Museum displays artwork created by AI in place of Girl with a Pearl Earring | Hacker News Reader

Museum displays artwork created by AI in place of Girl with a Pearl Earring

nltimes.nl

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> Artist Eva Toorenent advocates for legislation and rules for what she calls “unethical technology” with her organization, European Guilt for Artificial Intelligence Regulation

This typo ('guilt') is just too juicy

I'm curious if there was a similar rebellion among traditional-medium artists when digital art started becoming widespread a couple decades ago. Was there similar hand-wringing over how being able to use layers was cheating, how a smoothing filter or a clone tool made you "not a real artist"?

It was, yes. Part of it was calling digital artists lazy and a lot of it was the fear that galleries would cease to exist because everyone would just look at free art online and art itself would die. Of course, it wasn't everyone, but the sentiment was there.

It absolutely happened with the advent of photography that was certain to destroy the lives of hard working painters. Those painters at the time were mostly employed to paint pictures of rich people and something that could "easily" perform the same task to create images of mere commoners was a clear sign of impending doom.

What happened instead is, free of the requirement to appease rich people, what we now call "modern art" was created.

That's an excellent point. There are many parallels between criticisms of AI art that call it "just typing in a prompt" and calling photography "just aiming a camera". Does the fact that anybody can point their phone and create an image subtract from the "art-ness" of a professional photographer?

Many people in the art world at the time argued exactly that, just like they are doing today. From the photographers side it took lobbying, an act of congress, and a supreme court decision to finally grant copyright protection to photographs.

> free of the requirement to appease rich people

I don't believe this is the case now and it probably hasn't been for a long time, at least since the popularity of modern art exploded. Maybe it was true when the genre was still underground or generally reviled?

Check your timelines:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_photography

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_art

The thing you are implying is explicitly what I am claiming in the post.

You know he's talking about the invention and proliferation of photography, right? AKA two hundred years ago.

I'm curious about where 'real artists' would draw the line. Would it be cheating to use a paintbrush unless you've crafted it yourself?

I also find it ironic that some of the biggest detractors of AI art are, themselves, exclusively digital artists.

Personally I would draw the line where the tools I'm ultimately relying on to create art don't function at all without having millions of works by other artists baked into them. You can say that's how my brain is doing it anyway—and sure, you might be right to a first approximation—but isn't that the whole point? If I'm not even capable of executing that synthesis in some medium X myself, but rather have to outsource it to a computer program, then I'm more technician than artist.

It's something I don't expect people who have never seriously engaged with an artistic process to understand. Art is interesting when the artist discovered things in creating it, and you are not going to discover much by typing in a few sentences of prompt and maybe touching up the image (or story, or whatever) the model makes for you.

"Cheating" is a loaded and generally unsuitable word based on an infantile understanding of why art matters. The universe doesn't give a shit whether you do it yourself or get a machine to do it for you, and neither do I, really. Modulo speculative impacts on economy and culture, these are obviously useful tools and I don't have any moral issue with people using them. But I will say that if those people are aiming to create art rather than engage in a process of design, then by using these tools in their primary creative workflows they are depriving themselves of a priceless journey. That's why it matters.

It's a bit like sitting in your car at a trailhead and flying a drone out to the end of the trail and back rather than doing the walking yourself. Not only are you potentially ruining the experience for others (see: the recent Clarke's World closure to submissions), you're vastly cheapening it for yourself too. Most people in today's discourse are focusing on the former, but I think the latter is more interesting and important.

Great point, but then, I went for an art degree before I turned to computer science, so I know exactly what you mean. The act of artistic creation itself is rewarding, in a way very different to looking at art created by someone else.

As a counterpoint, though, I note that I've done some work on language generation and that, too, is something that can engage the user, and can be almost as rewarding as e.g. writing a story. Though that's much more so if the language generator is your own piece of work.

I'll also add that we appreciate artists who develop their own, unique personal style much more than artists who copy those of others. So far, neural net image generators have not been shown capable of creating their own styles, unless of course one considers artifacts of their generation process (e.g. monster hands) as a "style". People severely overestimate the "creativity" of such systems.

> As a counterpoint, though, I note that I've done some work on language generation and that, too, is something that can engage the user, and can be almost as rewarding as e.g. writing a story. Though that's much more so if the language generator is your own piece of work.

Writing fiction is my thing, and I've seriously considered using AI to generate descriptive passages and other relative "filler" as a force multiplier. Either way, I'd be interested to see how well I could get a model to imitate my style. I think I'm waiting until it's easy to run a GPT-3-class thing locally, which IIUC isn't currently the case. I don't like building workflows that rely on "cloud" stuff.

"Force multiplier" is the key, though. Another example might be somebody writing a story and then using AI to generate illustrations for it. I can also imagine future image generation AI allowing much finer control over the results, which would (IMO) make it much more akin to photography (and legitimize some of those arguments that have been popping up everywhere, including in this thread).

