating it because it looks good. If there's no other reasoning, then I'd still say they're the same, because how can one say they're not art too? Even as an observer of the art, what if I like the copycat more? These are all open questions to the philosophy of art and I'm glad it's accessible today to everyone rather than only to the historically abled.

Pollock was a part of a coherent intellectual movement across all of art. You can't productively discuss whether it's art without focusing on that. He didn't just wake up one day and think to himself that it would be fun to throw paint on the canvas like this and then people looked and wondered if that's art or not.

It was the intellectual statement conveyed through that medium that made him famous.

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