So here’s a fun argument. What’s different about AI?
Yeah yeah yeah, you didn’t draw that, but an idea was communicated through a visual medium. You can do that with unedited screenshots of Spongebob Squarepants. People can make art out of any damn thing. No tool is immune to human intent.
In generative AI, intent is basically all there is. The rest was done by a robit.
I’d argue that AI tools defer our intent onto the tool and that this reduces the art. Like, when using a traditional medium, every movement you make in an individual moment and every factor from the materials you use to the conditions you are working under is contributing to that creation.
But when making a text prompt, the only choices we’re making is the vocabulary we use and possibly the language we’re writing in. The end product will not change if the prompt is written by someone who is suffering or if it’s written at a specific time of day or if they’re getting paid to write.
So I don’t know if this makes it not art but I think it makes it objectively less art, by a very huge margin
Like, when using a traditional medium, every movement you make in an individual moment and every factor from the materials you use to the conditions you are working under is contributing to that creation.
And you think that this applies to buying a urinal off the shelf and then signing it?
That’s a good point, he definitely did less. And that seems intentional, perhaps Duchamp would have supported the freedom to call AI outputs art.
But there’s also more going on. He lived in a political context where art was being gatekept by fascists trying to limit cultural expression, he chose an object that is perceived as vulgar and unbelonging in an art installation, and he placed it somewhere in a social strata where it was considered to not belong. These are artistic choices, the art was in what he did and not the toilet itself.
You could say that you can do all those things with an AI creation. I think it would take a lot more work than feeding a prompt and getting an image. But maybe getting an image of something like one of those hideous AI slop babies and putting it in an museum would suffice. Or projecting it on a underserved community from a place where only tech moguls can see it in full resolution. I’m admittedly pretty stupid but it would make me reconsider.
Intent is not action. Intent is what you want your hand to do. If every child’s indecipherable stick figure is True Art, why not a plain-English description of what you want to see?
The end product will not change if the prompt is written by someone who is suffering or if it’s written at a specific time of day or if they’re getting paid to write.
I think it’s really weird how people who are categorically opposed to considering AI generated to be “art” seem really uncomfortable with the idea that some art can just be really bad or mediocre.
Because the stick figure is held in regard to who made it and when. We preserve and display our children’s stick figures all the time, not because they’re ever good but because of the conditions they were made under. So, still actual art.
The plain-english description would not be art because that’s a tool to make AI art with. It has no value without being used in a prompt.
No, art for money definitely counts as art, but it has a quality that distinguishes it from art that was made for no money. As an extreme example, see debates about zombie formalism and how it’s essentialy used for money laundering and power brokering. However AI generated art that is commissioned (for whatever reason) will be practically identical to a hobbyist’s output. So AI art is less art.
Because AI haters have a deeper relationship with Meaning™ than a person who got fascinated by a new seratonin-manipulating toy. If AI art enthusiasts were capable of understanding how the toy even worked beyond “magic machine makes my thoughts real”, they might feel a little more inclined to treasure their children’s drawings as well
Claiming that you have a deeper connection to meaning or artistic appreciation than someone who disagrees with you is about the most pretentious thing I’ve heard in a long while.
Consider that some people can understand how AI generation works, and still somehow disagree with you. Oh, and they can also appreciate art.
Do you think a photo of a can of soup can be art? What about the output of a math question specified to the point that the output is just a formality?
What about a urinal?
Then they obviously don’t understand it very well since it’s still somehow providing them with novelty. Seriously, the parlor trick has a threshold if you’ve seen it enough. I happen to think object permanence is beyond infants but by your logic that would also be pretense because I just I haven’t met a baby yet who had it.
And as I’ve mentioned before, I’m pretty stupid. The fact that the “infinite art machine” couldn’t keep an ape like me pressing the novelty button kind of speaks to its inability to create anything meaningful. I am a very low bar for overcoming pattern recognition.
Ah, yes, because the disagreeing with you means “infatuated by the random picture machine”, right? No room for someone to think that it’s, I don’t know, another tool a person can use in the creation of art? Kinda like how not every cellphone picture is high art, but you wouldn’t say you can’t use a camera to make art.
But no, clearly you’re the arbiter of knowing how stuff works and, what art is, and how others appreciate it.
object permanence is beyond infants but by your logic that would also be pretense
Yes, because developmental psychology is exactly the same as “art critique”.
It’s pretentious because you’re responding to someone who disagrees with you by asserting that either they don’t understand the subject technically, or their entirely subjective experience of art is somehow lesser than yours.
‘It’s not art because you’re shallow idiots’ is not an argument.
Functional adults can also draw incomprehensible squiggles, and haters insist that has magic qualia. Like any napkin scribble fully captures artistic intent, but a crystal clear depiction of a concept is disqualified.
Well, incidentally I’m not particularly interested in arguing with people who are a certain level beyond touching grass for the foreseeable future. I don’t actually set out to change anyone’s mind, you actually just asked a very interesting question in this thread so I engaged.
If you are genuinely interested in exploring deeper, you should check out all the other places this comment section went. Some other people made some very excellent points. I can’t guarantee anyone can make you see art the way people who actually love art do, but you should at least be entertained.
I concur with the sad detective, but disagree on one point. The prompt can be art in itself. After all, it’s literature, and literature is art. But the output of a machine that you feed that literature into isn’t art. It’s a commission, a request for someone else to draw a picture. But because no one is actually drawing a picture, the picture produced is not art. At best, it’s a preview of what it might look like of someone did draw the thing.
Like a photograph? A machine actually produced the image, the human just indicated what they would like the image to be of.
I feel like there’s a lot less need to apply caveats and exceptions if we accept that a machine can create art, but that what makes art interesting is what the person using the machine puts into the process.
If I take a picture of a bird with my phone while walking past, it’s less impressive than in I carefully find the right shot and angle, and meticulously take a photo. Same for an oil painting.
Some methods of creating an image require less work than others. What matters isn’t the difficulty, but what you actually put into it.
Direct correlations, like I told mindbleach. A camera is a tool that does exactly what the photographer makes it do. An image generator takes the place of a commissioned artist. You describe what you want to see, and the machine generates it. Prompters aren’t artists, they’re commissioners. And since machines aren’t artists either, the output of a such a machine isn’t art.
Why do you draw a distinction between the “direct correlation” of a camera and how an image generator works? Image generators are just as deterministic as a camera is. If you give it the same inputs, it returns the same output. A lot of tools implicitly put a random input with the user supplied input, but if you keep that the same, there’s no difference.
Do you know how they generally work? Technically, not from what an interface presents you with since that’s variable.
Beyond that, I don’t think that determinism or simple relationships between action and output are what constitutes an art tool either. Otherwise any artistic tool that intentionally plays with randomness wouldn’t be art, and neither would a complicated tool or medium.
That is one of the more baffling tells for the sneer-club absolutists. How can a person spend hours tweaking a block of text and not imbue it with meaning?
But consider: I don’t play any instruments. I have written music. If you’re hearing it, did I make that?
The text can have meaning, but the image generated when you feed that text into a machine does not. You have no control over what the machine does with your inputs—there is no direct correlation between the words you type and the resulting image. If you’re commissioning an artist to make a work for you, then no matter how much care you put into describing the picture you want to see, you aren’t the one drawing it.
But consider: I don’t play any instruments. I have written music. If you’re hearing it, did I make that?
If there’s a direct correlation between the music you write and the output of a machine interpreting it, then yes.
Your control over what the machine does is that input. It put your ideas into a JPEG, and that JPEG put those ideas into my brain. What do you mean, that cannot have meaning?
If there’s a direct correlation between the music you write and the output of a machine interpreting it, then yes.
But it’s not music. Right? The part you’re listening to, the playback or the recording, is just a machine doing things. What you’re hearing is not music. It’s something else, somehow. What is it? Fuck if I know, but y’all are convinced there’s some other thing that a song can be.
Re: images. You have no control over what the machine does. You give it a prompt, it generates an image, you decide it’s good enough and save the picture, or it’s not good enough and tweak the prompt. You don’t control the machine. It doesn’t put your ideas into a jpeg, it generates a jpeg that’s consistent with the description you gave. If that picture is also consistent with your ideas, cool. You can’t give the machine an idea to put into the JPEG in the first place, because the machine cannot have ideas.
Re: music. The part I’m listening to, the playback or the recording, is a machine doing things that have a direct correlation with your input. You do control the machine, because it only does precisely what you tell it to do. You decide where every individual note goes, how every individual note sounds. There is, again, direct correlation between your input and the output.
The difference is human labor being done by the artist who is creating the art. Ai images are generated using someone elses nonconsensually obtained and uncompensated labor. The prompter is not the artist, the millions of artists used to train ai are.
The nonconsensual acquisition and uncompensated labor are irrelevant. You can train an image generator on entirely paid-for and consensually obtained works, and the output remains not art because it’s produced by a machine incapable of imparting meaning on the images it generates
the output remains not art because it’s produced by a machine incapable of imparting meaning on the images it generates
What is “meaning”, and how would I measure it to determine if an image was created with or without it? Can a human create art without meaning, or is the addition of meaning intrinsic to human actions?
Can a photograph count as art? What’s the difference between a photograph, created by a simple machine which bends light onto a chemical strip, and AI images, which feed letters into a complex equation and tweak colors in a grid to minimize an error equation?
