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Comment by RiverCrochet | Hacker News Reader

> Is electronic music where the artist composes it on a screen and then hits 'play' music?

If X composes something, X is an artist. The person playing a composed work is a performer. Some people have both the roles of artist and performer for a given work.

To say an AI composes something is anthropomorphizing a computer. If you enter a prompt to make a machine generate work based on existing artists' art, you're not composing (in the artistic sense) and neither is the computer. Math isn't art even if it's pretty or if mathematical concepts are used in art.

The term "director" instead of composer or artist conveys what's happening a lot better with telling machines to generate art via prompts.

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I mostly agree with your sentiment, but saying "math is not art" is the same as saying "writing is not art". Calculation isn't art. But math isn't calculation. Math is a social activity shared between humans. Like writing, much of it is purely utilitarian. But there's always an aesthetic component, and some works explore that without regard to utility. It's a funny kind of art, accessible to few and beautiful to even fewer. But there is an art there.

This really made me think and you're right. Perhaps I should have said "calculation" instead of "math."

The Demoscene would disagree ;)

When it comes to art, description is after practice

It does not matter if they are labeled "composer" or "director ". It is the product that counts.

"....I know what I like"

Incorrect. Art is practice. It's literally what the word means historically. Put in "Etymology of the word 'art'" in your favorite search engine or LLM.

If someone is entering a prompt to generate an image in a model I have access to, I don't really need to pay them to do it, and definitely don't need to pay them as much to do it as I would an actual artist, so it is deceptive for them to represent themselves as someone who could actually draw or paint that. If the product is what counts then truth in advertising is required so the market can work.

The vast majority of artists in all fields don't really have their own style and are just copying other people's. Doesn't matter whether we're talking about art, literature, music, film, whatever.

It takes a rare genius to make a new style, and they come along a few times a generation. And even they will often admit they built on top of existing styles and other artists.

I'm not a fan of AI work or anything, but we need to be honest about what human 'creativity' usually is, which for most artists is basically copying the trends of the time with at most a minor twist.

OTOH, I think when you start entering the fringes of AI work you really start seeing how much it's just stealing other people's work though. With more niche subjects, it will often produce copies of the few artists in that field with a few minor, often bad, changes.

Sure, you can say that AI is just "stealing like an artist", but that makes the AI the artist in this scenario, not the prompter.

It bothers me that all of the AI "artists" insist that they are just the same as any other artist, even though it was the AI that did all of the work. Even when a human artist is just copying the styles they've seen from other artists, they still had to put in the effort to develop their craft to make the art in the first place.

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