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Comment by pawsocks | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious about what benefits having them on a blockchain provides, besides proof of ownership?

Generative systems often produce random outputs every time it runs. When run in a browser, an output just vanishes after a refresh and is usually never found again if you haven't saved the PRNG seed.

Using a blockchain, you can store a specific output of your generative system in a way that's definitive and collaboratively agreed upon. If you believe in collecting / trading digital assets, that's a prerequisite for algorithmic systems.

I'm not sure I manage to follow accurately. If you don't save the art you make then it's gone, generative or not. If you do save the output in some way (either by saving the output itself or saving the full information needed to regenerate the output) what is special about doing so on the blockchain vs anywhere else beyond the aforementioned proof of ownership?

One is of course allowed to care about proof of ownership and the method used to do so if they like :). I just didn't follow the response in context of the question of how it's different from doing the same without the blockchain otherwise.

Unrelated: Kickass you're the Monokai author - I still use that today! Have you ever posted a retrospective about Monokai?

A generative system can produce an infinity of outputs. An art platform combined with a blockchain allows you to store a finite number of outputs from the same system definitively without knowing upfront what the outputs would look like. This forces you to think carefully about your system: it should produce interesting works with each iteration. Some people call this long form generative art.

Regarding Monokai, I’ve written some history about it here: https://monokai.pro/history :)

Yah, I think the question really comes down to: what's so special about a block chain vs any other public record or database?

For example, it's just as easy - and more accessible - to put the code and example configurations with output in a github repository.

The special thing is that it’s decentralized. I know this discussion will not resolve and I’m not a blockchain zealot. I do think it’s an elegant decentralized storage system for algorithmic art where you make outputs definitive and collectible after initiating a run.

I think that's more than fair - "I like blockchain for decentralized proof of ownership more than other methods for the same." is as fine a preference as any other, of course.

Thanks for the history page :).

Of course, "proof of ownership" with generative art isn't, because pure generative art is ineligible for copyright protection (https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-de...).

You’re conflating AI art with algorithmic art. This is the reason why I wrote the article.

You mean images? Art cannot by generated by definition.

This seems, either intentionally or unintentionally, an extremely narrow view of art.

E.g. are the artists who worked on Flow (2024) no longer artists because the resulting images are generated rather than drawn? Most people would disagree, and hold/put forth a very different definition as a result, given even they were already credited as the artists on the piece before I asked the question.

Even the arguments in the courts about AI, which is a very different kind of "generated" output, stuck to showing the outputs can't be copyrighted rather than trying to argue whether the outputs were still art as the problem.

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