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Comment by hectorlorenzo | Hacker News Reader

I agree. Also, it's not that stable diffusion spontaneously generates art: someone has thought of a prompt, written it down, iterated, and finally decided that a given image was good enough to publish. Is stable diffusion an "artist" or is it a tool?

I find "what is art" discussions impossible to resolve and untangle from prejudices and biases. The least problematic answer I've found comes from John Carey, paraphrasing: "art is whatever someone has decided it to be". In other words, if I decide something is art, then it is.

The problem shifts slightly to a more interesting way to pose this question: why some art has more value than some other art (or even "does some art has more value than some other art")? Equally difficult to resolve but more prone to highlight prejudices and biases mentioned above.

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>I agree. Also, it's not that stable diffusion spontaneously generates art: someone has thought of a prompt, written it down, iterated, and finally decided that a given image was good enough to publish. Is stable diffusion an "artist" or is it a tool?

I'm curious about the possibility of the commissioner role for this situation.

From my point of view, the AI is the artist and prompting an AI to produce a specific image is akin to commissioning an artwork.

I think we have moved beyond human agency, and creation of art is reduced to the simpler constituents, the roles of artist and (if there is one) commissioner. The request to make an artpiece can also come from a machine.

I think the same argument can be made of photography. A photographer does not "paint" or "create" the image. It points a machine to a place and presses a button with a finger. This machine does "the work" for her. Who is the artist? Are photographers just commisioners of images?

Capturing the moment is more than just pointing. Look, I know the argument you're making, and it's certainly something to ponder on. But the whole "writing prompt" thing has a different aim from "human-created" art. Whatever that means. But it's generally a small subset from the latter.

I'm fully aware that I'm stretching the argument and analogies. However, I find all of these expressions ("Capturing the moment", "has a different aim") vague and full of gaps. Maybe it's because I never fully got photography, in a way. The difference between "capturing the moment" and "writing prompt" is that the former has a more romantic feel to it, but let's not forget that some of the most well-known photographies were staged to look spontaneous. And suddenly photography is just an exercise of story-telling and technique (light, exposure, etc), which is not that different from "harnessing the algorithm" to do the same.

Also, we're comparing an art 150 years in the making (with its schools, philosophies, heroes) with one in its infancy.

> the last paragraph

Oh, for sure. As for the rest, well I might've also missed the whole writing prompt thing. But I've always felt as if reverse engineering the thing.

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