AI ART: Art or Not?

Art is 100%, let me repeat 100%, full of bias. I can't express that enough. It's literally what makes us human.

Newsflash. Humans are human and humans are biased.

As such, art is one of the most human things we do.

 

The hypothetical alien argument is interesting because it gets down to the idea of what is consciousness. Can an entity that is not conscious make art?

Maybe if we believe the alien was conscious, then I could image we'd, at some level, accept their art forms. Or maybe not? maybe we just don't appreciate it because our senses are different. Maybe their music just sounds like static and randomness?

But suppose it's pleasing to us, where us humans would have a hard time with alien art is that there is no story behind it, there is no empathy, no connection, no shared history, no language ...so how do we make sense of it? We humans tend to gravitate towards people that look/think like ourselves. (one reason racism exists)

I think of the movie ET. Everyone is scared of the alien and sees it as a threat or a lab experiment. It isn't until the boy learns to empathize with ET and learns it's just a scared child. It isn't until we, the audience, understand that ET is conscious and we can build the "it's just a kid" story that we now are rooting for ET.

 

AI could've saved this child and his "art"...

 

Just read through the last few pages and agree with @krosfyah that part of what makes art interesting is the human story behind it and what it tells us about humanity. For example we have no way to know who painted the caves of Lascaux but we know it was humans because they left their hand prints. The art there isn’t just beautiful to look at but tells us about what they thought of their lives and their world around them. In the same way Beethovens 9th symphony has deeper meaning when realizing he was nearly deaf when he wrote it but still created one of the greatest and most passionate pieces of music. Or how the personal demons of Van Gogh and Kurt Cobain gave more depth to their art.

The problem with AI isn’t that it can’t create visually, musically, compositionally very beautiful works. In many cases superior technically than what humans can achieve is that there is no further depth to those works. Beyond the immediate sensory they don’t tell you anything about the human condition. They are only simulacra of what had originally been created by humans.

For example Till Norwood is beautiful to look at and can give very capable performances but she isn’t an actor in the way that Meryl Streep is an actor. Its responses are programmed in and / or combinations if averaged out responses from several human actors. interpretations of roles aren’t coming from an intrinsic personal experience or a unique take on the role but what algorithms have determined mathematically is how the role should be presented. Contrast this with various actors playing Hamlet. It’s a role that has been done many times before but the best actors bring something different and unique. With Tilly Norwood it’s not about creating something unique but acting convincingly human based on thousands or millions of actual humans.

Even leaving aside the issue of whether there is human depth to AI art the other biggest problem I see with AI art is the loss of craft from art. When it becomes too easy to create beautiful and compelling images, music, videos or stories there is little impetus to understanding the process of creation and as such quality suffers or things get simplified. Rather than really dig into the work created it’s just easier to tell AI to create another one. This is why I think we see with so much AI so many errors and oddities in recreations. In my own field so many creating building designs that can’t meet code or even built.

 

Here’s a controversial take:
Tilly Norwood is only good for video games and p*rn.

 

I don't know if I posted it on this forum or another one, but Rick Beato did something similar. He would listen to music made by AI and give his opinion where he would say "yeah, that's actually not bad" or what I found intriguing is him picking out some sound during the playback that he said helped him identify it was AI. I never could figure out what he was talking about because I don't think I heard anything. lol.

For me, AI music is ok as long as it sounds good to my ears and brain. I don't care if it's considered "art" or not. I listen to music because I like how it sounds. I listen to EDM/dance or any other form of music because of the rhythm, the beat, vocals, and sometimes the lyrics, etc. Don't care if a human makes it or if AI makes it. But like Beato above, I know there are those out there who delve deeper into music than my superficial tastes, so that's cool, too. I'm the same way about artistic works - there's artwork out there people like that I chuckle at or just can't figure out, but I don't think they're wrong or I'm right. Just different tastes and tolerances, I guess.

 

So if Hitler dropped some sick, amazing beats at an EDM festival you would be cool with it? I hear what you’re saying about just liking the beat and tempo but if I really like an artist’s music I want to know a little more about them. For example, I was really into Bassnectar a few years back then read up on him and it soured my opinion of his music. Similarly, if I like an artist and find out they’re an amazing human being, I’m an even bigger fan. AI takes all of that humanity away. There’s no inspiration. No backstory. Just a stolen amalgamation of popular art.

 

When you go that route, it's a slippery slope. I just care about the music for the most part. For example, if you're into James Brown, do you focus on his music or the fact he was arrested for everything under sun including theft, domestic violence, drugs, etc. Most of rock and roll would have to be "not liked" with some of the crap artists have done. Phil Spector was convicted of murder, so everything he made or had a hand in is not good or probably shouldn't be listened to? Afrika Bambaataa was one of the foundations of hip-hop, but he definitely appears to have been sick in the head... his music was still great.

In your extreme example of Hitler dropping sick beats (lol), if you didn't know the artist, but thought the music was great, then found out who the artist was, does the music now become bad? I wouldn't be ok with Hitler, but his music wouldn't have changed. Hitler magazine covers, comic books with other Axis leaders from WWII on the cover or Nazi fighting covers are hugely popular among collectors and command premiums from people that don't like the actual leaders or the organization. Maybe it's a case of the message vs the messenger?

