The reason human painting will survive is very simple: because 1) people value human-made objects independent of those objects' objective qualities, and because 2) paintings exist outside the digital world, and there is no robot sufficiently dexterous to match the skill of a painter in applying paint to a canvas. That being said, as this technology matures, lots of currently employed digital artists will no longer be needed.
ok but that's not what these models are doing? they're mimicking training data, and sure it's really impressive how far that gets - but ask it to do something outside of that raining data or where the # of samples is low and it's "creativity" falls apart
I think these models exhibit a form of creativity, but not creativity in the vein of say - an art style not seen in the training data
There are very few artists who you can call “original”, the majority are riffing and remixing based on previous predecessors. Making find tweaks here and there.
This is something you can achieve with an AI model just by increasing randomness.
That's actually the most interesting cases. And I strongly disagree that it falls apart
'The Edge of the Universe'
https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/wmu10p/the_edge...
Citation needed. We know how all ML starts with an RNG, since we built it. We don't know how human mind works.
It's debatable--it goes back to Barthes's "death of the author", whether art's value and meaning resides solely in viewer perception or also in author intention--whether AI art will be "true" art, but it will very soon be good enough to replace artists who work in subordinate contexts (which is, unfortunately, generally a necessity if one wants to survive within the reigning corporate-capitalist totalitarianism).
AI is not going to force us to "become artists and poets", because it will make it even harder to earn money (i.e., the stuff most people have to earn through humiliating subordination) at these things. It will force us to become dependent, in the way artists (in practice) already are. This isn't as horrible as it sounds. The rich are already dependent on the state, which enforces their so-called "property rights"--this fact being something so-called "libertarians" are too stupid to realize. The middle classes are already dependent on employers, which turns out to suck a lot more than being a rich person dependent on the state. We already depend on complicated supply chains and national defense practices; it is simply the case that we'll soon (a) be dependent on AI, as it increasingly excels at the menial subordinate work we once relied on other people to do, and (b) be dependent on intelligent management (first coming from nation-states and UBI; later, one hopes, coming from a global entity that can eradicate poverty worldwide) of this weird quantity called "money", because we will no longer be able to reliably earn it through work, machines having taken that over (and thank God).
Without a complete overthrow of corporate capitalism, we're going to regress to the state of medieval Europe and many of the poorest, most corrupt countries today, in which there are people who have money and there are people who work but it is impossible to get meaningful money by working.
----
[1] Please note that there's a distinction between personal property and private property. You're not an asshole for wanting people not to take stuff you need for personal use, such as your car and your books and your toiletries. That's personal property, which is a different thing. If we take this reasonable idea, though, and run it up without attention to how it might behave at scale, though, we run the risk of enabling the kind of nightmarish private property that afflicts countries like the US, inevitably leading to extreme inequality, intractable political corruption, and metastatic governmental dysfunction.