Comment by pigsty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pigsty | Hacker News Reader

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It’s weird how readily so many people will dismiss AI art as just being a product of its input, when that’s really all humans are as well. All artists (myself included) are just the ongoing product of various inspirations (inputs). Dali is a world-renowned artist, but his art wasn’t born in a bubble and ripped from the void. He studied and referenced artists before him, then changed it. Artists who saw his work later incorporated elements he used.

My big worry from here though is what’ll happen when we take the next step: bundling these AIs together and start making a comprehensive AI. We have AIs that can respond to comments to some extent now, we can generate realistic selfies, and they can make art based off prompts that they could be designed to feed to themselves—set that loose on Twitter and you have a completely automated and convincingly living artist out there. Next step after is using AI to handle free movement by auto-adjusting balance and then performing convincing human speech. The future is getting freaky and fast.

Only boring humans are just the product of the content they consume; interesting people have concerns about relationships with other humans, organisations, resources, threats and opportunities that come from being an entity living in a world full of things they don't control and things they'd quite like to control. It's also fairly easy to identify artists who have done nothing but look at other art.

Hayao Miyazaki once said "Almost all Japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people, you know. It's produced by humans who can't stand looking at other humans. And that's why the industry is full of otaku!" While I'm not actually a huge fan of his work, it's easy to see where he's coming from when you see the likes of "In Another World with My Smartphone" or the hundreds of other trash light novel adaptations. They're clearly fiction being produced by people whose lives are nothing but consuming other fiction, and all they can do is reference that. They have nothing to say.

For another example, there's a huge number of 20th century war films. They weren't made because their creators had read a lot of Wikipedia articles about how destructive wars were becoming. The likes of Platoon are a product of mortal fleshbags who actually saw combat and genuinely feared for their lives. Dr. Strangelove was created by people who had a genuine belief that they were at risk of being annihilated in a nuclear fireball.

This is a tricky distinction where this may be true of all specific individual humans, but not of humanity. At some point, language and art didn't exist, and humanity invented those things. We didn't mimic some other civilization that did it first.

I don't know that this distinction matters, but it is real. Even on an individual level, if you raise a child in complete isolation from history and teach them no language or art, they'll still form thoughts, have feelings, and develop means by which to communicate those.

I think this is the big open question of evolution as a whole, and language and art can be seen as the evolution of ideas/memes as Dawkin wrote about in the Selfish Gene. Were these developments sufficiently iterative, or was there some great leap that came out of nowhere? Was the wing merely just a stump on an animal that allowed it to leap tree to tree a foot further, or was it some process unknown to us? Was art just a splatter of blood on a cave that looked like a face to our brain’s face neural network, or did some inventive genius paint a mosaic when nothing else was ever on the cave wall?

> when that’s really all humans are

There's a fair bit of truth in this but it remains a nearly useless oversimplification. We can't adequately isolate or even identify all the inputs into what makes a person what they are, or produce what they do. The idea that this is even possible is rejected by a large proportion of the world population, and for now at least we can't prove them wrong.

> All artists (myself included) are just the ongoing product of various inspirations (inputs)

This ignores that inspiration is itself an active and creative process. There's not a one to one mapping between a piece of art and the effect it has on a person who receives it. Even hating an art is a process of influence in a very real way that I don't know there's an AI analog of. These systems can not include a source in their output, but can they decide to include its opposite? What is the opposite of a tree, btw? A desert, an ocean, a seed? A value judgement based on culture and aesthetics and opinion and worldview that ML software has no standpoint from which to make.

I'm not trying to make a moral case for or against this technology right now. But I think trying to understand and evaluate it in human terms like this is a mistake. It's something else, and we're still trying to figure out what terms are appropriate to understand it, hence the difficulty. It's important to honestly engage with that alienness and uncertainty right now.

But at least artists have some agency, all that stuff that they ingested goes through them and are somewhat limited by human hardware. Very little is original indeed but that percentage may as well go down even more as more and more AI generated soup unleashed on the world.

What about artists that used random generators in their art? Jackson Pollock used to randomly splatter paint on canvases and when some random pattern struck his fancy he went with it. That's not all that different from picking the pictures you like from a Stable Diffusion prompt and then further honing them with inpainting, image-to-image and so on.

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