None of what you describe has ever been my reasons for looking at an image, and yet I immensely enjoy looking at images.
I thought about it, and while part of my overall dislike of procgen in games comes from it being lazy and repetitive (too easy to spot the patterns), another part comes just from realizing there's nothing behind it. No mind, no plan, just RNG that I can keep rolling to get variations of the same theme.
(There's also a sense of loneliness - when everyone is consuming unique content, it stops being a topic of conversation, because there's no shared experience anymore.)
And if you do accept Intelligent Design, then arguably the RNG of AI images is also guided by it to the same extent.
Whether there is intelligent design or not, you can see the effects of life existing and changing in a forest. You can detect choices, individual and collective.
And I've found many Minecraft landscapes beautiful too.
Part of it is that all current AI generated imagery is an imitation of something, but an imitation that doesn’t and can’t follow the rules of the original or understand the meaning of the original. It’s fake.
Nature feels like the opposite. It’s real and brutal and, for living things, it is driven by millions of years of evolution. It’s entirely grounded in the physical laws of our universe.
And all art is imitation - that is how we learn to follow and follow rules, how the rules come into being, and how we communicate.
It's reasonable to think that they are not good artists who consistently know when to follow rules and when and how to break them, but I don't see how this is any different than anyone else making mistakes while learning.
(As for understanding, I'd bet ChatGPT could give a more convincing analysis of an artwork than most people)
Maybe that's why we are destroying the biodiversity and most tech people seem to love it!
(Except in context of biotech or dynamic systems; those are lenses that make me appreciate nature, but I realize this is an engineer's point of view - I'm excited about possibility of applying what we're learning, and/or repurposing what's already there.)
Things can be visually interesting without intent or artistic meaning. Even if you've never stared into a fire, surely would agree that many people do it? Or the ocean? Or hills covered in snow? Or trees? Or other people having lunch? Or a pretty face? People have gazed contentedly at things that are just pretty without any worry about "artistic choices" since people have existed.
I can enjoy just looking at something, whether it's a painting or a generated image, or just the sky. It doesn't take away anything from the experience to me if I know there is no meaning or intent behind it.
To me the two are entirely separate, and e.g. when I make things myself, whether I draw, or play the piano, or write code, the outcome is often secondary (I'm shit on the piano, and mediocre at drawing, but it doesn't matter). When I learn about an artist, the person and ideas might be interesting even if I have no interest in their art (I pointed out my favourite part of the Matisse museum in Nice is not his art, but the olive garden outside it, elsewhere, but Matisse is fascinating even if I don't care about his art at all). But when I watch their art, it's purely about what I see then and there. It's not that knowing history behind it never affects me, or interests me, but that I don't need it to enjoy the work, nor will I always - or even most of the time - feel the slightest urge to learn about the work or the artist.
On a less theory-heavy notion, the mere fact that a certain image or certain parts of a given image enjoyed that much of an investment to look like it does, somewhat guarantees that it had been worth the effort to someone, that it was meant to convey something. A quality, which is now gone for ever. Meaning, even the barest spark of expression, is now just at random. Moreover, by the very definition, art will now be dogmatic, even where it's asked for aberrations and exceptions, and redundant, since it's just a product of weighted averages based on an existing library of expressions. At least applied art is pretty much over, as is visual media. (Just look at what happened to cinema, when the regulating factor of film stock and related production costs fell away.)
> the mere fact that a certain image or certain parts of a given image enjoyed that much of an investment to look like it does, somewhat guarantees that it had been worth the effort to someone, that it was meant to convey something
For reasons very similar to yours, I enjoy going to 2nd hand record stores: if someone has bought the record a 1st time, then someone else though it was worth buying and putting it on a shelf, it's more likely to bring enjoyment than a random new purchase
> Moreover, by the very definition, art will now be dogmatic, even where it's asked for aberrations and exceptions, and redundant, since it's just a product of weighted averages based on an existing library of expressions.
I don't know much about visual media except music videos, but if you want to discover non dogmatic art, I'd recommend you try out what's popular in any random country.
I love music and I've found russian rap and french pop to be extraordinary, maybe because they follow their own dogma, a dogma that feels very foreign to someone more used to north american music: whatever the russian (or french) weighted average may be, it's very far from the norm of what I'm used to, so it stands out.