They’re both deterministic processes whereby a human selected input is transformed via a human configured machine into an output.
The difference to me is the degree of effort the human involved puts in. One involves selecting all the parameters and doing composition, where the other is a linguistic composition. The aesthetics or artistry put into the language input is lost because it’s not represented in the output: a low effort throw away prompt can look similar to a very deliberately crafted one. The crafting just provides specificity of output. A skillful and artistic use of words has better and more pleasing modes of expression. Doesn’t mean it can’t happen, just means that it usually doesn’t.
Given that we’re literally in a post about a piece of art that was used to say “fuck your gatekeeping of what constitutes art”, the relish with which people are willing to say “nope, that can’t be art because it’s not traditional” is… Astounding. Right up there with saying “that can’t be art, it doesn’t look like anything”.
It doesn’t have to be measurable. Art is a form of communication, and communication must have meaning behind it. You can’t communicate no idea. Even if you tried, you would be communicating an idea. So no, a human cannot create art without meaning.
Of course a photograph counts as art. A camera is a tool that does exactly what the photographer makes it do. There is direct correlation between the actions of the photographer and the image the camera produces. Positioning, focus, field of view, timing, I’m sure there’s a million other things a photographer could list that act as inputs.
Contrast that with an AI, where you simply describe the picture that you want to see, and it generates a picture based on what you said. You can spend hours, days, weeks perfecting The Prompt so that it creates exactly the image you want to see, and you will never be the one who made the picture, because the machine is the one that made the picture. See paragraph one for why that picture can’t be art.
I never said AI generated pictures aren’t art because they’re not traditional, I said they’re not art because machines can’t think or feel.
How do you mean it doesn’t have to be measurable? You’re actively talking about it’s absence or presence, so how do you know it’s there if you can’t measure it?
I’m also a bit baffled by the assertion that you can’t communicate “no idea”, along with the assertion that an AI generated image doesn’t have meaning.
If it has no meaning, doesn’t that mean it’s communicating “no idea”?
How do you know something has meaning or not if it can’t be measured?
Personally, I think you can only know if a person tells you that they think it has meaning, and that that’s independent of how they made the thing, but I’m curious what you think.
I really don’t see the difference in your camera argument.
Contrast that with a camera, where you simply point it at what you want to see, and it takes a picture. You can spend hours, days, weeks perfecting The Parameters so that it takes exactly the picture you want to see, and you will never be the one who made the picture, because the machine is the one that made the picture. See paragraph one for why that picture can’t be art.
You don’t explain why a machine you control making an image is art in one case and not in the other. I’ve seen where you argue direct correlation, but the prompt is directly correlated to the output, allowing the individual to tweak and change the output. They don’t have total control over the output, but neither does an oil painter, someone blowing glass, or Pollock swinging a brush to create paint splatter. A medium, tool or technique can have limitations.
And what if I’m not telling it what I want? What if I give it a long string of numbers that I’m tweaking until the output matches my wish? That feels a lot less like “describing a commission”, even though it’s the same process.
Personally, I think it’s obvious that AI art is art in the same way that a photograph or using Photoshop can be art. It’s a tool just like any other. It’s just currently more likely to be boring because it invites shallow art, and for what it needs as the artists input it’s more direct to just use that as the art. If you can jam your vision into a prompt, you can almost certainly convey it better with the words themselves, so you’d skip the tool and just write.
Incredible. This tool, unique among all human creations, is immune to human intent. Paint carries it when splashed, dribbled, or exploded with a grenade, but! AI cannot possibly convey a person’s thoughts. The only images that cannot mean anything. No concepts communicated, no commentary made, and obviously nothing to critique.
Yeah, because you aren’t describing the picture you want to see to the brush, and letting it generate the picture for you without any further input. A paint grenade requires a hand to throw it, and there is a direct correlation between what the hand does and what the paint grenade does. There is no such direct correlation when you tell a machine “make an art piece depicting three children in a trench coat trying to sneak into a building labelled ‘the internet’ with a cardboard cutout of a bouncer in their way.” You are a commissioner, not an artist, and the machine isn’t an artist either, which means the image produced is not art.
As if tweaking a prompt seventeen times has less intent than whether your finger twitched while lobbing a paint-covered grenade.
So I’m an art commissioner, except the fictional scenario depicted visually is not art, because it was created by a robot, except the robot can’t create things, so it’s not an artist, because what it makes isn’t art, because it’s not an artist, and oh no I’ve gone cross-eyed.
Again, the prompt that you spend all that time tweaking can be considered literature, which is art. The image you get when you feed that literature into a machine and tell it to do its thing isn’t art.
I compared you to a commissioner because that’s literally the role you’re playing. I didn’t say the robot can’t create things, I said the robot can’t create art. There is no meaning behind the carbdboard cutout of a bouncer because the machine does not know what cardboard or bouncers are. It doesn’t have any thoughts or feelings or opinions or intent regarding anything in the image it produces. It doesn’t know what age verification is, let alone have anything to say about the subject.
You’re being so incredibly disingenuous here. I haven’t made a single circular argument. My position has consistently been that these machines cannot create art because they cannot think or feel. They are not analogous to a brush, because there is no direct correlation between the input you provide and the output it produces.
It doesn’t know what age verification is, let alone have anything to say about the subject.
Yet the image conveyed that it’s about age verification.
You know what the image is about, and if an image is about anything, that is meaning. Should your philosophy require blaming a person, there’s only one human in the loop.
The robot doesn’t know what bouncers or cardboard are, yet it can represent them, on command. Someone used those concepts to visually communicate an abstract thought. You’ve demonstrably understood their intent. Yet you blame the robot, then say robots can’t be blamed, so this image cannot do what it’s already done.
The model is simultaneously too much of an inert tool to ever imbue qualia, and too active a participant to credit any meatbag.
But if I dip a grenade in a paintbucket, then every charred flake goes precisely were I intended.
I’m starting to get bored with this, and I feel like my entire opinion can be summed up by
If I tell a human to draw a cool red dragon sitting on a pile of gold, then I didn’t draw that dragon, that other person did. Replacing that human with an AI doesn’t suddenly mean that I drew it. Ergo, prompt engineers are not visual artists.
Art necessitates intent on the part of an artist, and machines have no intent. The machine has no opinion about why the bouncer is there, nor the implications of children accessing the internet without actual age verification. Those elements are there on the picture solely because that is what was described in the text, and not to convey any meaning.
It is meaningless because the “artist” didn’t mean anything when they made it.
It’s also just not a very interesting piece in general. It’s shallow at best. Just because I can see that the different elements represent different things doesn’t mean it means anything. It doesn’t have anything to say about its very subject matter. They’re just there.
AI isn’t a tool, you do not wield it, you just submit requests and get what you get. You might as well call yourself a chef for placing an order at a restaurant.
I feel that argument struggles in the context of this post though, where the labor is adding a signature onto a toilet. A similar amount of labor went into people typing up their prompts as went in from someone that’s well known adding on a signature. Now, I say this as someone that thinks AI art is wasteful since it uses up so much water and electricity, and is mostly done unethically since the art sourced was mostly done without consent or fair compensation.
Actually, the post’s follow up images posit that he MADE those toilets, since no two are the same and they don’t match existing designs. Saying he put in as little effort as AI “artists” is misunderstanding his work.
That’s the thing, people didn’t care about it till it had a well known person’s name actually attached to the piece though. It was submitted as just a toilet with a signature from an unknown person, it wasn’t originally known that it was from Duchamp.
To me, it feels like there are a few important questions Duchamp poses:
Does art have worth on its own without the artist? Without Duchamp, the piece may well have only been recognized as a toilet with a signature.
Is the artist an integral part to the meaning? I feel like in this case the answer is yes, because it was recognized for more than it was perceived because it became known that it was from Duchamp.
What is the difference between a tool and a piece of art? Namely, where do we draw the line?
Most people think he bought an off-the-shelf urinal, and they still understand, that would be art. It would still function as commentary. The object’s existence in a museum is a jab.
The flipside is-- y’know that handwritten card that goes around? Like ‘I would rather see your scribbliest stick figure than your fanciest AI slop.’ The anti-AI crowd loves it, and it means a lot to them. What would change if we found out it was made in Qwen?
Yes. It’s an added layer of meaning where he put in the effort, and still made a toilet. This is not a low-effort shitpost, even if it looks to be one from a basic perspective. And when you challenge the meaning of art, it says a lot that the effortmade is impossible to determine at a quick glance.
And I don’t know if it means a lot to people, or if it’s just a thing a lot of people agree with. And if it was made in a shitty ai slop generator, then it would change it from “defiant speach” to “I don’t agree with what I say, I just want you to like me.” And based on every piece of AI I have ever seen, even the stuff AI bros like to boast about, there would be a spelling error they didn’t notice.
The low-effort shitpost everyone thinks it is, would still have meaning.
“I don’t agree with what I say, I just want you to like me.”
I will remind you we’re talking about Fountain. Duchamp trolled the art world by meticulously recreating something trivial. If someone popularized an anti-AI screed, using AI, that would be funniest goddamn thing - and a complete rebuttal.
