Don't ask if AI can make art – ask how AI can be art | Hacker News Reader

Don't ask if AI can make art – ask how AI can be art

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18 pointsrntn10 comments

Those questions aren't interesting. Anything someone decides to regard as art is art. Can it be good art? As a tool AI can be used by a good artist to make good art.

If one merely needed to press a button on a machine to make good art, then it seems such a machine would quickly obsolete itself. Heck, with generative images we're already there. People see an AI generated image and they go "Oh, it's just more of that AI stuff."

I think it's fair it's fair to claim that by definition, if AI can make it all by itself, then it's not good art, because if AI can make it all by itself, then it's already in the "been there, done that" pile. As a tool however, a good artist can use AI to make good art.

The article addresses your point:

> Now, is any of this true art, you might ask, or is it merely entertainment? I’m not sure it matters. Chiang dismisses the value of generative AI for either, defending the craft required for supposedly lowbrow genre work. Movements like pop art weakened the distinctions between “high” and “low” art decades ago,...

> I it's fair it's fair to claim that by definition, if AI can make it all by itself, then it's not good art, because if AI can make it all by itself, then it's already in the "been there, done that" pile. As a tool however, a good artist can use AI to make good art.

A scenario that blurs the line between these two is where an AI is used to randomly generate 100, or 1000, or 100,000 images and an artist (editor?) chooses one for some artistic purpose. If the generation process is random enough, then the AI is bound to create something new by accident eventually, just like a room full of monkeys banging on typewriters will eventually write Hamlet. At the end of this process though, did the AI create art by itself through randomness, or is it just a special case of an artist using a tool and the act of choosing is what created the art?

No mention of Holly Herndon or Mat Dryhurst at all? Whoever wrote this completely failed to do their research — more than anyone else I'm aware of, they've been working to explore the possibilities of how working with AI can be considered Art.

Some assorted reading:

- https://x.com/matdryhurst/status/1830554355025477940

- https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/holly-herndons...

- https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/15858/art-in-the-...

EDIT: didn't mention Archillect either. Extremely low value article.

EDIT2: finished reading, and no mention at all about Section 230 protections despite discussing "tech platforms", and a single reference to "fair use" being referenced in a callout box. Whoever wrote this should be embarassed by how little they say with so many words.

What makes Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst so special? There are tons of artists working with AI, some even before these two particular artists were even born.

I've been giving far too little though about AI and the hype around it (might call me a sceptic), but I feel compelled to defend the article as it gave me some new perspectives, and is undeserving of your, frankly, low quality comment. If it was a flame bait, then I got hooked (sorry HN)

You namedrop three(?) artists and insinuate something about two legal frameworks - but provides no arguments or context why they should've been a natural inclusion in the article or how your critique relates to it.

Is that.. yes, a low value comment.

For one thing a technology that puts immersive worlds into the hands of ordinary people could make immersive worlds much more interesting.

Before LLM's and the contemporary advances, my good friend argued "AI" could never be funny, because humor requires subversion. Now I think AI humor is both here and art. I'm not an AI evangelist by any means, but the "Nothing, Forever" Seinfeld parodies (before they were de-likened) were the funniest video media at the time.

To me the Seinfeld project was funny in the same way that Markov Chain generators often are: It was uncanny, absurd, and filled with non sequiturs. That's not to say there wasn't artistic merit in the project as a whole, but the model's contribution was only ever unintentionally funny and I never felt I was laughing with the model, but at it.

> That's not to say there wasn't artistic merit in the project as a whole

Yeah, I think what really made it work is the context of Seinfeld's conceit of being a "show about nothing" while also being so influential that people encountering it for the first time today tend to see it as a bland proto-sitcom. It wouldn't mean the same thing to give that treatment to a show like Full House or Family Matters.

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