But then from early on I found a lot of attempted analysis of art shallow and often outright insulting in it's insistence of knowing intent that was often not there.
E.g. I recall an interview with a Norwegian author where the interviewer was terribly invested in the symbolism of a scene, and the author though for a moment and answered that he just thought it sounded good, and wished he'd thought of that.
In other words, while there certainly is intent behind a lot of art, your interpretation is yours. It may or may not even intersect with any authorial intent.
So why does it matter?
I've written two novels. I don't give the slightest shit if people interpret things in them how I intended. For the most part I just wanted to evoke certain feelings. There's no intentional symbolism there. Many things in the setting that I know people will interpret as a positive outlook I consider depressing - from my perspective its a dystopia, but I don't want to make it feel like that. But how people take it is entirely up to them.
The artists investment has no relevance to or bearing on my enjoyment of a work. Nor would I expect or care if that is the case when people engage with my own. (I get that people who make a living of human art are worried, and that is valid)
I for one look forward to consuming AI art when it is pleasing. I also still look forward to consuming human art when it is pleasing. And hybrids.
I really don't care which is which if it looks good to me, sounds good to me, reads well to me, makes me think, makes me feel.
I feel like that's an attitude that's particularly common among software engineers: see an artifact as its surface presentation and nothing more. Maybe it's a result of thinking about abstractions like APIs too much.
When I appreciate an image, it typically has to be either a reflection of reality (this thing I'm seeing is a real thing that I now know about) or an actual person's expression (an act of communication) for me not to feel cheated.
It doesn't help that one of the biggest use-cases for "AI" image generation is the creation of clickbait bullshit masquerading as a reflection of reality.
Basically: the context is as important as the raw image itself.
There is context to a storm, or a tree too. Many things have more, and more complex, context than human intent.
Intent is just one categorisation of data, and it can be interesting, but so are many other categorizations of data.
And we also often get authorial intent wrong, often embarrassingly so.
It also compels me to see the dismissive attitude to AI art as fundamentally flawed, in that while we're clearly not "there" yet, I see no fundamental conceptual difference between different forms of computation - including the human mind - so any dismissal of the "just statistics" kind to me is an attempt to imbue the human mind with religious characteristics I fundamentally reject.
At the same time, to me, that attempt denigrated human art, which to me is equally just a result of computation.
If you can't enjoy art unless you think there's some spark of something more behind it, then to me the only reason you fail to reject human art too is faith in something there's no reason to think I'd there.
Nothing we know suggests we are - or can be - anything more than automatons resulting from computation any more than the trees in a forest or waves on a beach.
Yet we still have intent, even if it is just a product of computation.
And we still produce beautiful patterns that I enjoy whether or not I recognize your intent, and whether or not there was any intent behind any given aspect I enjoy.
I think there's no there there. Most of my time as a software engineer is spent understanding what someone else was thinking and trying to accomplish at the time through the lens of the code they ended up writing. Is that archaeological endeavor not strongly connected to if not exactly what we're talking about here?
It's just that I also know how to enjoy looking at things without any of that.
Whether those are "artistic choices" or random chance or a set of heuristics does not affect my enjoyment.
It does not mean I don't find knowing about the choices of an artist or their process interesting at times, but for the vast majority of art I see I have idea about them. They are separate to my enjoyment of a given image.
I don't know why you are skeptical - to me the notion that anything but the image itself should be necessary for me to enjoy it is a bizarre notion and I suspect it would be for a whole lot of people. Most people would not be able to name whomever created the vast majority of art they've seen, nor name the style, and do not spend time thinking about either.
Because it wasn't what I wrote or read poems for.
Sometimes I'd even seek out a certain translation of a work because I enjoyed the beauty of the choice of word of the translator more than the authors underlying ideas.
(I've never gotten through the original of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, because I find it trite, but there's a particular Norwegian translation I loved - the authors intent was identical, but one presentation of it was beautiful to me in ways the other has never been because of the patterns of words rather than meaning)
Whether or not that intent or symbolism was there in a given poem, I found the process inherently destructive for my enjoyment of those poems, and I utterly detested the process because it felt like violence.