Imagine the glee in that reveal. Some guy spent hours rendering, tweaking, rendering, tweaking, giggling to himself the whole time, until it produced exactly the image you’ve seen. All flaws excused by the proud AI haters, the same way they (and its text) would excuse literally anything a hand does with a pen. And then - ta-da! Here’s the prompt and the seed! You all found meaning in a generated image, and experienced emotional connection because of it. Get loved, idiot. Get camaraderie’d.
Then you get to watch people twist in knots. It never meant anything to them! Anymore! It’s complete trash, and they’re throwing out all their favorite band’s t-shirts, because they always hated them. It tricked them… but not in any way that confers intent.
Jesus christ, you’re having more delusions than AI. Do you honestly think anyone would care about a picture of some text they agree with so much that the rug pull will affect them in any meaningful way? Do you think that guy hitting refresh on his prompt generator is putting in meaningful effort? Do you think anyone but AI chuds will excuse the blatantly obvious flaws the way you guys do?
Even at this second, I can’t even remember what the image looks like. It doesn’t mean anything to me. I just agree with the words.
I’m sure your little fiction brings you comfort, but it’s just fiction.
It doesn’t mean anything to me. I just agree with the words.
… the words are its meaning.
Those words say: flaws are fine, for anything done by hand.
If Fountain was an off-the-shelf urinal, would you go crack it with a hammer? That’s how people genuinely talk about generated images. They latch onto terms like intent and declare the robot cannot provide it, therefore, some image they quite enjoyed is now a useless husk. As if they can delete the emotional response from their brain.
Like a clever visual metaphor doesn’t parse, if it was rendered instead of scribbled.
Ah, so it wasn’t art for the years that people thought it was a store bought urinal? And it currently exists in a superposition state of art and not-art because it’s not actually known if he sculpted it or not?
I certainly agree that intellectual property is bullshit and should be abolished with the caveat that it should be abolished after capitalism is done away with. However, labor value ≠ intellectual property. I don’t care that the stolen labor used in the end product is minimal, I care that the labor was done by artists and used without compensation by a corporate entity. I care that someone then takes advantage of those artists labor by prompting a machine who uses that stolen labor to generate their idea, for which they had the most minimal intentional input, and calls themselves an artist. I also care that throughout this entire process a corporation is making money off a process that would be impossible without the artists. You say culture belongs to us all but ai cannot produce culture, it offers nothing new, it is an aggregate of ideas that already exist. Cultures change a grow, they are living things that ai offers nothing to.
Tools don’t have culture, people do. New subcultures exist for this tool. Like primitive CGI, it produces images differently. Onlookers seeing the limitations, and offering “Well why don’t you just draw that?,” do not get it.
Would you feel any differently if some collective of artists created a model entirely from their own works, specifically so people can describe images into existence? The end result would not be any different.
I would feel differently about that actually. I still wouldn’t call anything created through prompt a piece of art created by the prompter though. I might call the ai itself a form of art. I might call the prompted images art but the art would have come from and belong to the artists who created the ai
Why? They didn’t make those images, any more than you would. They made the thing that made those images.
The artists did make the images generated by their ai. They put their labor into creating the art that feeds it and they have the ability to curate what art goes into the ai in order to give it a meaning or message. The major factors in what I consider art are labor, intent, and meaning. The prompter lacks these. Their labor, if you would consider prompting to be labor, is absolutely minimal, you could not possible input less labor. Their intent is missing. Think of an oil painting for example. Each brush stroke is intentional, they all have purpose whether it be for representing the beauty of a scene through the lense that they see it and want the viewer to see it or for creating a message they want the viewer to understand. How can the prompter accomplish this? The prompter might give the image meaning but how is the observer meant to understand it when the prompter cannot guide them?
The ai these artists built and curated might be able to translate their message, guided by their intent, and created by their labor if built for that purpose and for that reason I consider images created by it to be their art. Who prompts the ai makes no difference.
I include might, in both my comments because this remains to be seen.
Sorry, taking this seriously. So… if I use their tool… and enter a lurid combination of popular cartoon characters, morally indefensible fetishes, and prominent political figures… it’s their fault. They made that art. The image you closed immediately but cannot unsee, contains absolutely none of my meaning. It is immaculate of my intent, and I cannot be blamed.
No matter how many hours I spent getting Frieren’s spit to land in Starmer’s ear.
It doesn’t retain pixels at all. A better way to describe what it retains (though not accurate) is brush strokes. It retains much more of the information than the raw byte count could imply. It’s effectively compressed by capturing relationships of pixels rather than the pixels themselves.
You and I know that - critics might not. They talk like image files go into the model and stay there. One guy insisted that training was no different from encoding a JPEG, because… numbers.
The information gleaned from any single image is hilariously minimal. It’s insulting that anything recognizable comes out. A prolific artist’s contribution means their style is distinguished from the rest of humanity by only a handful of bits.
I would say the difference is that intent is not controlled by the artist. Sure, they give a prompt, but they don’t actually control the mechanism that creates the output. In fact, the people who create it can’t even parse what it’s doing. It’s just a bunch of seemingly random weights.
When you’re holding a paintbrush, or sculpting clay, or whatever else you’re doing, you’re controlling the tool and manifesting your intent through it. With AI you aren’t. There can be intent by the creator but there’s no intent in the tool.
Demoscene sizecoders rely on pseudorandom patterns all the time. They find what they need. Maybe they didn’t sculpt those mountains, draw those textures, or arrange those notes - but it’s still art, and they made it.
Inscrutability means people gotta fuck around with these tools to get closer to what they want. The robot does stupid things and must be punished. Prompts get hammered into place over ridiculous details.
If an image took effort, conveys ideas, and looks good, what could that be besides art?
We don’t actually know if he bought the urinal or made it. The screenshot of a Tumblr post just says it’s a theory, and if you look into it elsewhere it’s just not known.
But, it doesn’t actually matter. Would it become “not art” if it turned out it was a store bought urinal?
The entire point of the post is “no”.
I definitely read the whole post. Maybe you can let me know what I’m missing. From what I can see, someone asked why a guy buying a urinal and then signing it gets to be art but not an AI generated image. Another person responded by saying
I would say the difference is that intent is not controlled by the artist […] When you’re holding a paintbrush, or sculpting clay, or whatever else you’re doing, you’re controlling the tool and manifesting your intent through it. With AI you aren’t. There can be intent by the creator but there’s no intent in the tool.
But how does any of that apply to Duchamp’s fountain? He did not have any control over the inputs that went into making the urinal. He didn’t hold any clay. He didn’t even paint anything unless you wanna get cute about what a signature is.
Go read the OP again. All of it. You didn’t read it, or you missed part of it, or you misunderstood something.
This is not me saying “I think you’re wrong.” It is saying your comment is fundamentally missing context that is in the OP. You’ll know what we mean when you see it.
In my opinion, you would be better served reading a history of Duchamp and a study of the piece rather than taking for granted screenshots of random people on the Internet. It’s true that we don’t actually know if Fountain is actually a readymade sculpture or not but the idea that most art scholars believe that it is not a ready-made sculpture is simply untrue. In any case, whether or not it is actually a ready-made sculpture doesn’t really have a bearing on its quality as an artwork. On the contrary, the whole point of the piece is to demonstrate that it is not important who actually made the physical object which represents the artwork.
Now that you understand that it is not a conventional opinion that Duchamp secretly made Fountain himself, I would like you to reconsider your answer to the question. And if you don’t believe me that it’s not a conventional opinion, I invite you to consult with literally any encyclopedia that has an article on the piece.
Yup, definitely didn’t read the post. He submitted several urinals, and they do not match any urinals manufactured around the time of his submission. Add in his apparent skill with ceramics and, yes, he DID make those toilets.
Then again, if AI bros could pay close attention, they wouldn’t like AI images.
You’re taking a screenshot of a social media post at face value. If you look anywhere else it’s not regarded as a prominent notion that he secretly made it himself. Hell, I can’t even find reference that he worked in ceramics.
I’m not particularly pro-ai, but people being so against it that they’re willing to take screenshots of Tumblr as proof rather than consider someone’s argument is … Annoying.
It’s proof, not that he made the toilet, but that they didn’t read the post they claim to have “definitely read.” We’re discussing the post.
And you might not pay attention, but I do. I checked your post history, where you claim AI is intelligent, and AI art is art, this is not the first AI thread you’ve defended AI in, and your most recent post (rather than comment) is on stable diffusion. You are very much pro-AI, and you’re being disingenuous by claiming you’re not.
? You mean where I shared a picture I thought was fun something like a year ago?
Fuck off with claiming you know how someone feels on a topic when you’re clearly not even able to understand what they’re saying.
Yes, I believe AI is intelligent. With the caveat that the bar for intelligence is low enough to include thermostats.
Yes, I think AI art is art. *Shitty, low effort art, like from a dentist office.".
Without knowing to what you’re referring, I can’t tell you why you’re full of shit with your “defending AI” claim. I’ve defended the academic discipline of AI, which is different from the generative AI tools we seem to be discussing. I’ve told people they don’t understand AI tools, but that’s not “defense”.
Did you read the ones where I’ve said that we intuitively feel that the way LLMs scrape data is unfair, but that that unfairness isn’t represented in copyright law, so rather than trying to twist current law to fit, we should understand how it actually works and adjust laws to match our sense of fairness?
