Today, it’s time to get subjective. I’m a huge hipster snob. I have shelves full of records and books. I’m a rock critic. I have detailed opinions about why your favorite is trash. I do realise it’…
I always thought you could do interesting stuff with genAI, especiall when it goes into mangled, uncanny-valley territory. Though I can only think of examples for visual generators, like this album cover or the AI Pizza commercial.
The only text-based example that comes to mind is I forced a Bot to write this Book and that’s just a guy imitating LLM writing style. (Hillarious though!)
Just to be clear, I agree with you and am not debating or arguing with you in any capacity with anything I say from this point onward.
I always thought you could do interesting stuff with genAI, especiall when it goes into mangled, uncanny-valley territory. Though I can only think of examples for visual generators, like this album cover or the AI Pizza commercial.
The output of genAI can be interesting and thought-provoking, but ultimately, it is not art. When humans create art, they have a vision of what they are trying to make. That vision might be fairly concrete, like “I want to depict this apple,” or abstract, like “I want to express sadness.” Then, they craft in their medium until they have a work fulfilling their vision. LLMs don’t do this. They don’t have cognition, much less intent or understanding, so they can’t have “vision”. When they “create” something, they do it without understanding the artistic/creative language of the medium used. Whatever the output is, it is iteratively massaged noise that some algorithm evaluates to be statistically correlated with the input prompt.
<insert paragraph here that steelmans the idea of an “AI Artist”, which I can’t be bothered to do, but structurally would appear here in this comment>
I don’t think someone who takes the output of an LLM and presents it as “art” is an artist, as I don’t think the output of an LLM is art. If I did think that the LLM could produce art, then the person presenting the output still is not an artist; the LLM would be. But I don’t think that. If someone were to take the output of an LLM and change it in some way, it might be art, much like how someone might create a collage, but generally you don’t see that. You usually just see people take the output and flog it as art.
First I thought “Oh jeez, what a wall of text” but now you gave me my own thoughts that I want to share.
I don’t think callling genAI output “not art” is a very defendable statement. I believe art is ultimately a type of activity, and one that is very hard to draw a strict line around. If I find a cool piece of driftwood and frame it, did I do art? That’s kind of what that artist did when he picked his album cover.
But I also share your sentiment about “AI artists” pretending to work in a medium of which they understand 0% of the nuance. I think it makes more sense to call those people hacks instead of “not artists”, because that’s what you call people who use shallow, formulaic methods to dabble in a medium of which they are wholly incompetent.
And finally, AI as toolset does of course uniquely pander to hacks.
If I find a cool piece of driftwood and frame it, did I do art?
Kinda? I “found” a defective injection molding part, where the color of previous batch seeped in in a pattern that looks like a flower. It’s really pretty. That there is no intention behind it makes it more interesting to me. It wasn’t trivial to put it on a wall. I had to use nails and iron wire and then balance it. I am fine with not calling it art. On a scale 1-10 it definitely is not more than 2.
I agree. There is intent going into the prompt fondler’s efforts to prompt the genAI, it’s just not very well developed intent and it is using the laziest shallowest method possible to express itself.
I don’t even think LLMs can produce art.
I always thought you could do interesting stuff with genAI, especiall when it goes into mangled, uncanny-valley territory. Though I can only think of examples for visual generators, like this album cover or the AI Pizza commercial.
The only text-based example that comes to mind is I forced a Bot to write this Book and that’s just a guy imitating LLM writing style. (Hillarious though!)
GPT-2 was the peak of LLMs, because it was interestingly broken shit
Just to be clear, I agree with you and am not debating or arguing with you in any capacity with anything I say from this point onward.
The output of genAI can be interesting and thought-provoking, but ultimately, it is not art. When humans create art, they have a vision of what they are trying to make. That vision might be fairly concrete, like “I want to depict this apple,” or abstract, like “I want to express sadness.” Then, they craft in their medium until they have a work fulfilling their vision. LLMs don’t do this. They don’t have cognition, much less intent or understanding, so they can’t have “vision”. When they “create” something, they do it without understanding the artistic/creative language of the medium used. Whatever the output is, it is iteratively massaged noise that some algorithm evaluates to be statistically correlated with the input prompt.
<insert paragraph here that steelmans the idea of an “AI Artist”, which I can’t be bothered to do, but structurally would appear here in this comment>
I don’t think someone who takes the output of an LLM and presents it as “art” is an artist, as I don’t think the output of an LLM is art. If I did think that the LLM could produce art, then the person presenting the output still is not an artist; the LLM would be. But I don’t think that. If someone were to take the output of an LLM and change it in some way, it might be art, much like how someone might create a collage, but generally you don’t see that. You usually just see people take the output and flog it as art.
First I thought “Oh jeez, what a wall of text” but now you gave me my own thoughts that I want to share.
I don’t think callling genAI output “not art” is a very defendable statement. I believe art is ultimately a type of activity, and one that is very hard to draw a strict line around. If I find a cool piece of driftwood and frame it, did I do art? That’s kind of what that artist did when he picked his album cover.
But I also share your sentiment about “AI artists” pretending to work in a medium of which they understand 0% of the nuance. I think it makes more sense to call those people hacks instead of “not artists”, because that’s what you call people who use shallow, formulaic methods to dabble in a medium of which they are wholly incompetent.
And finally, AI as toolset does of course uniquely pander to hacks.
Kinda? I “found” a defective injection molding part, where the color of previous batch seeped in in a pattern that looks like a flower. It’s really pretty. That there is no intention behind it makes it more interesting to me. It wasn’t trivial to put it on a wall. I had to use nails and iron wire and then balance it. I am fine with not calling it art. On a scale 1-10 it definitely is not more than 2.
I agree. There is intent going into the prompt fondler’s efforts to prompt the genAI, it’s just not very well developed intent and it is using the laziest shallowest method possible to express itself.
I’m an “is it art?” maximalist. But I think it’s the wrong question about generative AI. The right question is the corporate incentives.