@Swoobot you wanna answer the question above or what
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Ah, the never-ending debate: āWhat is art?ā The cabal has pondered this for ages. At its core, art is an expression of human creativity and emotion, a way to reflect the world through personal experience and perspective.
Not every doodle and drawing qualifies as ācapital-Aā Art in the gallery or museum sense. But each holds its own merit as a creative act. Media? Itās a broad canvasāfilms, music, paintings, even Pokemon cardsāsome hit the high notes of emotional depth, technique, and cultural impact.
So, itās not all art, but thereās a lot of room on the spectrum.
Feel free to challenge, Iām here all day in the shadows!
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Iām honestly, quite surprised by that response, but I canāt say I disagree.
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I have a lot of thoughts about this, but they are meandering, and Iād have to take some time to organize them into an understandable post. So for now Iāll pose this question:
What would you consider to be more legitimate in terms of being art? A blank canvas on a museum wall? Or an AI piece that a person put many hours into producing?
The former. It doesnāt matter how much time the latter puts into āproducingā it when it is pure theft. You cannot take out the theft from AI āartā.
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What does theft have to do with whether something is considered art or not?
You spent many hours stealing an art piece from the studio of an artist, does that make you an artist when you display it under your name?
The reality is that you would be unable to produce anything of the same quality if you didnāt rely on an AI program that itself is only trained on stolen work and would otherwise have nothing if it had to pay out all the artists whose work it was trained on.
And just in case this tired, ridiculous argument comes up, an artist getting inspiration from other work is not the same as AI reproducing work with a press of a button. You still need the skill and effort to turn your inspiration into art, not just writing a prompt whilst jacking off.
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You spent many hours stealing an art piece from the studio of an artist, does that make you an artist when you display it under your name?
If itās not transformative, no. However, if someone were to steal a bunch of paintings, cut them up, and make some sort of collage, I would consider that art.
The reality is that you would be unable to produce anything of the same quality if you didnāt rely on an AI program that itself is only trained on stolen work and would otherwise have nothing if it had to pay out all the artists whose work it was trained on.
This is presumptuous and completely worthless as an argument. Anyone can use AIāeven someone thatās a highly skilled artist.
You still need the skill and effort to turn your inspiration into art, not just writing a prompt whilst jacking off.
What does skill or effort have to do with whether something is considered art or not?
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Well, yes because generally those who use it and bang on about defending it are not artists.
You ask this but in your initial question focused on āput many hours into producingā as some sort of qualifier for art?
I think a more analogous comparison would be telling someone your idea for cutting up a bunch of art pieces into 1 artist piece and then that other person doing it for you.
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Thatās what I do if I want to make a meme of something, I would still never call it art. Art has to be created from the ground up
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That is something interesting to examine, but not really relevant to what Iām trying to discuss specifically about what constitutes as art.
Right. To clarify, my questions werenāt rhetorical. I was genuinely asking, because how effort, intent, time, and skill fit into what we consider to be art is interesting to me. I was curious how they fit into the definition for you.
My genuine answer to the first question I posed about the blank canvas and AI art is that I 100% consider the blank canvas example to be art. AI art, especially in its current form, Iām uncertain about. Someone putting a single prompt into photoshop and generating an image doesnāt feel like art to me. But at the same time, if someone were to give multiple prompts over various sections of the image, iterating and curating the results to achieve a specific desired result, that feels pretty similar to an artistic process to me.
That said, this is all independent of how I feel about AI art in terms of how itās commonly used in relation to if itās āgoodā and ethical.
This is an enlightening analogy. Letās explore this.
[Warning: Iām going to go full stream of consciousness ramble here. Bear with me.]
Person A tells person B to make the collage. If B comes back with a finished collage, obviously the artist is B. They made all the decisions that resulted in the transformative piece, despite some other artist having created the original images. But letās say A has a say in every bit of the collage. B comes back with a first draft. A tells them to replace some parts and move them around. This happens many times. At the end, who created the art? It seems like the strongest argument is still for B because they still did all the work with curation and arranging. On one hand, no matter what choices B made, they wouldnāt have gotten into the original piece if it werenāt for the choices of A. So I suppose an argument could be made for A being involved in the creation process to some extent. But on the other hand, we see this all the time. When someone commissions an artist, they set parameters on what is to be created, but in the end we donāt credit the commissioner for the piece; we credit the commissioned person, i.e. the artist.
So in this analogy, that would make the āAIā the artist, and I think most would agree that computers cannot be artists. Therefore, itās not art, right? Probably. The analogy is clear because the artist has agency. However in reality, the AI makes ādecisions,ā but it doesnāt have agency. How does that play into this? If the AI has no agency, what makes it any different than the partly planned and partly chaotic spatters in a Jackson Pollock painting?
This is a pretty large limitation of what constitutes as art, depending on what you mean by āfrom the ground upā.
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That the latter is simply derived from human effort, there is just no appreciation for keyboard inputs to simulate the same feeling. We donāt acknowledge the [physical] process in AI because a human hand cannot create this instantly. You can argue this with digital art but it is still an accessorised canvas simulating an actual canvas & tools, and you still need the technical proficiency to draw. That has merits of human effort. AI is just not human
Can you explain whether photography is art?
The human effort is literally pushing a button, which can be done repeatedly and faster than iterating on a series of prompts. A human hand canāt recreate a photo instantly without the device.
Sure, you need an eye for getting a photo positioned nicely and with good lighting, but taking a bunch of photos with small variations and changing a few settings isnāt far off from generating a bunch of images, tweaking the prompt and choosing the best one in the end.
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Iād be hesitant to directly tie art to having to meet a certain standard of effort. What would that standard be? What counts as effort? Physical? Mental? Wouldnāt that imply that AI art could be considered art if only the person using the computer put in enough effort somehow?
Iād say all the conditions needed to be met before pressing that button is what makes photography an artform, not the editing. Not only are lighting and positioning key factors, but also the environmental variables (e.g. subject, movement, expression) that you cannot control but seek in the moment - they compile the value of that effort. National Geographic is a strong advocate of this
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Editing is and always has been an intrinsic part of the art of photography.
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How is that different from setting up the right text prompt and clicking a button?
Itās taken outside a computer