What about where I’ve pointed out that LLMs can’t think, but generate statistically likely continuations of input, hence propagating misunderstanding and creating misunderstanding because people are using a language tool as though it’s a knowledge tool?
Did you consider that maybe I’m not pro AI or anti AI because I view it as a tool, and one wouldn’t be pro belt sander or anti belt sander, but rather irritated at people who misunderstand them, frustrated that we’re spending billions on the least useful sander for what it’s being used for because it’s the most magic looking, and annoyed that we’re jamming sanders into word processors when no one asked for that?
Anyway, we were talking about how you’d rather believe random Tumblr screenshots than reality when you got caught up trying to enforce your orthodoxy that anyone who doesn’t passionately hate anything that could be perceived as being AI related or supporting is clearly an ignorant techbro fetishizing the singularity. You’ll be damned if you need to understand what any of those words mean to know that you hate them.
I don’t know that I give a shit what the post says in regards to if he made it or bought it for the purposes of the question. It’s irrelevant to the point actually being discussed, to say nothing of “seemingly not true”.
Also, since you’re very concerned with addressing what the post says: people overly obsessed with enforcing the form that art takes are fascists, per the post. Feel like you’re kinda missing the forest for the trees there.
AI art is art, it’s right there in the name. It’s often perfectly aesthetic to look at too.
The issue is that there’s nothing deeper behind it, and you know there’s nothing deeper behind it. The most blase painting done by a human has a thinking person behind it, and in some way the art is an expression of at least their intent to create it.
For the most part, the intent to create an aesthetic image isn’t particularly interesting. But if you convey an intent or something that’s more compelling, you have more compelling art.
Other art has been done by random process and, as you mentioned, it becomes much more about the context than the actual piece.
If you go by the language, AI (artificial intelligence) is intelligent. No, it isn’t. The words don’t mean anything until proven. I would argue art requires intent and intelligence. “AI art” does not.
The term is created by capitalists selling a product. That doesn’t make it an accurate description.
AI is intelligent, it just lacks sapience, sentience and other things humans have.
The term was created by academics to describe the usage of computers to solve problems previously only solvable by humans or other intelligent creatures.
One of the things learned most quickly is that “intelligence” is a much lower bar to cross than you would expect.
A thermostat can measure how the temperature changes in response to it’s actions, and then apply that information later to alter how it heats and cools.
That’s intelligence. It’s very simple intelligence, unless it’s a particularly odd thermostat, but that doesn’t make it not intelligence.
If someone hangs a print of a famous painting on the wall, have they hung art on the wall? The print required zero creative skill or intelligence, and was a rote process done without human intention. It is still a creation chosen for it’s artistic value, in this case for being a representation of something that’s indisputably art.
Is an object representing art itself art? I say yes, if someone says it is.
Can poetry be art? What about poetry that describes a scene, or a point in time?
I’m not saying that an AI generated image is interesting or good art. If someone swinging a brush at random can create art, or playing a set of radios all at once can be art, then I don’t see why using a pile of math, numbers and random noise to make an image can’t be art.
Pollack and Cage can be interesting because of what they intended to say with their art, and how they chose to say it inside their medium.
I’m not going to say that the process of art becoming interesting because of the intent of the artist is only valid in certain media. AI image generation just happens to be a medium or tool that is nearly entirely the intent and creativity of the artist. The idea for an image, no matter how unique and ornate, isn’t that interesting if that’s all there is. That’s why the vast majority of AI art just isn’t interesting. Regardless of the results, a few sentences or a short paragraph describing a scene is unlikely to provide much interest. It’s dentist office art. A pretty picture you enjoy seeing and then forgot.
It’s totally possible for that sentence or paragraph to be compelling or interesting, but in that case, you don’t need the associated image.
Unless that combination is part of it, or something.
Point being: “art” isn’t some mystical human only thing. The threshold for both it and intelligence is very low.
Being an example of art or intelligence doesn’t make it interesting or clever.
Don’t gatekeep art based on the medium or method. AI art, due to being able to create aesthetic results easily, usually lacks the inspiration, creativity, or depth of equivalent not-ai art, so it’s not nearly as impressive.
Like how a photorealistic painting of a swimming pool is significantly more impressive than an actual photo of that swimming pool. It’s not that photography can’t be art, it’s that a perfect representation of a scene isn’t impressive or interesting in that medium or with that tool.
AI is intelligent, it just lacks sapience, sentience and other things humans have.
It is not. A key component of intelligence is being able to infer knowledge based on generalizations of previously obtained knowledge. Convolution neural networks are not capable of this. They need to be trained on the data to predict results. They can’t conceptualize abstract ideas and apply them to predict never-before-seen circumstances.
The term was created by academics to describe the usage of computers to solve problems previously only solvable by humans or other intelligent creatures.
Correct, but that’s not what the modern usage is referring to. The academic term is referring to artificial general intelligence (AGI). The thing the capitalists are trying to sell using the term AI currently is just a predictive model.
If someone hangs a print of a famous painting on the wall, have they hung art on the wall?
No one is calling the printer an artist. Yes, the print is a piece of art. It’s a copy of something created with intent by the artist, not the printer. It doesn’t really matter that it’s a copy. That’s a very stupid argument if you’re going to “ship of Thesius” a print. It’s still a version of the original, just not the original itself.
If someone swinging a brush at random can create art…
How do you swing a brush randomly? Have you tried doing something random? You can’t really. Maybe they could build a machine that swings it randomly, though I’d say the act of building the machine is intentional, and artistic. The thing it creates is a piece of that process.
… I don’t see why using a pile of math, numbers and random noise to make an image can’t be art.
Because there’s no intention. A pile of math and numbers can be art. That’s all that anything digital is. They aren’t necessarily though. Without some intent behind those numbers being a particular set of numbers it isn’t art though.
AI image generation just happens to be a medium or tool that is nearly entirely the intent and creativity of the artist.
How so? I’m assuming “artist” here is referring to the prompt creator. Their intent is not taken into account by the AI tool. Only their prompt is. If you put the same prompt in then it’ll generate different results each time, even if the intent of the prompt creator is the same. That would imply their intent is not part of the creation process.
Point being: “art” isn’t some mystical human only thing.
I never implied such a thing. I think a sufficiently intelligent creature other than humans could create art. Again though, the product currently being called “AI” is not intelligent though. It can’t abstract ideas into concept that can be applied to unrelated subjects. That’s what would be required to make art.
Don’t gatekeep art based on the medium or method.
I’m not. I’m gatekeeping it on being creative. I don’t care that it’s digital.
It’s a rhetorical technique applying the things you say to closely related topics, to form a contradiction, and indicate you should not believe those things. Like getting Graham Linehan to rigidly define ‘chair’ and then showing him a picture of a horse.
If “you didn’t draw that” means something’s not art, what about all the other art people didn’t draw?
If “you didn’t draw that” means something’s not art, what about all the other art people didn’t draw?
Yeah, that’s what’s disingenuous here. You took the individual words in my comment absolutely literally when it obviously isn’t meant to be absolutely literal. I’ve already said that literature and music are art, so obviously I meant something else.
So here’s a fun argument. What’s different about AI?
Yeah yeah yeah, you didn’t draw that
Is it possible that what I meant was that the difference is that the person claiming to be an artist after sculpting a fountain is an artist because they sculpted a fountain, but a person claiming to be an artist because they made a machine draw a picture isn’t an artist because the machine drew the picture? I mean, that’s a valid interpretation of my statement, and it’s consistent with literally everything else I’ve said in this thread. Maybe try rereading it with that interpretation.
And then study and memorize the Wikipedia article on the cooperative principle before you ever write a comment on the internet again
What a high-minded defense of two pull quotes and ‘get a load of this guy.’ You’re winding yourself up over “my statement,” when your statement was a dismissive scoff.
And speaking to everything else you’ve said - CGI is not the part an artist did.
You’ve drawn razor-sharp distinction between a prompt and an image, between score and music, between art and… pictures. Modeling and rigging and posing and framing are not what an audience looks at. They only see the render. A computer did that part. An artist did all that underlying work… but the picture is something else.
Yet obviously we’d both say CGI is art. That specific image only exists because of the effort put in by people. They used tools that make some things easy and other things trivial. We would not say real art requires creating perspective manually, and letting the machine do it is cheating. The technical details barely matter when someone puts feelings in your brain.
Except here, this new thing is different, so they faked it and it doesn’t count.
Are you actually understanding the question though? Do you understand that Duchamp did not sculpt the urinal, but literally just bought one already made and signed it?
This is literally just people speculating. He definitely made replicas of it later but the official story is the original piece known as Fountain (which eventually was lost) was a standard urinal purchased at a New York hardware store (J L Mott Ironworks).
And whether or not he actually made it is kind of besides the point. Like the whole point of Fountain is it demonstrates that it doesn’t actually matter who the specific individual is who made the physical manifestation of the object which represents the artwork. Like even if he never made replicas of it, even if we knew with 100% certainty that he literally just bought a urinal and submitted it to an art show that “accepts all submissions” just to see if they really would accept it, it would not diminish its quality as an artwork at all. On the contrary, it would only better serve the point it’s trying to make.
Maybe it’s more like as if a lot of artists made mundane art with shit as paint. Sure it’s art, but if shit is the claimed revolutionary part I’m not that interested
So here’s a fun argument. What’s different about AI?
