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Comment by GraffitiTim | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this could be the beginning of many artists being replaced by AI.

I don't think it is possible to replace an artist. The definition of artist, that I could find, is recursive so that's the first problem with that.

Then the appreciation is subjective; to replace an artist you would need something like; 'I like Rembrandt but now I like this guy instead'. I used to like Jean Michel Jarre then Beethoven then Iron Maiden then Slayer then ... etc. I still like all of these and can get excited when hearing any of them. No one of them replaced the other.

So we might have MORE artists. Once we accept that computers can make art 'without' humans. I am fine with that, but this example is definitely not a very good example. To me it looks like fancy filters.

> The definition of artist, that I could find, is recursive so that's the first problem with that.

Huh?

something is art because the artist calls it art.

The artist is someone who makes art. The problem is to define what is art. Its when the artist (or others) says so.

From my understanding it seems that the technology exists to replicate human art, not to create new styles on top of it. So I think in order to train the technology to do more styles of art it will require humans to make those new styles.

I think there's a useful metaphor in pop music: Mainstream music is almost fully formulaic. While not fully written by machine, it's not exactly a green-field endeavour to write a pop song. While we do tend to call these people writing and especially performing pop-songs "artists", this is more in the sense of "performer", and it's generally laughed at when a pop star refers to their art.

In the meantime, there are tons of underground movements and scenes, coming up with new sounds and styles, and the artists we generally accept as proper such (and not just performers), belong to these, feeding new styles into the mainstream.

Something similar will probably hold true for computer-made "art": Some very nice and enjoyable things will come out of it (and tons and tons of trivial and dull things as well), but the truly interesting stuff is made by humans further up the funnel.

Depends on your definition of 'artist'. This doesn't create any original work, it just remixes a photo into a style. When the subject matter is more than a source image and the output more than a digital visualisation through an algorithm, then the answer is 'no'.

Strictly speaking: no, by definition. However AI could drive some of them out of market. Example: people are buying this kind of human made art https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=dreaming+painting&tbm=... Why shouldn't they be buying these neural network made pictures? https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=deep+dreaming+neural+n...

I would say in that case that the art is the AI itself (or its code), because it is what efforts and research have been put into. And thus the artist would still be human: (s)/he is the one who created the AI.

I don't think so, but I think it's definitely getting us closer to the first artist who really isn't - creates art deep AI way and paints a copy of it.

If art for you can be replaced by this kind of mimicry, it begs the question of whether you really need or care about art in the first place.

Art is more than just creating visually appealing images, it's also about capturing intent. Until the point AI has its own intent, the images that are shared reflect the intent of the humans that interact with it. Can think of it as an advanced type of paintbrush.

The artists who can stay in business are the ones who can picture completely new images in their minds eye and draw them. The ones that just transform reality a little are probably not going to do so well.

For people downwoting this comment, please explain why. This is a very pertinent question.

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