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Comment by mkaic | Hacker News Reader

I can't speak for everyone, but the reason I personally find generated images completely uninteresting from an artistic standpoint is that they are low-effort. I appreciate art because a human sacrificed time and effort to make it. As a general rule of thumb (with exceptions, of course), the more time and effort an artist sacrifices to make a piece of art, the more I find that art interesting, especially if the artist is highly skilled.

I don't think that AI art is fundamentally uninteresting (I am a machine learning researcher, so I think it's rad), or that it can't be used as a tool to make great art. I just think that the final image is not the point of art. The point is that a person practiced for hundreds/thousands of hours to develop a creative skill and then spent several more hours painstakingly applying that skill just to create the image. If AI is incorporated into a high-effort, high-skill process, I don't have an issue with it.

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People have varying definitions of art. Mine is more about communication and changing perceptions, I couldn't care less about time spent. I know artists from both camps.

Also interesting is the time spent making marks vs. thinking about it

I know Matisse kept several works in his studio for many many years pondering and struggling with what to do with them and the actual mark-making was very rapid e.g. The Red Studio painting

And this is why I began my comment with "I can't speak for everyone!" Art is so subjective that it would be rather silly of me to try to make a bold, authoritative statement about its nature. I definitely understand your perspective to some degree, and wish you the best :)

I suppose that's the crux of it, I'm a formalist (https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/f/formalism) whereas a lot of other people appreciate the back story or narrative more

The problem I have with the 'effort' theory of value - which I also used to use! - is that you can take it to absurd conclusions.

For example, a beginner painter will take much longer to make the same painting as a master; so judged on effort, it should be better? Or if I make a minature cathedral out of matchsticks, then it might take me decades - is that therefore more interesting artistic output than a sketch that Picasso (say) made in one smooth line that took minutes?

Of course, a reasonable answer is that it is some combination of effort, aesthetics, personal choice, and fashion. Maybe it's like a recipe where the balance of these ingredients has to be right.

There's also the aspect of the time it takes to learn to draw/paint well, sometimes the simplest-looking things take the longest to learn

"It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child" - Picasso

To a certain extent, your argument is mitigated by considering the cumulative effort of learning to produce art, AKA "knowing where to hammer", AKA "it took a lot of hard work to make this look easy".

If we incorporate cumulative effort, then the original assertion that AI art is low-effort falls flat.

In fact, since AI is trained on a much bigger data set than humans, AI art is in fact higher-effort than human-made art (and therefore, according to the GP, more interesting).

That seems like a pretty huge stretch to me. I don't think it's valid to count the effort in developing and training AI as part of the effort to produce the art.

> I don't think it's valid to count the effort in developing and training AI as part of the effort to produce the art.

But that is what webmaven was proposing. "your argument is mitigated by considering the cumulative effort of learning to produce art"

So do you count the training and practice a human and the AI took in order to be able to produce the art, or do you not count either of them?

Counting the development of AI software as part of the effort to produce art would be like counting the the process of growing up as part of the human effort to produce art. I don't think either of those count because they're not art-specific. They're both the baseline "effort" needed in order to just function.

Sure. Just a few questions so that I understand you.

Do you subscribe to the view that effort is what makes art valuable?

A master painter paints an amazing portrait with a few brush strokes in 10 minutes. A teenager creates a matchstick cathedral by working extremely diligently for 2 years. Do you think that the matchstick cathedral is more artistic than the portrait?

If you say yes to the first, and no to the second then there is a seeming contradiction. Because clearly more effort went into the years to cut matchsticks than the minutes to draw the portrait. To resolve this seeming contradiction webmaven proposed that we should count the hours spent acquiring the skill. The master spent a lifetime drawing and painting until he got good enough to capture the essence of someone with a few brush strokes. Are you agreeing with that argument? If yes, why does it not apply to an AI? If not how do you resolve the contradiction?

> I don't think either of those count because they're not art-specific.

The training of a neural network is very art specific. It looks at art. It creates, gets criticised, creates again on repeat.

Don't get me wrong. I don't think the AI is more artistic just because it encapsulates more effort. I think the mistake is that effort is not what makes art valuable. It is not a pineapple pooping competition. Emotional impact is what makes art art in my opinion. (Which is a different question from what makes art have monetary value.)

> Do you subscribe to the view that effort is what makes art valuable?

Not as a hard rule, no, although there is absolutely art where the effort to produce it is an inherent part of the value of it.

> Do you think that the matchstick cathedral is more artistic than the portrait?

No, not because of effort involved, anyway. If both things are trying to convey something about the human experience, they're both equally "artistic".

I subscribe to the view that what makes art valuable is that it communicates something human that can't be communicated well otherwise[1].

This is why if there existed an AI that produced art all by itself, I would consider the work produced to be pretty pictures, not art. An artist using AI as a tool to produce human communication, though? Totally art.

> (Which is a different question from what makes art have monetary value.)

I agree. The price tag of a thing says nothing about its artistic value. It only speaks to commercial value.

[1] This is also why I don't think there is any such thing as "bad art". Art can be successful or unsuccessful, but "bad" and "good" are subjective aesthetic judgements. When people say art is "bad", what they mean is it's art they dislike.

I'll repeat what I wrote in another comment: the problem might just be that usually the "AI artist" isn't the one that built and trained the model. What the artist does in this case is spending some time in finding a good prompt. Which could be seen as a form of art itself, but if we're talking about time spent, this amounts to much less.

Edit: I decided to add my two cents about using time spent as a measure of effort. I think this can be misleading and I have a counterexample, although admittedly it isn't from art: think about an athlete running 100 meters. This doesn't require effort just in the training before, but also in the act itself. And the less time the athele takes to run 100 meters, the more is the effort required.

As for my own opinion about art, I think that anything could be art: what counts is the idea behind it. How this translates to this specific problem of AI generated images I'm unsure though, as it would, at least in part, depend on how much of your idea you can convey through a ML model.

I guess the analogy in this situation would be someone taking a photo of a master artwork.

But then, that effort is rarely sustained by the "Ai artist" himself. It is usually someone else that builds and trains the model.

This argument rests on your views of labor theory of property, which suggests that you "own something" by "putting labor into" that thing.

We loosely apply this as a premise for intellectual property rights, but it's contingent on the state being the referee - and many cases have ended in rights being taken away from inventors because someone else worked the legal system to take it away.

In the case of generative training data, it's largely being used as a commons resource. The more you are inclined towards labor theory of property, the more it "feels like" theft, because the original laborer would be credited as owner - the labor of the machine is derivative of that labor, and largely non-transformative since it results in imagery resembling the original, versus metadata, statistics, etc.

Labor theory of property has many philosophical issues, as outlined with the "monkey selfie" case:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disp...

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