Yeah yeah yeah, you didn’t draw that, but an idea was communicated through a visual medium. You can do that with unedited screenshots of Spongebob Squarepants. People can make art out of any damn thing. No tool is immune to human intent.
In generative AI, intent is basically all there is. The rest was done by a robit.
I’d argue that AI tools defer our intent onto the tool and that this reduces the art. Like, when using a traditional medium, every movement you make in an individual moment and every factor from the materials you use to the conditions you are working under is contributing to that creation.
But when making a text prompt, the only choices we’re making is the vocabulary we use and possibly the language we’re writing in. The end product will not change if the prompt is written by someone who is suffering or if it’s written at a specific time of day or if they’re getting paid to write.
So I don’t know if this makes it not art but I think it makes it objectively less art, by a very huge margin
And you think that this applies to buying a urinal off the shelf and then signing it?
you missed the bit that pointed out the urinals match no production model, and would not actually function if you tried to plumb them up.
They are unique, handcrafted pieces made to make you think they came off a factory floor!
That’s a good point, he definitely did less. And that seems intentional, perhaps Duchamp would have supported the freedom to call AI outputs art.
But there’s also more going on. He lived in a political context where art was being gatekept by fascists trying to limit cultural expression, he chose an object that is perceived as vulgar and unbelonging in an art installation, and he placed it somewhere in a social strata where it was considered to not belong. These are artistic choices, the art was in what he did and not the toilet itself.
You could say that you can do all those things with an AI creation. I think it would take a lot more work than feeding a prompt and getting an image. But maybe getting an image of something like one of those hideous AI slop babies and putting it in an museum would suffice. Or projecting it on a underserved community from a place where only tech moguls can see it in full resolution. I’m admittedly pretty stupid but it would make me reconsider.
Intent is not action. Intent is what you want your hand to do. If every child’s indecipherable stick figure is True Art, why not a plain-English description of what you want to see?
… and art for money doesn’t count?
I think it’s really weird how people who are categorically opposed to considering AI generated to be “art” seem really uncomfortable with the idea that some art can just be really bad or mediocre.
Because the stick figure is held in regard to who made it and when. We preserve and display our children’s stick figures all the time, not because they’re ever good but because of the conditions they were made under. So, still actual art.
The plain-english description would not be art because that’s a tool to make AI art with. It has no value without being used in a prompt.
No, art for money definitely counts as art, but it has a quality that distinguishes it from art that was made for no money. As an extreme example, see debates about zombie formalism and how it’s essentialy used for money laundering and power brokering. However AI generated art that is commissioned (for whatever reason) will be practically identical to a hobbyist’s output. So AI art is less art.
Self-professed AI haters insist every shitty scribble has Meaning™ in a way no render possibly could.
Because AI haters have a deeper relationship with Meaning™ than a person who got fascinated by a new seratonin-manipulating toy. If AI art enthusiasts were capable of understanding how the toy even worked beyond “magic machine makes my thoughts real”, they might feel a little more inclined to treasure their children’s drawings as well
Claiming that you have a deeper connection to meaning or artistic appreciation than someone who disagrees with you is about the most pretentious thing I’ve heard in a long while.
Consider that some people can understand how AI generation works, and still somehow disagree with you. Oh, and they can also appreciate art.
Do you think a photo of a can of soup can be art? What about the output of a math question specified to the point that the output is just a formality?
What about a urinal?
Statements can be pretentious and also entirely correct, your hurt feelings do not constitute a rebuttal
Whose feelings are hurt?
Did you stop reading after the first sentence? Calling someone pretentious isn’t typically intended as a rebuttal. Maybe finish reading next time.
Oh, and since it doesn’t seem like you know: “that statement is correct” isn’t an argument. It can be rubutted with a simple “no it’s not”.
Then they obviously don’t understand it very well since it’s still somehow providing them with novelty. Seriously, the parlor trick has a threshold if you’ve seen it enough. I happen to think object permanence is beyond infants but by your logic that would also be pretense because I just I haven’t met a baby yet who had it.
And as I’ve mentioned before, I’m pretty stupid. The fact that the “infinite art machine” couldn’t keep an ape like me pressing the novelty button kind of speaks to its inability to create anything meaningful. I am a very low bar for overcoming pattern recognition.
Ah, yes, because the disagreeing with you means “infatuated by the random picture machine”, right? No room for someone to think that it’s, I don’t know, another tool a person can use in the creation of art? Kinda like how not every cellphone picture is high art, but you wouldn’t say you can’t use a camera to make art.
But no, clearly you’re the arbiter of knowing how stuff works and, what art is, and how others appreciate it.
Yes, because developmental psychology is exactly the same as “art critique”.
It’s pretentious because you’re responding to someone who disagrees with you by asserting that either they don’t understand the subject technically, or their entirely subjective experience of art is somehow lesser than yours.
‘It’s not art because you’re shallow idiots’ is not an argument.
Functional adults can also draw incomprehensible squiggles, and haters insist that has magic qualia. Like any napkin scribble fully captures artistic intent, but a crystal clear depiction of a concept is disqualified.
It’s not art and you’re shallow idiots, happy now?
Well, incidentally I’m not particularly interested in arguing with people who are a certain level beyond touching grass for the foreseeable future. I don’t actually set out to change anyone’s mind, you actually just asked a very interesting question in this thread so I engaged.
If you are genuinely interested in exploring deeper, you should check out all the other places this comment section went. Some other people made some very excellent points. I can’t guarantee anyone can make you see art the way people who actually love art do, but you should at least be entertained.
‘It is too late, I have already drawn you as the soyjak.’
You never cared about this topic. You just wanna be in a club.
I concur with the sad detective, but disagree on one point. The prompt can be art in itself. After all, it’s literature, and literature is art. But the output of a machine that you feed that literature into isn’t art. It’s a commission, a request for someone else to draw a picture. But because no one is actually drawing a picture, the picture produced is not art. At best, it’s a preview of what it might look like of someone did draw the thing.
Like a photograph? A machine actually produced the image, the human just indicated what they would like the image to be of.
I feel like there’s a lot less need to apply caveats and exceptions if we accept that a machine can create art, but that what makes art interesting is what the person using the machine puts into the process.
If I take a picture of a bird with my phone while walking past, it’s less impressive than in I carefully find the right shot and angle, and meticulously take a photo. Same for an oil painting.
Some methods of creating an image require less work than others. What matters isn’t the difficulty, but what you actually put into it.
I’d go further and say appreciation is enough. If bliss.jpg was taken accidentally, it would mean the same thing to all the people who saw it.
This idea that beauty requires deliberate authorship is giving creationism.
Direct correlations, like I told mindbleach. A camera is a tool that does exactly what the photographer makes it do. An image generator takes the place of a commissioned artist. You describe what you want to see, and the machine generates it. Prompters aren’t artists, they’re commissioners. And since machines aren’t artists either, the output of a such a machine isn’t art.
Why do you draw a distinction between the “direct correlation” of a camera and how an image generator works? Image generators are just as deterministic as a camera is. If you give it the same inputs, it returns the same output. A lot of tools implicitly put a random input with the user supplied input, but if you keep that the same, there’s no difference.
Do you know how they generally work? Technically, not from what an interface presents you with since that’s variable.
Beyond that, I don’t think that determinism or simple relationships between action and output are what constitutes an art tool either. Otherwise any artistic tool that intentionally plays with randomness wouldn’t be art, and neither would a complicated tool or medium.
That is one of the more baffling tells for the sneer-club absolutists. How can a person spend hours tweaking a block of text and not imbue it with meaning?
But consider: I don’t play any instruments. I have written music. If you’re hearing it, did I make that?
The text can have meaning, but the image generated when you feed that text into a machine does not. You have no control over what the machine does with your inputs—there is no direct correlation between the words you type and the resulting image. If you’re commissioning an artist to make a work for you, then no matter how much care you put into describing the picture you want to see, you aren’t the one drawing it.
If there’s a direct correlation between the music you write and the output of a machine interpreting it, then yes.
How can an image not mean anything?
Your control over what the machine does is that input. It put your ideas into a JPEG, and that JPEG put those ideas into my brain. What do you mean, that cannot have meaning?
But it’s not music. Right? The part you’re listening to, the playback or the recording, is just a machine doing things. What you’re hearing is not music. It’s something else, somehow. What is it? Fuck if I know, but y’all are convinced there’s some other thing that a song can be.
Re: images. You have no control over what the machine does. You give it a prompt, it generates an image, you decide it’s good enough and save the picture, or it’s not good enough and tweak the prompt. You don’t control the machine. It doesn’t put your ideas into a jpeg, it generates a jpeg that’s consistent with the description you gave. If that picture is also consistent with your ideas, cool. You can’t give the machine an idea to put into the JPEG in the first place, because the machine cannot have ideas.
Re: music. The part I’m listening to, the playback or the recording, is a machine doing things that have a direct correlation with your input. You do control the machine, because it only does precisely what you tell it to do. You decide where every individual note goes, how every individual note sounds. There is, again, direct correlation between your input and the output.
Tweaking the prompt is control. The tool is weird and limited, but that is how you use it.
If you can describe your ideas, then an image consistent with that description… contains your ideas.
Damn, you’re right, so anything conveyed by the image must come from a human being. Wild.