Letting the computer provide the vision and direction as well as the technique is fun, for sure. I had a lot of fun with Stable Diffusion. But it's as you say—the current state of the art is highly imitative, and I think these capabilities will ultimately frustrate serious creators of art and serious consumers of it.

yes

it was probably the same for whoever came up with perspective, 'oh yes, well, I see what you've done, isn't that, erm, cheating, and anyway, my painting looks more like a real painting...etc etc'

Oh is it supposed to be Guild? I was wondering about that and figured it was an obscure use of the word Guilt that I was not familiar with.

As usual, news outlets can't help themselves insinuating the model _contains_ these images. I feel like this partially an honest mistake, partially because otherwise the conclusion would be obvious and the article boring.

Source article for people that read Dutch: https://13ft.io/www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/maurits...

Why does this link start with 13ft.io here? It should be https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/mauritshuis-han...

Anyone who has spent time with Midjourney knows that it can take hours to fine tune a prompt to get exactly what you’re after. It also says the artist adjusted the result in Photoshop, which means it likely took an additional few hours on top of that. It’s possible they spent an entire day on this.

I whole day? Now that’s artistic commitment!

I know this is sarcasm but still... is the value of art how long it takes or the artistic sense and judgement that goes into it? Or perhaps none of that matters and it is entirely preference on the part of the person appreciating it.

The value of "art" goes down with the number of people able to create it. If it takes someone a week of training and a days work to create a Mona Lisa replica with glowing teeth, then that's worthless art, even if it does look better than the original. Makes for a great publicity stunt for the museum to put something like that up, and there's only one person who can be the first to do it. So in other words, there cannot be a large number of people able to do that. Therefore this time it's art that has some worth, the next time someone does it its worthless.

Art takes time to create, and the more time it takes to create the more art it is of course. Makes sense.

I mean, art is supposed to make people emotional. Seems like by that metric this piece has been a success.

You're right, it's about what it conveys to the observer.

Everyone seems to be so focused on art being a matter of hard work, it's not, if it where, a lot of abstract artist wouldn't be selling paintings.

I think we may have radically different ideas about what art is or what it is supposed to do.

Art is meant to provoke feelings and reactions. In people, anyway.

I would definitely consider that a misconception of what art is or what it is supposed to do. It's the kind of thing Aristotle said, but our conceptions of art have changed since Aristotle's time.

Here's an introduction to the topic:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/art-definition/

> The definition of art is controversial in contemporary philosophy. Whether art can be defined has also been a matter of controversy. The philosophical usefulness of a definition of art has also been debated.

Your own link _starts_ with a statement about the controversial nature of a definition of art. Are you surprised you disagree with someone on the nature of art?

> Are you surprised you disagree with someone on the nature of art?

I think we both agree here that the obvious answer to this question is "no", and that's the correct answer... is there some specific point you're trying to make?

Good article. The entry for "Traditional" seems closest to correct.

Those definitions generally exclude works by Duchamp and many other modern artists which do not fit into the narrow traditional definitions of art. (There are some overbroad traditional definitions, I don't think you're talking about those.)

Just to give some wider social context--the backlash against modern art is something of a right-wing talking point, and it has been for nearly a hundred years if not longer, for complicated reasons that would fill an entire book. These days I see those definitions the most in those Twitter accounts with ancient roman/greek sculpture as their profile pictures, which post about the decline of society and how modern art is bad, classical art is good.

I like modern art. You may not like it, but it seems weird and distasteful to reach for a definition of "art" that excludes things you don't like.

> the backlash against modern art is something of a right-wing talking point, and it has been for nearly a hundred years if not longer

You are most definitely blaming the wrong axis of the political compass. Preference for or opposition to modern art has no political leaning and varies widely between people of all political stripes. Modern art has been notably suppressed by authoritarian regimes[0] however but this is not due to their politics, rather it's entirely due to their personal opinions which become law in a dictatorial government. More evidence against your claim also comes from the fact that was mentioned in this thread that the CIA, who by most measures would be traditionally considered right wing, promoted modern art as a propaganda weapon against America's enemies[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_realism

[1] https://news.artnet.com/art-world/artcurious-cia-art-excerpt...

Again, there's a whole book that you could write about this topic, and a single comment in an HN thread is not going to do it justice, not even in summary.

The CIA may act as an agent for implementing right-wing policies, but if you're trying to explain CIA behavior, you would use a variety of both ideological and pragmatic explanations. Anti-modern art movements have close ideological ties with fascism and authoritarian beliefs, which can be far-left or far-right.

We should just change the definition of art to anything that people argue about.

Most topics in philosophy. Any time we attempt to define what a word means, we use other words to do it, and a big chunk of philosophy is spent dealing with the bottom of that mess. What is "real", what is "knowledge", what is "intelligence", what is "art", etc.

So is clickbait

I think we will likely want to know the story that accompanies a painting more than ever. Aesthetics and composition alone will not make a great piece since we can no longer trust that some work was created by a human artist.

We know that AI paintings are simply points in the latent space between human-created artworks, so there cannot be any information gain from such representations and therefore have nothing new to say about the human condition without adding real-world context and story.

