“Generative Art” is Not Art: Consciousness is a pre-requisite | Hacker News Reader

“Generative Art” is Not Art: Consciousness is a pre-requisite

backtohumanity.substack.com

3 pointsgeorgex78 comments

... but what if the audience is not aware that the work is computer generated? Don't they get the same experience they would get from a human made work?

Art is good in 2 synergetic ways: the artist gain satisfaction from his work, and the audience gains satisfaction from the product of the work.

All questions about whether AI generated art is real art need to be asked and answered within the context of this, or some like, understanding.

It's the same as thinking about if one day you wake up and realize that your dog is not conscious. I, for one, would feel that something was lost. We want writers and painters and conscious beings on the other side of these pieces that give us meaning. If we find out that they weren't there at all, if when an author says: 'I was sick to my stomach,' it was a lie, then that art would lose value. At least in my eyes.

And, ethically, artists should disclose whether or not they used these technologies.

I'd argue that context is more of a prerequisite than consciousness. Nature is art, but rocks aren't conscious. They're beautiful because they exist in a grounded reality that we can contextualize. AI-generated imagery can still be beautiful, just in a different way. Refusing to acknowledge that feels like a denial of inherent beauty and awe, which a lot of AI imagery can evoke (albeit in a dilapidated, naive way).

Nobody needs to justify their reason for hating AI art. The game is changed now, though, and nobody is putting the cat back into the bag. Artists will either learn to work with AI or they won't, as long as their personal satisfaction is the same then I don't see why it matters.

It's semantics, but I take your point. I'm trying to give a new definition of art that you disagree with, and by that definition nature would be beautiful but not art. I could be wrong.

I agree that AI will create breath-taking images, though I'm not sure how far that will go. Would we care about the David if it was made by a robot? Would we appreciate Tender is the Night if Fitzgerald wasn't giving his human perspective? Personally, I wouldn't; not for more than a moment.

On the last point: I would prefer to pay artists creating beautiful works by hand instead of via machine. So it does matter from my perspective. I would like to know who is who.

All that is fine, but it's extremely subjective and relies on other people sharing your subjective opinion on art. You're likely to find a lot of artists who sympathize with you, but the general public would probably side with whichever creation is more evocative. In that sense, I'd argue that unconscious media has been the status-quo since the late 90s. It's the meta for the current "creator class" that seeks audience on TikTok and Twitter.

Artists will always exist, but the mechanical process of creating art is currently being sublimated. That's more-or-less what AI synthesis is doing in all fields.

Perhaps. I think the general public would lose interest if they knew that a great work of art (i.e. the David, or the Sistine Chapel, or an emotional novel) came from a computer. I think HOW something is made is part of what makes it evocative.

But I agree with you about unconscious media being the status-quo.

The problem is that if I don't recognize something from the pre-ai art era, then my knee-jerk assumption is that it's probably ai generated. So now all art is as worthless as the AI generated stuff.

I find your idea that consciousness is for us- and not for AI- to be somewhat of a dubious one.

If there is one thing that is universal in nature, it is the way that life, even if it is not conscious, always tries to maximize its entropy. Entropy here meaning information about the system.

A computer, especially a very powerful computer, will try to minimize prediciton error. To achieve this, it will use as much information as possible to describe the environment, and make decisions as fast as possible. Consciousness isn't needed for that. Just silicon.

Art is just gpt-3 prediction applied to pixels. Quot erat demonstrandum.

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