Re: music, all the music I’ve written is procedural.
The difference is human labor being done by the artist who is creating the art. Ai images are generated using someone elses nonconsensually obtained and uncompensated labor. The prompter is not the artist, the millions of artists used to train ai are.
The nonconsensual acquisition and uncompensated labor are irrelevant. You can train an image generator on entirely paid-for and consensually obtained works, and the output remains not art because it’s produced by a machine incapable of imparting meaning on the images it generates
What is “meaning”, and how would I measure it to determine if an image was created with or without it? Can a human create art without meaning, or is the addition of meaning intrinsic to human actions?
Can a photograph count as art? What’s the difference between a photograph, created by a simple machine which bends light onto a chemical strip, and AI images, which feed letters into a complex equation and tweak colors in a grid to minimize an error equation?
They’re both deterministic processes whereby a human selected input is transformed via a human configured machine into an output.
The difference to me is the degree of effort the human involved puts in. One involves selecting all the parameters and doing composition, where the other is a linguistic composition. The aesthetics or artistry put into the language input is lost because it’s not represented in the output: a low effort throw away prompt can look similar to a very deliberately crafted one. The crafting just provides specificity of output. A skillful and artistic use of words has better and more pleasing modes of expression. Doesn’t mean it can’t happen, just means that it usually doesn’t.
Given that we’re literally in a post about a piece of art that was used to say “fuck your gatekeeping of what constitutes art”, the relish with which people are willing to say “nope, that can’t be art because it’s not traditional” is… Astounding. Right up there with saying “that can’t be art, it doesn’t look like anything”.
It doesn’t have to be measurable. Art is a form of communication, and communication must have meaning behind it. You can’t communicate no idea. Even if you tried, you would be communicating an idea. So no, a human cannot create art without meaning.
Of course a photograph counts as art. A camera is a tool that does exactly what the photographer makes it do. There is direct correlation between the actions of the photographer and the image the camera produces. Positioning, focus, field of view, timing, I’m sure there’s a million other things a photographer could list that act as inputs.
Contrast that with an AI, where you simply describe the picture that you want to see, and it generates a picture based on what you said. You can spend hours, days, weeks perfecting The Prompt so that it creates exactly the image you want to see, and you will never be the one who made the picture, because the machine is the one that made the picture. See paragraph one for why that picture can’t be art.
I never said AI generated pictures aren’t art because they’re not traditional, I said they’re not art because machines can’t think or feel.
How do you mean it doesn’t have to be measurable? You’re actively talking about it’s absence or presence, so how do you know it’s there if you can’t measure it?
I’m also a bit baffled by the assertion that you can’t communicate “no idea”, along with the assertion that an AI generated image doesn’t have meaning.
If it has no meaning, doesn’t that mean it’s communicating “no idea”?
How do you know something has meaning or not if it can’t be measured?
Personally, I think you can only know if a person tells you that they think it has meaning, and that that’s independent of how they made the thing, but I’m curious what you think.
I really don’t see the difference in your camera argument.
You don’t explain why a machine you control making an image is art in one case and not in the other. I’ve seen where you argue direct correlation, but the prompt is directly correlated to the output, allowing the individual to tweak and change the output. They don’t have total control over the output, but neither does an oil painter, someone blowing glass, or Pollock swinging a brush to create paint splatter. A medium, tool or technique can have limitations.
And what if I’m not telling it what I want? What if I give it a long string of numbers that I’m tweaking until the output matches my wish? That feels a lot less like “describing a commission”, even though it’s the same process.
Personally, I think it’s obvious that AI art is art in the same way that a photograph or using Photoshop can be art. It’s a tool just like any other. It’s just currently more likely to be boring because it invites shallow art, and for what it needs as the artists input it’s more direct to just use that as the art. If you can jam your vision into a prompt, you can almost certainly convey it better with the words themselves, so you’d skip the tool and just write.
Incredible. This tool, unique among all human creations, is immune to human intent. Paint carries it when splashed, dribbled, or exploded with a grenade, but! AI cannot possibly convey a person’s thoughts. The only images that cannot mean anything. No concepts communicated, no commentary made, and obviously nothing to critique.
Yeah, because you aren’t describing the picture you want to see to the brush, and letting it generate the picture for you without any further input. A paint grenade requires a hand to throw it, and there is a direct correlation between what the hand does and what the paint grenade does. There is no such direct correlation when you tell a machine “make an art piece depicting three children in a trench coat trying to sneak into a building labelled ‘the internet’ with a cardboard cutout of a bouncer in their way.” You are a commissioner, not an artist, and the machine isn’t an artist either, which means the image produced is not art.
As if tweaking a prompt seventeen times has less intent than whether your finger twitched while lobbing a paint-covered grenade.
So I’m an art commissioner, except the fictional scenario depicted visually is not art, because it was created by a robot, except the robot can’t create things, so it’s not an artist, because what it makes isn’t art, because it’s not an artist, and oh no I’ve gone cross-eyed.
If it’s not art, what are we looking at?
Again, the prompt that you spend all that time tweaking can be considered literature, which is art. The image you get when you feed that literature into a machine and tell it to do its thing isn’t art.
I compared you to a commissioner because that’s literally the role you’re playing. I didn’t say the robot can’t create things, I said the robot can’t create art. There is no meaning behind the carbdboard cutout of a bouncer because the machine does not know what cardboard or bouncers are. It doesn’t have any thoughts or feelings or opinions or intent regarding anything in the image it produces. It doesn’t know what age verification is, let alone have anything to say about the subject.
You’re being so incredibly disingenuous here. I haven’t made a single circular argument. My position has consistently been that these machines cannot create art because they cannot think or feel. They are not analogous to a brush, because there is no direct correlation between the input you provide and the output it produces.
A picture.
Yet the image conveyed that it’s about age verification.
You know what the image is about, and if an image is about anything, that is meaning. Should your philosophy require blaming a person, there’s only one human in the loop.
The robot doesn’t know what bouncers or cardboard are, yet it can represent them, on command. Someone used those concepts to visually communicate an abstract thought. You’ve demonstrably understood their intent. Yet you blame the robot, then say robots can’t be blamed, so this image cannot do what it’s already done.
The model is simultaneously too much of an inert tool to ever imbue qualia, and too active a participant to credit any meatbag.
But if I dip a grenade in a paintbucket, then every charred flake goes precisely were I intended.
I’m starting to get bored with this, and I feel like my entire opinion can be summed up by
If I tell a human to draw a cool red dragon sitting on a pile of gold, then I didn’t draw that dragon, that other person did. Replacing that human with an AI doesn’t suddenly mean that I drew it. Ergo, prompt engineers are not visual artists.
Art necessitates intent on the part of an artist, and machines have no intent. The machine has no opinion about why the bouncer is there, nor the implications of children accessing the internet without actual age verification. Those elements are there on the picture solely because that is what was described in the text, and not to convey any meaning.
It is meaningless because the “artist” didn’t mean anything when they made it.
It’s also just not a very interesting piece in general. It’s shallow at best. Just because I can see that the different elements represent different things doesn’t mean it means anything. It doesn’t have anything to say about its very subject matter. They’re just there.
AI isn’t a tool, you do not wield it, you just submit requests and get what you get. You might as well call yourself a chef for placing an order at a restaurant.
Writing a recipe doesn’t make you a chef, but you still came up with that dish.
It’s still food.
I sorta got into that in my other comment
I feel that argument struggles in the context of this post though, where the labor is adding a signature onto a toilet. A similar amount of labor went into people typing up their prompts as went in from someone that’s well known adding on a signature. Now, I say this as someone that thinks AI art is wasteful since it uses up so much water and electricity, and is mostly done unethically since the art sourced was mostly done without consent or fair compensation.
Actually, the post’s follow up images posit that he MADE those toilets, since no two are the same and they don’t match existing designs. Saying he put in as little effort as AI “artists” is misunderstanding his work.
That’s the thing, people didn’t care about it till it had a well known person’s name actually attached to the piece though. It was submitted as just a toilet with a signature from an unknown person, it wasn’t originally known that it was from Duchamp.
To me, it feels like there are a few important questions Duchamp poses:
Serious question: does that matter?
Most people think he bought an off-the-shelf urinal, and they still understand, that would be art. It would still function as commentary. The object’s existence in a museum is a jab.
The flipside is-- y’know that handwritten card that goes around? Like ‘I would rather see your scribbliest stick figure than your fanciest AI slop.’ The anti-AI crowd loves it, and it means a lot to them. What would change if we found out it was made in Qwen?
Yes. It’s an added layer of meaning where he put in the effort, and still made a toilet. This is not a low-effort shitpost, even if it looks to be one from a basic perspective. And when you challenge the meaning of art, it says a lot that the effortmade is impossible to determine at a quick glance.
And I don’t know if it means a lot to people, or if it’s just a thing a lot of people agree with. And if it was made in a shitty ai slop generator, then it would change it from “defiant speach” to “I don’t agree with what I say, I just want you to like me.” And based on every piece of AI I have ever seen, even the stuff AI bros like to boast about, there would be a spelling error they didn’t notice.
The low-effort shitpost everyone thinks it is, would still have meaning.
I will remind you we’re talking about Fountain. Duchamp trolled the art world by meticulously recreating something trivial. If someone popularized an anti-AI screed, using AI, that would be funniest goddamn thing - and a complete rebuttal.