Paintings will be judged by how well they fit in the context of nature and society. "I trudged through the Grand Canyon to paint this landscape in Spring" is much more compelling than "I just typed in these words in MidJourney and this is what came out".

Art has been seen as an outcome of context, rather than simply a combination of aesthetics and composition, for a long time already. The movements of Dadaism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and, maybe most famously, Cubism have all already questioned the purpose of art in the recent-ish past.

That purpose of art is what will need to be determined now. In the early Middle Ages of Europe or the Islamic Golden Age, for example, art served a religious purpose. In more modern times, art has served to question or criticise the status quo in the context from which it's born. I don't think this purpose necessarily needs to be abandoned, but it will definitely need to be re-assessed in light of this new tool we've developed.

Let's not forget how much the CIA messed up our interpretation of art in recent times. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/artcurious-cia-art-excerpt...

Damn, the CIA had good taste in art, who knew...

"I woke up from a dream in which I was crawling in an impossible landscape. So I jumped onto my keyboard and, after a sleepless night, conjured the image I saw from the numeric ether. This is that image."

For 99.9% of people art == pretty pictures that they like. So no, what you describe will absolutely not happen.

And let's be honest, most backstories of paintings are either fabricated, completely nonsense or boring. No, that mediocre painting of flowers in bloom isnt better because i know the artist went on a vacation to Tuscany. And no, that other painting showing three colored dots on a white background isnt representing the struggle of people against capitalism and is most definitely not evoking feelings of loneliness in a cold, harsh world or whatever the fuck museums try to tell me.

Brutal, but I couldn't agree more.

Sure, by exception it's possible for one to have a deep emotional connection to a piece of art or the artist, but in general I don't think anybody is curious at all beyond it looking good/bad.

As for critique on society by means of art, we're past the age where any of it would be original or shocking. Any critique you might have we can read about on social media every day. It's the norm, nothing out of the ordinary. It's so normalized that even the threat of a total societal collapse fails to impress.

I once found myself in a modern art museum (against my will). We entered a giant empty room with 3 beach chairs in the far corner. In the next room was a wrangled and damaged piece of steel sitting on the floor. In both cases the tour guide questioned us as to what we believe the meaning of these works are.

So now you have a bunch of adults looking at garbage yet complying with the social pressure to pretend that any of this is sane or interesting. You'll fake the genuinely curious but puzzled face, comply with the minimum thinking time to signal that you did some deep soul searching, and make the random guess. Which is correct, because art is whatever it means to YOU.

We were looking at a mirror all along. Life-changing, really. As in, never again.

Probably. I wonder how many people will just lie.

Real story is the original is out on loan.

So museum asked public to submit their ideas to hang as replacements and they chose several

A group of the best ones here - some very creative ideas:

https://www.mauritshuis.nl/nu-te-doen/tentoonstellingen/mygi...

It seems there were many more than one of those images that were created by a neural net image generator.

It was a decent MidJourney effort but the one earring is placed in a manner that is anatomically incorrect.

Watch on RTL tonight — I’ll be showing off “Rembrandt taking a selfie” which I made in 5 minutes. Unlikely to hang in any museum, but about the same level of art.

When I was young I thought art is what looks pretty but over years I learned art can be anything. Ugly, pretty, political, abstract, a framed drawing, a dirty bidet placed in the middle of an empty room. Now the core property of art to me is that it is always self-expression. The question becomes, there's no self to express, how is it art?

The self is still there. The artist is the person who commanded the AI to make the work, and then selected that work as something they liked.

In addition, that person can also take it further and modify the art, either with the AI or with more traditional programs, or even more creative means.

The AI didn't decide on its own to produce this art. Someone directed it. That person is an artist.

The human is the artist.

The AI is the helper.

I can't speak for everyone, but I really enjoy playing with AI-aided creation. The things I make with these tools reflect my personality and feelings at the time of creation.

There the self remains.

That's kind of what I'm saying. "AI" "created" an "artwork" is nonsensical. It's like saying it was "created by Photoshop".

Some of these look fun and interesting, but I still much prefer the original. So I would argue humans not totally replaced yet.

They would lose a lot of the fun part without the context of the original, as well.

Cool and I’m going to purchase it for a billion AI generated dollars in a cryptocurrency

This piece has all of the human mysteries of a stock photo in a shampoo commercial.

It's actually very good.

We're to soft on AI. Had a human done them they would hopefully not have been hanged in a museum. Bland and soulless as they are.

Museums aren't a "top 100 most popular" display. They have curators, who can use pretty much any method conceivable of selecting what to display.

Just like the rest of the world, artists have their own community, in-jokes, memes and contentious people.

It's very possible that a whole bunch of stuff is on display because the author is the curator's friend, or the curator thinks it makes some particularly good point, or even because the curator decided to troll people a little.

That doesn't seem to be the case

> The jury did not look at the ethical issues behind the entries. “We purely looked at what we liked. Is this creative? That’s a tough question.

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