Art was never separate from the person and the culture that created it. It was its soul. Now our lives are flooded with soulless creations night and day--the product of lazy minds and an amalgamation of stolen already-bland cultural works.
Overall, the perspective espoused here is bad for art. Art isn't hidden inside effort, you don't find it by saying "don't be lazy", and if it's inseparable from where it came from (which I think is pretty debatable, art travels through time and the world and can find interest), this is as true for what humans make as what AI makes.
I think the last bit gives the game away. This perspective is an otherwise content free way of saying "some art is interesting to me, and some isn't".
>saying "some art is interesting to me, and some isn't".
That applies to every single human being, including you, except maybe for art scholars.
I'm also not sure that art is actually a way that humans talk to each other. That assumes that the point is delivering some information, but a lot of artists talk about it as a compulsion, or something they do for themselves, or as being about understanding the world. I would actually say that many would say that it's definitively not about audience reception. Simultaneously, audiences interpret things of their own accord all the time. Unlike when sending a message, art is often most fully interacted with when you're engaging with things that weren't put there explicitly.
What do you see in AI art that you love or find interesting so much?
Well, your post, following your own logic, just says that you like AI-generated stuff. You cannot judge what's good or bad for art, you can't call someone preference "snobbery" because the only property of art is that someone likes it. Interesting things is also then completely subjective.
You insult people and then lie about what you said.
All of which are impossible with AI. It has no intent, it fulfulls the ask from the prompt. If the prompt is so detailed to imbue the work with deeper meanings, then the author is the person that wrote the prompt, not the LLM which becomes something of a translater.
If LLMs get so good at architecting stories that they can whip up some conceptual layer of understand that feels like communication then we will have achieved a higher form of literary remixing. LLMs are still a series of weights,they still operate in a stateless way and have no initiative besides our prompt. Unless we change that, the value of what an LLM can produce remains limited.
To think otherwise is like a tribesman finding a radio and thinking they are hearing the voice of God. Because you aren't following where the words come from you invent a persona for something that is fundamentally a vehicle of transport.
Your insight years later is still something you constructed, it's a new story that you've told yourself, presumably without any new input from the writer, all of which you can do with any given piece of media. You can do that without the intent having been there on the writer's part at all, even, something which is fairly common to do.
* Once a synonym for "artistic", but that's a distracting coincidence
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Well you're not replying, so I'll respond to my own "story" about what you meant, as if I guessed right. I think art can be lots of things, and this (interpretation of cryptic output) is indeed one of the things it can be. The aesthetic movement in the 19th century opposed didactic art, such as deliberate allegories, hence they coined "art for art's sake". But this shows that art as deliberate communication evidently existed too, since they rejected it. Then, looking somewhere much more modern, pop music artists frequently surf atop of fictional images of the star that are largely invented by the audience. Mystique is quite enjoyable. But wanting to be fooled, wanting to misunderstand, is perverse. Milli Vanilli's fraud pissed people off, and rightly so.
There was probably some pomo shit about completely interpretable art, but I doubt anybody really liked that.
So I think the popular preference is for art that is inexplicit, somewhat mysterious, certainly not a plain communication, but art that is an effective inexplicit communication and has a genuine artist's mind invested in it.
I could add that this is somewhat preserved in art even after it's been digested by AI, but that's hardly ideal.
Computer code can replicate rhetoric and prose. It can even create meaning the user didn't anticipate. This is as much a reflection of the 'author' as any hallucination.
I don't live like that, you don't live like that, but most people do, and they have ever right to. Humans aren't analytical engines. Evolutionary biology has pushed us strongly towards caring deeply about meaning, identity, and respect. This is normal and has to be unlearned. Good luck with that. Other people don't have to like and respect art for you to.
So do you think AI is OK for throwaway stuff but not OK for "production" so to speak?
There is also the generational factor. Digital art, printing press etc all of it had a generational factor to it before gaining acceptance. So who knows what the future holds.
Even for pure picture lovers, I will say beyond philosophizing about the creator, the content of the picture itself is subject of thought and analysis as far or as little as one wishes.