Imagine the glee in that reveal. Some guy spent hours rendering, tweaking, rendering, tweaking, giggling to himself the whole time, until it produced exactly the image you’ve seen. All flaws excused by the proud AI haters, the same way they (and its text) would excuse literally anything a hand does with a pen. And then - ta-da! Here’s the prompt and the seed! You all found meaning in a generated image, and experienced emotional connection because of it. Get loved, idiot. Get camaraderie’d.
Then you get to watch people twist in knots. It never meant anything to them! Anymore! It’s complete trash, and they’re throwing out all their favorite band’s t-shirts, because they always hated them. It tricked them… but not in any way that confers intent.
Yes, it would have meaning, but less.
Jesus christ, you’re having more delusions than AI. Do you honestly think anyone would care about a picture of some text they agree with so much that the rug pull will affect them in any meaningful way? Do you think that guy hitting refresh on his prompt generator is putting in meaningful effort? Do you think anyone but AI chuds will excuse the blatantly obvious flaws the way you guys do?
Even at this second, I can’t even remember what the image looks like. It doesn’t mean anything to me. I just agree with the words.
I’m sure your little fiction brings you comfort, but it’s just fiction.
… the words are its meaning.
Those words say: flaws are fine, for anything done by hand.
If Fountain was an off-the-shelf urinal, would you go crack it with a hammer? That’s how people genuinely talk about generated images. They latch onto terms like intent and declare the robot cannot provide it, therefore, some image they quite enjoyed is now a useless husk. As if they can delete the emotional response from their brain.
Like a clever visual metaphor doesn’t parse, if it was rendered instead of scribbled.
Stupid question, of course it matters
Ah, so it wasn’t art for the years that people thought it was a store bought urinal? And it currently exists in a superposition state of art and not-art because it’s not actually known if he sculpted it or not?
Use your words.
Fuck intellectual property. Culture belongs to us all.
And a 20 GB model trained on a billion images retains less than eight pixels of each.
I certainly agree that intellectual property is bullshit and should be abolished with the caveat that it should be abolished after capitalism is done away with. However, labor value ≠ intellectual property. I don’t care that the stolen labor used in the end product is minimal, I care that the labor was done by artists and used without compensation by a corporate entity. I care that someone then takes advantage of those artists labor by prompting a machine who uses that stolen labor to generate their idea, for which they had the most minimal intentional input, and calls themselves an artist. I also care that throughout this entire process a corporation is making money off a process that would be impossible without the artists. You say culture belongs to us all but ai cannot produce culture, it offers nothing new, it is an aggregate of ideas that already exist. Cultures change a grow, they are living things that ai offers nothing to.
Tools don’t have culture, people do. New subcultures exist for this tool. Like primitive CGI, it produces images differently. Onlookers seeing the limitations, and offering “Well why don’t you just draw that?,” do not get it.
Would you feel any differently if some collective of artists created a model entirely from their own works, specifically so people can describe images into existence? The end result would not be any different.
I would feel differently about that actually. I still wouldn’t call anything created through prompt a piece of art created by the prompter though. I might call the ai itself a form of art. I might call the prompted images art but the art would have come from and belong to the artists who created the ai
Why? They didn’t make those images, any more than you would. They made the thing that made those images.
Attributing authorship if they write the prompt, but not if you write the prompt, is a religious debate.
The artists did make the images generated by their ai. They put their labor into creating the art that feeds it and they have the ability to curate what art goes into the ai in order to give it a meaning or message. The major factors in what I consider art are labor, intent, and meaning. The prompter lacks these. Their labor, if you would consider prompting to be labor, is absolutely minimal, you could not possible input less labor. Their intent is missing. Think of an oil painting for example. Each brush stroke is intentional, they all have purpose whether it be for representing the beauty of a scene through the lense that they see it and want the viewer to see it or for creating a message they want the viewer to understand. How can the prompter accomplish this? The prompter might give the image meaning but how is the observer meant to understand it when the prompter cannot guide them?
The ai these artists built and curated might be able to translate their message, guided by their intent, and created by their labor if built for that purpose and for that reason I consider images created by it to be their art. Who prompts the ai makes no difference.
I include might, in both my comments because this remains to be seen.
But does the JPEG have Buddha nature?
Sorry, taking this seriously. So… if I use their tool… and enter a lurid combination of popular cartoon characters, morally indefensible fetishes, and prominent political figures… it’s their fault. They made that art. The image you closed immediately but cannot unsee, contains absolutely none of my meaning. It is immaculate of my intent, and I cannot be blamed.
No matter how many hours I spent getting Frieren’s spit to land in Starmer’s ear.
Lol somebody invested in AI
It doesn’t retain pixels at all. A better way to describe what it retains (though not accurate) is brush strokes. It retains much more of the information than the raw byte count could imply. It’s effectively compressed by capturing relationships of pixels rather than the pixels themselves.
You and I know that - critics might not. They talk like image files go into the model and stay there. One guy insisted that training was no different from encoding a JPEG, because… numbers.
The information gleaned from any single image is hilariously minimal. It’s insulting that anything recognizable comes out. A prolific artist’s contribution means their style is distinguished from the rest of humanity by only a handful of bits.
I would say the difference is that intent is not controlled by the artist. Sure, they give a prompt, but they don’t actually control the mechanism that creates the output. In fact, the people who create it can’t even parse what it’s doing. It’s just a bunch of seemingly random weights.
When you’re holding a paintbrush, or sculpting clay, or whatever else you’re doing, you’re controlling the tool and manifesting your intent through it. With AI you aren’t. There can be intent by the creator but there’s no intent in the tool.
Demoscene sizecoders rely on pseudorandom patterns all the time. They find what they need. Maybe they didn’t sculpt those mountains, draw those textures, or arrange those notes - but it’s still art, and they made it.
Inscrutability means people gotta fuck around with these tools to get closer to what they want. The robot does stupid things and must be punished. Prompts get hammered into place over ridiculous details.
If an image took effort, conveys ideas, and looks good, what could that be besides art?
Did Marcel Duchamp play some kind of role in the manufacturing of this urinal?
You didn’t read the whole post, and it shows
We don’t actually know if he bought the urinal or made it. The screenshot of a Tumblr post just says it’s a theory, and if you look into it elsewhere it’s just not known.
But, it doesn’t actually matter. Would it become “not art” if it turned out it was a store bought urinal?
The entire point of the post is “no”.
I definitely read the whole post. Maybe you can let me know what I’m missing. From what I can see, someone asked why a guy buying a urinal and then signing it gets to be art but not an AI generated image. Another person responded by saying
But how does any of that apply to Duchamp’s fountain? He did not have any control over the inputs that went into making the urinal. He didn’t hold any clay. He didn’t even paint anything unless you wanna get cute about what a signature is.
Go read the OP again. All of it. You didn’t read it, or you missed part of it, or you misunderstood something.
This is not me saying “I think you’re wrong.” It is saying your comment is fundamentally missing context that is in the OP. You’ll know what we mean when you see it.
In my opinion, you would be better served reading a history of Duchamp and a study of the piece rather than taking for granted screenshots of random people on the Internet. It’s true that we don’t actually know if Fountain is actually a readymade sculpture or not but the idea that most art scholars believe that it is not a ready-made sculpture is simply untrue. In any case, whether or not it is actually a ready-made sculpture doesn’t really have a bearing on its quality as an artwork. On the contrary, the whole point of the piece is to demonstrate that it is not important who actually made the physical object which represents the artwork.
Now that you understand that it is not a conventional opinion that Duchamp secretly made Fountain himself, I would like you to reconsider your answer to the question. And if you don’t believe me that it’s not a conventional opinion, I invite you to consult with literally any encyclopedia that has an article on the piece.
You are wrong, cope
Yup, definitely didn’t read the post. He submitted several urinals, and they do not match any urinals manufactured around the time of his submission. Add in his apparent skill with ceramics and, yes, he DID make those toilets.
Then again, if AI bros could pay close attention, they wouldn’t like AI images.
You’re taking a screenshot of a social media post at face value. If you look anywhere else it’s not regarded as a prominent notion that he secretly made it himself. Hell, I can’t even find reference that he worked in ceramics.
I’m not particularly pro-ai, but people being so against it that they’re willing to take screenshots of Tumblr as proof rather than consider someone’s argument is … Annoying.
It’s proof, not that he made the toilet, but that they didn’t read the post they claim to have “definitely read.” We’re discussing the post.
And you might not pay attention, but I do. I checked your post history, where you claim AI is intelligent, and AI art is art, this is not the first AI thread you’ve defended AI in, and your most recent post (rather than comment) is on stable diffusion. You are very much pro-AI, and you’re being disingenuous by claiming you’re not.
? You mean where I shared a picture I thought was fun something like a year ago?
Fuck off with claiming you know how someone feels on a topic when you’re clearly not even able to understand what they’re saying.
Yes, I believe AI is intelligent. With the caveat that the bar for intelligence is low enough to include thermostats.
Yes, I think AI art is art. *Shitty, low effort art, like from a dentist office.".
Without knowing to what you’re referring, I can’t tell you why you’re full of shit with your “defending AI” claim. I’ve defended the academic discipline of AI, which is different from the generative AI tools we seem to be discussing. I’ve told people they don’t understand AI tools, but that’s not “defense”.