The one time I wrote a poem with a message was as a task in his class, and it was a sharp denunciation of the analysis of poetry. No analysis was necessary - the intent was brutally apparent and quite rudely expressed.
It is also the only poem of mine I've performed in 'public', which was a mistake of him, because it's perhaps the one thing that I have written that has met with the most universal approval among those who heard it, and it hardly improved the attitude towards the analysis of poetry.
I still find pulling art apart to often be brutally destructive and occasionally insulting in it's often shallow insistence of knowing intent that usually is without actual evidence and mired in dogma.
I don't mind people finding meaning in knowing more about how it was created when the creator of a piece of art wants that context to be known or part of the work, but I feel very strongly about assuming intent even for human art, because to me at least, for what I wrote, my intent usually was to write without any deeper meaning or symbolism, to evoke emotion.
For me, for what I wrote, picking it apart ruins that on every level in ways people rarely are able to undo for themselves.
It's like trying to reassemble a cadaver.
People can find their own meaning in anything, and make their own choices, but so much art snobbery revolves around that assignation of a dogmatic interpretation of intent as "correct" and objective that often feels outright disrespectful to assume to me.
If I know as a reader that there is no genuine expression behind this, no intent of evoking anything, that it's rather patched together, based on stochastic heuristics in order to mend seamlessly, this just doesn't work. Much the same, I mentioned earlier in another comment that I believe AI generated images to occupy pretty much the negative space of abstract expressionism and informal painting. (Both styles withstand quite robustly any attempts of simple analysis.) It's really about this particular stretch, transposing inner and outer impressions into expressions, what I'm concerned with. This sort of establishes kind of a net, in which we, as humans, may suspend in. (E.g., if you are enjoying yourself in nature, does it matter, whether this is organic, has eroded and grown in certain ways, in a polylog of beings and forces, or if this is just a generated prop made of plastic? I bet, it does.)
For a more concrete example, take light in figurative art. All images are modelled from and by light, and it's quite natural that we should explore an image along its lines. Light and the way it spreads emphasises the image, even if there was no intention of doing so, just by "how it works". These are choices, equally if made intentionally and consciously or not. It's the trace and trait of a human being. But, if there was no intent, if it's just patches mended to meet up, based on weighted averages, a transferred texture? Even if there are sculpted objects and dark and light patches to look at, is there light, at all? Is it even worth noting? How should this work for me? Is there any meaning in looking closely at this?
If I see an image that evokes a feeling, it won't diminish anything if I find out it is an AI image. Why would it? The image is the same.
The same is my attitude to my writing: I may have an intent, but whether the reader interprets it the same way is irrelevant - I've written it either way, and got my enjoyment out of writing it. It'd be a shame if they don't enjoy it, but that's all.
Why does it matter? It doesn't change my experience of writing it in any way. It has no bearing on my life at all.
Nor does an artists intent change what I see, or hear, or read in any way.
Your example at the end is just deeply depressing to me. Why does it matter? It looks the same. To lose our on enjoying something nice because of factors other than the art itself feels sad to me.
Furthermore, why do you think the human art is any less the result of computation? To me, that seems like a superstition, and meaningless. I don't feel like it's a distinction with any value.
And, for you, as a writer: As you can't compete with generators on economic grounds, the productions of the former will probably become prevalent (if they are not already, in some niches). If input rejection becomes the default mode of reception, this may affect you, as well.
PS: In other word, a representation is not the real thing, it's a thing of its own in its own realm, raising the question of "what realm?".
As an illustration, here are two illustrations of my own, both representing real objects, drawn in (pre-AI) Photoshop from scratch, for interface purpose. The first is an actual application – mind the focus and guidance of attention and varying detail, the second one is just a draft, still lacking any such focus. This second one is quite similar to an AI generated image, as it lacks any purpose, thus, any reason to be there at all. (Besides that bit of light that is already in that image, it is offending in its neutrality. And there is really no point in publishing it, outside of this context.)
I agree with you.
I basically stopped looking at things on /r/earthporn because nature itself is pretty and the bastardization that often happens on that subreddit isn't. They often play with the Hugh's to get deeper greens, more contrast, etc.
But then it stops looking natural and my reaction isn't one of awe or interest. It's not pretty to me. It's interesting the first time you see it, but not the 100th time you see it.