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Comment by dormento | Hacker News Reader

I loathe the blasted copyright washing machine as much as the next intellectually honest person, but:

> AI can't create anything original.

Can we? I mean, don't we base our output on experience and reprocess references + memories of things past to create what we deem as "new"?

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Many artists have a distinct, original style. Originality is the ability to create novelty in a way which is aesthetically pleasing. I've yet to see AI create a single distinct style which is beautiful.

In my experience, an artist's original style arrives more or less from the artist having imitated and subsumed bits and pieces from other artists over the course of their artistic pursuit.

It isn't beautiful at all, nauseating uncanny valley stuff in my opinion, but AI images do have a style (or rather one of a number of idiosyncratic styles.) The sort of glossiness and unsettling focus in photorealistic images; the terrifying dreamlike surreality of more impressionist graphics; even the cartoony style used in corporate infographics. They're all quite distinctive to me at least and certainly aren't anything a human would produce. You can see the "influences" (i.e. stolen training data) but it really has come up with something itself.

Not that I think it should have. Kill it with fire and EMPs.

True. AI does have a style but it's more of a bug than a feature.

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