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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Just to humans. Not to an AI.

I don't think AIs are particularly good at applying paint to a canvas using a brush. Maybe the word you were looking for was "printer"?

I think people will continue to value human-made paintings much like we still value human-played chess games.

One of the things I enjoy about doing a painting is that it doesn’t involve technology, just me, a canvas, and paint. Machines equipped with mechanical arms are no doubt going to soon be churning out fine painting after fine painting, but nevertheless, it’s an enjoyable human activity, made by humans for humans.

sorry to say that "paint" meaning colored inks are a technology

further, machines which churn out fine painting after fine painting already exist and are old boring technology by this point

the least old instance of this tech is inkjet printers

It’s called a printer, not a painter

> sorry to say that "paint" meaning colored inks are a technology

We all knew what the hell he meant.

> One of the things I enjoy about doing a painting is that it doesn’t involve technology, just me, a canvas, and paint.

You would actually be surprised at how much actual technology there is in the canvas, paints, and brushes. Especially, if you want the paint not to be toxic.

I think those pointing out the tech missed your point. It's fair to say that making paint is a technology but "painting" is an art and the two are very distinct.

An artist can create art with most anything, dirt and sand for example.

My wife has been painting lately. She has two sisters that paint as well and they're all remarkably good at it. So was her mother, and her mother's uncle was as well. He did a mural in the Ames, Iowa Post Office that was a WPA funded project that's pretty cool. Makes me wonder if there is a genetic connection :D

https://ameshistory.org/content/evolution-corn-post-office-m...

Admittedly unrelated to the original article, you may find https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/aug/21/picture... interesting - he's been going around the country photographing those Post Office murals (I ran across this because my office is currently in a former WPA-era post office building and it is preserved in the lobby even though it hasn't been an actual post office for at least a decade - it kind of took it from "we have a weird revolutionary-war-themed painting" (it's new england, we've spent 200 years subliminally preparing to start shooting at brits again) to "this is part of a nation-wide historical collection that just happens to be in decentralised storage" :-)

Wow! That's a great project and it's very cool to see all those other murals. You can really see that same style of art in a lot of them. They have a very sturdy feel to them.

What AI does isn't painting.

I mean, couple it with one of these, and it is...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09LlZhlcJTU

Ok, I think this is a funny comment but if you think about it for more than a second it really condenses what a lot of the AI handwringing is about: humans value what's difficult to humans, or at least what's difficult to a lot of humans. We get upset when something shows up that can even partially mimic a creative process that's valued for its scarcity.

There's still zero progress made towards generative AI doing anything but mimicking existing work done by humans, and very poorly and inefficiently I might add.

Please tell me where I can find research demonstrating truly novel output from generative AI.

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