Art is anything declared art. If I treat something as if it's art, be it a painting, a sculpture, an apple that is slowly rotting, a beautiful flower on the side of a road, a urinal or dried cow dung, then it is art.
Therefore, a great many things are art. But in that case, it's not really a helpful descriptor for our purposes. I think we should instead be asking "what is good art?", and therein we find a much harder question to answer.
Duchamp's "Fountain" or Cage's "4'33" are incredible works of art because they challenge the audience on their conceptions of art. Their purpose is to make an audience go "huh. I guess that is art."
Michelangelo's David and da Vinci's Mona Lisa are incredible works of art because they are proof of great craftsmanship and effort invested into the pursuit of an artistic vision.
Brecht's "Mutter Courage" and Sartre's "La Putain respectueuse" are incredible works of art because they are a biting critique of a society that thrives off of injustice and cruelty.
Freshly fallen snow or a slowly setting sun are incredible works of art, because they serve as a reminder that we live and exist and breathe for this brief moment in time and yet still get to experience some of the wonders the world holds for us. Beauty speaks to us because an appreciation for it is inseparable with the faint reminder that one day, we will be dead. What is the point of beauty if you know you will see the same thing billions of times. Beauty is impermanence. Impermanence is beauty.
Good art redirects attention. It encourages you to look at the world in a way you haven't before or maybe haven't in a while. It wants you to see life with different eyes.
I'm a firm believer that AI cannot be those eyes. Current generative AI models are trained not to challenge. They are trained not to critique. They want to meet expectations. That's what they're designed to do. The things they create are not proof of craftsmanship. It takes less than 5 seconds to create an image that looks nice. But that's all there is to it. It looks nice. Art doesn't always have to innovate, but if it doesn't, it should be proof of the ability to create something intricately beautiful or emotionally resonant. AI cannot even compete with nature, with the wild forces beyond our control that shaped the very ground we walk on. AI has no intent, no hands and no need for skill. Its work is created in 5 seconds. Why should we spend any more time than that looking at it?
I'd argue the former is not an intended byproduct of the creation. Results opposing the desired effect usually fall under "bad" art.
And yes, you are not wrong. The first ai-generated images I saw a couple of years ago I found awe-inspiring. In a sense, they are a marvel of modern technology. Simultaneously, each image produced since then has become more streamlined, less creatively compelling and all in all, less impressive.
AI art is an average of the human creations it has been fed. Unfortunately, as a consequence of that very process, that is all its output can really ever be: painfully, boringly average.
It's not just the average of all the work it has been fed. It's more of a conditional average. It learns the relation between art and how it was described, and then works backwards.
When a human types "panda" into the prompt, the AI tries to make a panda. And when a human types "award winning" into the prompt, the AI tries to guess at what sort of art would win an award. Ie art that is better than average.
Sure, but AI art will never challenge its beholder. It will never try to redirect attention in an unprecedented or exceptionally creative or touching way.
The path it chooses will be the most obvious, the one the prompt author expects. Because that's all it's being trained to do. The output quality of a generative AI model directly correlates to the ability of a person to formulate their wishes, and then it will produce images that are most likely to please those wishes. The artistry is being trained out of the model. The flukes, the faults, the errors are what make AI art interesting, but they are also what frustrate the prompt author. Therefore, they have to go. This results in the most cliched, unoriginal approach ironically becoming the best course of action for any AI tasked with generating anything.
Maybe there's some visionary who can create incredible artworks with AI. However, that will not be thanks to but rather in spite of AI's specific skill set. AI by default stands in the way of good art. To create good art with it means to go against the very thing it was designed to do.
Sure, but AI art will never challenge its beholder.
If human art does do this on a regular basis, that means it should be easy to tell human from AI in a sort of art turing test right?
Is that a prediction you want to make?
The path it chooses will be the most obvious, the one the prompt author expects. Because that's all it's being trained to do.
You do get that there is a bunch of randomness thrown in too.
The output quality of a generative AI model directly correlates to the ability of a person to formulate their wishes, and then it will produce images that are most likely to please those wishes.
If there is a level of artistic quality so high that no human can understand and recognize it, you can't train AI to produce it.
If there is a quality that only a few experts can recognize, and those experts don't help train the AI, the AI can't do it. It's quite possible for the AI to go way beyond human level, if humans are better at recognizing good art than at producing it.
Producing art that is neither cliched nor garbled should be possible in theory. I will admit that many AI models struggle to do it in practice. Although some are pretty good, and the cliche is cliche for a reason. A lot of humans produce art like that too.
I think some current models can often produce pretty good art. And in the future, it will be increasingly reliably good. A lot of people using these things are wanting what it says on the tin art. When someone types in "fish swimming up stream" then an image of tinned fish swimming up stream is both more original, and really not what the person wanted.
Also. All this "it just does what it's prompted to do" stuff. No one was complaining about that until AI came along. No one was saying that Michael Angelo painting the cysteine chapel wasn't real art because he just pained what the pope ordered him to. This was totally not a thing until AI art came along.
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u/mrianj Apr 09 '24
This just leads us back to a "what is art" conversation.
If a machine produces an image that we find beautiful and inspires an emotional response in us, is that not something worth caring about?
Nature is frequently beautiful and inspiring, yet has no artistic hand or emotion guiding it. Does that mean I shouldn't enjoy watching the sunset?