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.
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.
I sorta got into that in my other comment
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.
A flimsy guard against children acting adult on the internet has nothing to say, says meaning understander.
Someone should’ve scribbled it on a napkin, then it would intend to communicate an idea. It would be art!
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.