Did you read the ones where I’ve said that we intuitively feel that the way LLMs scrape data is unfair, but that that unfairness isn’t represented in copyright law, so rather than trying to twist current law to fit, we should understand how it actually works and adjust laws to match our sense of fairness?
What about where I’ve pointed out that LLMs can’t think, but generate statistically likely continuations of input, hence propagating misunderstanding and creating misunderstanding because people are using a language tool as though it’s a knowledge tool?
Did you consider that maybe I’m not pro AI or anti AI because I view it as a tool, and one wouldn’t be pro belt sander or anti belt sander, but rather irritated at people who misunderstand them, frustrated that we’re spending billions on the least useful sander for what it’s being used for because it’s the most magic looking, and annoyed that we’re jamming sanders into word processors when no one asked for that?
Anyway, we were talking about how you’d rather believe random Tumblr screenshots than reality when you got caught up trying to enforce your orthodoxy that anyone who doesn’t passionately hate anything that could be perceived as being AI related or supporting is clearly an ignorant techbro fetishizing the singularity. You’ll be damned if you need to understand what any of those words mean to know that you hate them.
I don’t know that I give a shit what the post says in regards to if he made it or bought it for the purposes of the question. It’s irrelevant to the point actually being discussed, to say nothing of “seemingly not true”.
Also, since you’re very concerned with addressing what the post says: people overly obsessed with enforcing the form that art takes are fascists, per the post. Feel like you’re kinda missing the forest for the trees there.
AI art is art, it’s right there in the name. It’s often perfectly aesthetic to look at too.
The issue is that there’s nothing deeper behind it, and you know there’s nothing deeper behind it. The most blase painting done by a human has a thinking person behind it, and in some way the art is an expression of at least their intent to create it.
For the most part, the intent to create an aesthetic image isn’t particularly interesting. But if you convey an intent or something that’s more compelling, you have more compelling art.
Other art has been done by random process and, as you mentioned, it becomes much more about the context than the actual piece.
Buffalo wings, the name proves nothing.
If you go by the language, AI (artificial intelligence) is intelligent. No, it isn’t. The words don’t mean anything until proven. I would argue art requires intent and intelligence. “AI art” does not.
The term is created by capitalists selling a product. That doesn’t make it an accurate description.
AI is intelligent, it just lacks sapience, sentience and other things humans have.
The term was created by academics to describe the usage of computers to solve problems previously only solvable by humans or other intelligent creatures.
One of the things learned most quickly is that “intelligence” is a much lower bar to cross than you would expect.
A thermostat can measure how the temperature changes in response to it’s actions, and then apply that information later to alter how it heats and cools.
That’s intelligence. It’s very simple intelligence, unless it’s a particularly odd thermostat, but that doesn’t make it not intelligence.
If someone hangs a print of a famous painting on the wall, have they hung art on the wall? The print required zero creative skill or intelligence, and was a rote process done without human intention. It is still a creation chosen for it’s artistic value, in this case for being a representation of something that’s indisputably art.
Is an object representing art itself art? I say yes, if someone says it is.
Can poetry be art? What about poetry that describes a scene, or a point in time?
I’m not saying that an AI generated image is interesting or good art. If someone swinging a brush at random can create art, or playing a set of radios all at once can be art, then I don’t see why using a pile of math, numbers and random noise to make an image can’t be art.
Pollack and Cage can be interesting because of what they intended to say with their art, and how they chose to say it inside their medium.
I’m not going to say that the process of art becoming interesting because of the intent of the artist is only valid in certain media. AI image generation just happens to be a medium or tool that is nearly entirely the intent and creativity of the artist. The idea for an image, no matter how unique and ornate, isn’t that interesting if that’s all there is. That’s why the vast majority of AI art just isn’t interesting. Regardless of the results, a few sentences or a short paragraph describing a scene is unlikely to provide much interest. It’s dentist office art. A pretty picture you enjoy seeing and then forgot.
It’s totally possible for that sentence or paragraph to be compelling or interesting, but in that case, you don’t need the associated image.
Unless that combination is part of it, or something.
Point being: “art” isn’t some mystical human only thing. The threshold for both it and intelligence is very low.
Being an example of art or intelligence doesn’t make it interesting or clever.
Don’t gatekeep art based on the medium or method. AI art, due to being able to create aesthetic results easily, usually lacks the inspiration, creativity, or depth of equivalent not-ai art, so it’s not nearly as impressive.
Like how a photorealistic painting of a swimming pool is significantly more impressive than an actual photo of that swimming pool. It’s not that photography can’t be art, it’s that a perfect representation of a scene isn’t impressive or interesting in that medium or with that tool.
It is not. A key component of intelligence is being able to infer knowledge based on generalizations of previously obtained knowledge. Convolution neural networks are not capable of this. They need to be trained on the data to predict results. They can’t conceptualize abstract ideas and apply them to predict never-before-seen circumstances.
Correct, but that’s not what the modern usage is referring to. The academic term is referring to artificial general intelligence (AGI). The thing the capitalists are trying to sell using the term AI currently is just a predictive model.
No one is calling the printer an artist. Yes, the print is a piece of art. It’s a copy of something created with intent by the artist, not the printer. It doesn’t really matter that it’s a copy. That’s a very stupid argument if you’re going to “ship of Thesius” a print. It’s still a version of the original, just not the original itself.
How do you swing a brush randomly? Have you tried doing something random? You can’t really. Maybe they could build a machine that swings it randomly, though I’d say the act of building the machine is intentional, and artistic. The thing it creates is a piece of that process.
Because there’s no intention. A pile of math and numbers can be art. That’s all that anything digital is. They aren’t necessarily though. Without some intent behind those numbers being a particular set of numbers it isn’t art though.
How so? I’m assuming “artist” here is referring to the prompt creator. Their intent is not taken into account by the AI tool. Only their prompt is. If you put the same prompt in then it’ll generate different results each time, even if the intent of the prompt creator is the same. That would imply their intent is not part of the creation process.
I never implied such a thing. I think a sufficiently intelligent creature other than humans could create art. Again though, the product currently being called “AI” is not intelligent though. It can’t abstract ideas into concept that can be applied to unrelated subjects. That’s what would be required to make art.
I’m not. I’m gatekeeping it on being creative. I don’t care that it’s digital.
I love when people answer their own question
CGI isn’t art, then.
This is an incredibly bad-faith interpretation of my comment
… it’s a counterargument.
It’s a rhetorical technique applying the things you say to closely related topics, to form a contradiction, and indicate you should not believe those things. Like getting Graham Linehan to rigidly define ‘chair’ and then showing him a picture of a horse.
If “you didn’t draw that” means something’s not art, what about all the other art people didn’t draw?
Yeah, that’s what’s disingenuous here. You took the individual words in my comment absolutely literally when it obviously isn’t meant to be absolutely literal. I’ve already said that literature and music are art, so obviously I meant something else.
Is it possible that what I meant was that the difference is that the person claiming to be an artist after sculpting a fountain is an artist because they sculpted a fountain, but a person claiming to be an artist because they made a machine draw a picture isn’t an artist because the machine drew the picture? I mean, that’s a valid interpretation of my statement, and it’s consistent with literally everything else I’ve said in this thread. Maybe try rereading it with that interpretation.
And then study and memorize the Wikipedia article on the cooperative principle before you ever write a comment on the internet again
What a high-minded defense of two pull quotes and ‘get a load of this guy.’ You’re winding yourself up over “my statement,” when your statement was a dismissive scoff.
And speaking to everything else you’ve said - CGI is not the part an artist did.
You’ve drawn razor-sharp distinction between a prompt and an image, between score and music, between art and… pictures. Modeling and rigging and posing and framing are not what an audience looks at. They only see the render. A computer did that part. An artist did all that underlying work… but the picture is something else.
Yet obviously we’d both say CGI is art. That specific image only exists because of the effort put in by people. They used tools that make some things easy and other things trivial. We would not say real art requires creating perspective manually, and letting the machine do it is cheating. The technical details barely matter when someone puts feelings in your brain.
Except here, this new thing is different, so they faked it and it doesn’t count.
Dumbest comment yet
Are you actually understanding the question though? Do you understand that Duchamp did not sculpt the urinal, but literally just bought one already made and signed it?
…he did make them. It shows the variations between them in the pictures in the post.
This is literally just people speculating. He definitely made replicas of it later but the official story is the original piece known as Fountain (which eventually was lost) was a standard urinal purchased at a New York hardware store (J L Mott Ironworks).
And whether or not he actually made it is kind of besides the point. Like the whole point of Fountain is it demonstrates that it doesn’t actually matter who the specific individual is who made the physical manifestation of the object which represents the artwork. Like even if he never made replicas of it, even if we knew with 100% certainty that he literally just bought a urinal and submitted it to an art show that “accepts all submissions” just to see if they really would accept it, it would not diminish its quality as an artwork at all. On the contrary, it would only better serve the point it’s trying to make.
Maybe it’s more like as if a lot of artists made mundane art with shit as paint. Sure it’s art, but if shit is the claimed revolutionary part I’m not that interested
So what, sure. Doesn’t mean I have to like it. I certainly have seen ai that was cool even.
Gatekeeping art never really works for me.