Maybe what you said about humanity is why I can separate the art from the artist (for the most part). If someone told me a painting I liked was some type of depiction or symbolism of something tragic that happened to them in their life, I wouldn't ignore it. I would find it interesting. If it was a painting I didn't like and they told me that story, I still wouldn't like it.

If there's one instance that really makes me feel weird about the artwork because of the artist, it's Cosby and watching old episodes of the Cosby Show. That man damn-near broke my heart since I loved his comedy and that show. He was the perfect tv father and seemed like a good dude. Oh well.

 

You are highlighting an interesting distinction that is probably worth pointing out. To illustrate the point, I'll make a controversial parallel.

Covid masking:
1. Public policy states that society as a whole, we are better off if everyone masks all the time.
2. But you need to make your own individual decision if it makes sense for you to mask at any individual point in time.

If you are involved in public policy, you don't come out and say, let's leave it up to individuals. As a matter of public policy, you have to make broad assertions that apply as wide as possible.

So bringing it back to AI Art, your personal opinion about if you think something is good art or bad art and/or if you know anything about the artist is just one voice among millions (or billions).

If you don't like Taylor Swift, it matters not. She's well cemented in as an "artist", whether you like it or not. A key reason she is so popular is because she has such a strong following the love her, and she could put out dog crap and people would buy it.

So regarding AI Art, there might be a handful of people here or there that like it ...but will society buy into it, figuratively or literally buy it?

If enough people buy Hitler's sick beats, it's safe to say it's art. But if a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it...

Bill Cosby is an interesting example. Another interesting name is R.Kelly. He made all-time great music ...but his legacy has fully tainted it and to this day, I can't listen to his stuff without feeling dirty. When was the last time you heard an R.Kelly on the radio? He's been fully black listed.

 

"Impossible" is not a vibe, it's a modal claim, and it needs a barrier, some specific property of great art that no generative process could ever, in principle, cross. You guys have to name that barrier and show it's uncrossable. If you can't, the word isn't "impossible," it's "hard," and I've already won the literal argument. So go ahead...name the wall. There are only really three candidates afaict.

"It has no intention so it doesn't mean anything." First, meaning in art is largely built on the audience's side of the equation... this is just reader-response. The same marks on the same canvas move you... or don't, regardless of a hidden fact about how what maker meant. Second, we have already canonized art made by procedure and chance. Sol LeWitt literally wrote "the idea becomes a machine that makes the art" and had assistants execute instructions he never touched and it sits in a hundred museums. Cage's chance operations, Eno's generative pieces, Ellsworth Kelly's chance collages. If a human writing a procedure that something else executes can be great art, then the execution running on Windows 3000 changes nothing intrinsic.

"It has no consciousness so nobody felt anything." This judges the work by its origin instead of its effect. You have no access to any maker's inner life; you infer it, if you infer it at all, (What % of ppl know the screenwriter of their fav movie?) from the work. Hold this tight enough and you also disqualify every coldly crafted human piece and every commission churned out to pay the rent. The value lives in the artifact to audience relation, not in an unverifiable fact about someone's qualia.

"It only recombines and so it can't truly create." Neither can any human. There is no artist who made anything ex nihilo; they all remix a language, a tradition, a set of influences under constraint. The Romantic myth of the lightning bolt genius is a myth. If "recombination under constraint" disqualifies machines, it disqualifies Shakespeare. And the combinatorial space is not small... it's that the set of all possible novels already contains every unwritten masterpiece; the only question is search and selection, not whether the point exists.

Great art exists. Humans made it. Humans are physical systems. So a physical system has already produced great art, which means physical systems can. To deny that a differently organized physical system could is to claim the art making capacity is welded uniquely to human meat, and that's a heavy metaphysical bill (a soul) that someone arguing against me has to pay in full. Substrate independence is the default everywhere else... birds and 747s both fly.

Salt in the wound is photography. It was said to be mechanical, soulless, a mere capture with no art in it. Charles Baudelaire loathed it and yet it is unquestionably, now, a medium for great art. Perspective, the printing press, sampling, sound recording: every one got the "that's not real art" treatment, and every one got canonized. The thing you guys are hanging on has a great track record of being wrong.

Now, be fair, I concede the following point. Authenticity genuinely is part of some art's value... Anne Frank's diary moves you partly because it's real, and a perfect forgery lacks something an original has. And a lot of "AI art" is really human art made with a very fancy brush... the person's prompt, taste, and curation are doing the work. But notice what those good objections are actually about... attribution... who is the artist and not the possibility of "can the art be great". You guys (to whom it may concern) are arguing the name on the wall is paramount, and I say name is a side track to the quality. See: Michael Jackson, Cosby, Lost Prophets guy etc... Accept or reject the art/artist at your own pleasure/tolerance.

"Great generative art is impossible" and "current generative art is not great" are two completely different claims. The first is philosophy... and those on the other side of my argument are welcome to take another crack at it, the second is a boring, temporary observation about quality that improves every year. So many in this thread are reaching for the first part, but only saying the second.

 

Late edit to the point about authenticity. Acting as an art medium kills the requirement for authenticity in the crib. It elevates The Diary Of Anne Frank to great art, but if you saw someone tearing up after the Thanos snap, with Peter collapsing into Tony's arms, you already know this isn't a requirement. Further, Fargo lied to your face about authenticity and is forgiven by most, and yet, elevated by the mere claim of authenticity to varying degrees, audience dependent.