People care a bit more about the creator in music, because musicians have built up a lot of image and fake mystique. But then again, for some genres, its much less relevant to people especially those that got grew natively or thrived on the internet eg noise rock, hardcore electronic.
Some of course want deeper analysis, seeing the artists blog/thoughts etc.
Ultimately the actual revealed preference is that most people just want "pretty pictures" and couldn't care much about anything else.
I don't engage with this hobby anymore since the platforms got flooded with AI-generated content. Now, I do like some early and cheeky AI-generated images (mostly pre-ChatGPT), but not after -- and not because of corporate and social politics -- I'm honestly largely out of the news cycle and don't know what terrible or amazing thing some AI company did this week. And yet my hobby completely died and it was strangely disorienting because I struggled to find something else that could replace it, I don't have social media and didn't have feeds except for on those three platforms (I deleted them all now).
I am an outlier from the general population in how I engage with visuals, and I do think that it's likely that all of the commercial visuals in the future will be AI generated, now, I don't think they will be pretty, though. I think they will be largely ugly. I think the majority of people don't actually care about "pretty pictures" at all and are content with very ugly things surrounding them all the time. And the rest can't help it.
I wish time machines existed so we could do blind testing of AI generated art vs purely manual art to people around say 2019.
My point is it doesn't matter. All art ultimately boils down to is doing something cool, and then pointing at it. The vast, vast, vast majority of "art" is not paid and never was. Even the art that is called "art" has little-to-nothing to do with effort. Duchamp's "readymades" are basically less effort that typing a prompt into AI.
That said, nobody has to like Duchamp's readymades. Nobody has to like anyone's art. The point of art is that you can like it or not. It's not objective, but the vast majority of people are going to pretend that it is, but that's fine because it's actually not.
I think that, as with photography and painting, there will be a place for all types of art, also machine generated, but under different umbrellas.
To think that they compete in the same category is a mistake.
If you filled your day with brainrot slop - does it matter the origin. Does it matter if Instagram thirst traps are so with surgery and filters or if the whole meat puppet stuff is skipped
So far it seems like AI video generation will vastly multiply the quantity of crap like this and enable it to be even worse while being cheaper and easier to produce, while not meaningfully improving the status quo for higher quality works.
"Does it matter which you watch?" Well, who said that was the most interesting question in the first place? Who makes slop is not the only way the situation is changing.
A human premium, and an elevation of human made art was always inevitable. Most "AI art" token spend is TPS reports, and explainer slides, maybe educational materials on the fringes. Maybe there is a chance some forms of AI art becomes its own new medium (like theater vs "the talkies") but it was never going to be a replacement.
Just 3 years of pointless hand-wringing, headlines and breathless interviews for nothing.
"Aaron Sorkin says he will never use AI".
Yes. No one asked him to! But alas, clickbait rules all.
I would argue that modern art has none. Further, I would argue that art is what speaks to people.
That means that an AI generated image which makes people laugh has more soul than whatever the top selling modern artists was in 1995. By my estimation, that makes a lolcat a better piece of art than most modern art.
That is something that I actually think is true. Of course there are great artists who can show us much, much more than what is inside a lolcat. Its just that I haven't seen one of those in a while.
Artists are concerned for their jobs; That I get. Trying to defend art by claiming magical things like it doesn't have any soul is just cope. And frankly, the more I see of that, the less I care about artists and their real problems.
The public is underexposed to beautiful and interesting art, but who is to blame?
Art is a form of expression and/or communication. It's interesting because it shows us different perspectives, as well as things that overlap with ours. When you see a smiley face on your lawn and think it's a sign by the person you just fell in love with, and then find out the exact same artifact was in fact created by wind sweeping some branches together, you'll feel different about it. Similar for art. Or take jokes. A friend might find a joke of yours funny they might not find funny from a person they dislike. That's not "unfair" or "objectively wrong", just like rejecting the same artifact depending on source. If you don't understand this, you talking about "magic" is the cope.
> Its just that I haven't seen one of those in a while.
So that's the argument for making sure of that? Heh.
> Artists are concerned for their jobs; That I get.
The article isn't about artists being concerned for their jobs. This is about people rejecting slop.