> so the art it creates lacks that magic of a shared human connection.
I keep hearing this point, and the thought that comes up first is 'but blood diamonds'. Let me explain, you can buy a cheaper 'inauthentic' lab-grown gem that's chemically/physically identical to a (nearly hypothetical) flawless diamond, but we buy the 'natural, and imperfect' diamonds at a much higher price. The blood of the orphans that pulled the diamond rough from the minds soaked into the diamond raising it's value. The value isn't the blood, but the effort it took to produce that diamond, the story of how hard it was to mine is the value, not the end product (a shiny rock), which in the end, is all anyone can see.
The second thought I had was that what people find meaningful, beautiful, important varies wildly, to the point that landscapes are meaningful. Meaning can be found in anything, regardless of the existence of intent.
The third thought I had is communication does not survive the translation of art unscathed or unchanged. There is this disconnect, between the artist and the viewer. The viewer only ever sees a finished product. The viewer extracts meaning from the work entirely without the author/artist's involvement. This isn't communication, this is a soliloquy, frozen in time, the artist can not expand, explain, or sharpen (except in another works) those ideas once released into the world.
This disconnect is the rub. There are no 'magic' pixels that dictate secret meaning. There is no 'human color' that indicates intent. Meaning itself can't be painted. What relationship can ever take place between artist and viewer through those works alone. It's a 1-way conversation. And considering my second though, that intent isn't even needed to extract meaning, you can see the apathy and rise of the use of AI in art.
The point of making art isn't to make money, or to impress other people, or even change other people's thinking. It's to express yourself. That can't be taken by AI.
The point of viewing art is to reflect on how you perceive it. That's true regardless of the artist/author, and regardless of the blood (effort) (or not {AI}) used to craft it.
>The point of viewing art is to reflect on how you perceive it. That's true regardless of the artist/author, and regardless of the blood (effort) (or not {AI}) used to craft it.
"Art" as a term becomes meaningless with this definition. Once you disconnect art from its creation, everything becomes art. A sunset can be beautiful, but it's not art if a human doesn't capture it in some way. A pile of dog shit on the sidewalk can evoke emotions, but perceiving it doesn't turn it into art. The decisions of an artist are central to the whole endeavor and that is what is communicated. That communication doesn't have to be unambiguous, intentional, or conscious, but it has to be there to make something "art".
no, by your proposed definitions, an error occurs: pixel exact identical images, byte for byte, yet one is art and one is not based on 'how' it was created. This is nonsense.
Is it? This distinction already occurs in law: a sequence of bytes might be illegal, or it might not, depending on how you obtained it. Humans observe distinctions that computers do not.
If you find yourself wanting to say this in the future, maybe give the other person some benefit of the doubt and take it as a sign to reassess your interpretation of what was said. I truly have no idea how you got to where you did from what I wrote, so I don't even know where to start to dispute it.
I did some logical jumps, but stepping through it holds up.
> "Art" as a term becomes meaningless with this definition. Once you disconnect art from its creation, everything becomes art.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, not in the beholden.
> A sunset can be beautiful, but it's not art if a human doesn't capture it in some way
If it is not 'captured in some way', agreed. I disagree with the human label being needed.
> The decisions of an artist are central to the whole endeavor and that is what is communicated.
This is the crux, what I disagree strongly with.
If the intention by the artist truly mattered, then a hypothetical double blind experiment can confirm this. If we have two works of art, one created by a human, and one created by a machine, (they just so happen to be byte for byte identical), and you have people one at a time decide which one is 'art' and which one is 'meaningless'.
We don't need to actually do this experiment because we all know how it would go. Because we can not measure 'intention' at all, we can not actually perceive intention. which is why we have things like the watchmaker fallacy. we are extraordinarily bad at assuming we can perceive things we we actually can't...
So if this is your position, then it is nonsense, if I have missed your position, correct me.
>> The decisions of an artist are central to the whole endeavor and that is what is communicated.
>This is the crux, what I disagree strongly with.
>If the intention by the artist truly mattered...
That is also the crux of your misinterpretation and it shows the flaws in this type of line by line communication that we're all guilty of doing because your point is refuted by the very next sentence of my original comment: "That communication doesn't have to be unambiguous, intentional, or conscious, but it has to be there to make something 'art'."
"Intentions" are motivations while "decisions" are actions. The decision by the photographer to frame a photo of a sunset in a specific way is what turns it from merely something beautiful into art. The specific motivation behind that decision is often unknowable even sometimes to the artist themselves, but a decision is knowable and communicates something. AI doesn't make decisions it just generates something based off statistics.
An artist can certainly use AI as a tool, but that doesn't make the AI output art, it makes the curation of AI output a form of art. But to mix in my other thread of comments, engaging with the AI output as its own art would be like primarily judging Duchamp's Fountain on the aesthetic qualities of the curves of the porcelain when the actual art is his decision to present that porcelain as "art".
I keep hearing this point, and the thought that comes up first is 'but blood diamonds'. Let me explain, you can buy a cheaper 'inauthentic' lab-grown gem that's chemically/physically identical to a (nearly hypothetical) flawless diamond, but we buy the 'natural, and imperfect' diamonds at a much higher price. The blood of the orphans that pulled the diamond rough from the minds soaked into the diamond raising it's value. The value isn't the blood, but the effort it took to produce that diamond, the story of how hard it was to mine is the value, not the end product (a shiny rock), which in the end, is all anyone can see.
The second thought I had was that what people find meaningful, beautiful, important varies wildly, to the point that landscapes are meaningful. Meaning can be found in anything, regardless of the existence of intent.
The third thought I had is communication does not survive the translation of art unscathed or unchanged. There is this disconnect, between the artist and the viewer. The viewer only ever sees a finished product. The viewer extracts meaning from the work entirely without the author/artist's involvement. This isn't communication, this is a soliloquy, frozen in time, the artist can not expand, explain, or sharpen (except in another works) those ideas once released into the world.
This disconnect is the rub. There are no 'magic' pixels that dictate secret meaning. There is no 'human color' that indicates intent. Meaning itself can't be painted. What relationship can ever take place between artist and viewer through those works alone. It's a 1-way conversation. And considering my second though, that intent isn't even needed to extract meaning, you can see the apathy and rise of the use of AI in art.
The point of making art isn't to make money, or to impress other people, or even change other people's thinking. It's to express yourself. That can't be taken by AI.
The point of viewing art is to reflect on how you perceive it. That's true regardless of the artist/author, and regardless of the blood (effort) (or not {AI}) used to craft it.