When something is brought into the world through human intention, it has the possibility of being art. A human must stand next to it and say "This is mine."
The human role in the creation of art is non-negotiable.
When something is brought into the world through human intention, it has the possibility of being art. A human must stand next to it and say "This is mine."
The human role in the creation of art is non-negotiable.
That's silly. There's lots of art with no known creator. Assuming the creator will never be known, it's functionally no different from art that has no creator.
We're already at a point where lots of "art" you look at might have had no human involvement; it could have been generated ad hoc by a web search or in response to the way you hesitated over something else in your feed (okay, maybe not already but certainly in the near future).
But we can't just say that anything that moves you is in a superposition of "art" and "not-art" until sufficient evidence emerges that it was created by a human.
Most people don't experience art through the "art historian" or "true art appreciator" lenses of "who made this and why". They just experience the thing for what it is.
2030's equivalent of Banksy could be a hacker who puts artistic images on major websites. It could then come out, years later, that it was all done by some AI agent. It doesn't matter if that's likely or not, it's obviously possible, and your definition can't just ignore it.
> Assuming the creator will never be known, it's functionally no different from art that has no creator.
This is the key point to argue. I say that it IS different. AI is giving us fits because AI generated works create congnitive dissonance. Knowing a human made something at all is what allows us to connect to it as art. We don't need to know anything about them other than that they are a human, they existed.
The crazy part about it is that it is possible for a human to use AI to make art. It's the intention and the human that make it possible. Where it breaks down is when there's no intention.
I can't remember what show it was (maybe Futurama?), but there's a great bit that lampoons this idea. At a modern art exhibit, somebody leaves something like a banana on an empty pedestal. Later, the attendees are marveling at it, talking about what it means, that sort of thing.
In that is example, there is no artistic intent, but also, the "piece" cannot be readily separated from the other "pieces" in the modern art exhibit that were made with artistic intent.
By your definition of art, people can be "duped" by facts about a piece that don't even accompany many pieces that we think of as "obviously art". They can assume they know the answer, or even a bounding box for the answer like "it was made by a person intentionally", and they can turn out to be wrong, and then... what? It just wasn't art, retroactively?
What if a famous haiku turns out to have been a coded message, 100% instrumental in nature, something like the number and position of enemy forces? "Whoops, guess it wasn't art". What if the best picture I took on a vacation turns out to have been take by a software glitch while my camera sat on my luggage?
We only ever think we know who made something. We do get it wrong. There's a lot of fraud in the art world. Is that likely to get worse or better in the next 100 years, do you think? What are future generations to do, just wonder about whether all their favorite art (that looks like art, feels like art, moves them like art) is "maybe art, maybe not"?
Yes, the modern interpretation of art is just the old adage that beauty is in the eye of the beholder or more crudely it’s all head canon. It’s a degenerate form of what was pursued before the modern era which was to identify and produce art that was unambiguously exceptional to anyone who saw it. Some of that is still present but seems stifled by the requirement to go against tradition so you end up with things like exploiting sheer size or complexity for effect.
Yes and the important aspect imo, is the intention. not if you used a paint brush, a camera, or ai.
i think a lot of the general pushback on ai is the utter lack of intention behind a lot of it's usage. we call it "slop" but it's really a lack of intent. and we can feel it, with ai-isms in written communication, the subtle insanities of ai generated art, and 4000 line functions that could be 40.
but it doesn't have to be this way.
Is a print of the Mona Lisa still art? Or is it worthless slop by virtue of having been created by a machine?
For the curious, Jean Baudrillard and Walter Benjamin are a good place to start for answering these questions.
as of yet, there’s still no such thing as a print created entirely by a machine. Someone made the scan, prepared the print file, chose the paper stock, proofed the prints. Or at least some of those steps, depending on the print.
The point is, there’s no print that is 1:1 equivalent to an original painting. There are artistic choices embedded throughout the process that influence the result and make one print different than another, which people might consider more or less accurate, or faithful, or beautiful, or artistic.
It’s easy to assume an image is just an image, a bunch of pixels with defined numerical values. But the real world has so much more detail than that.
C’est ne pas une ~~pipe~~ Mona Lisa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images
A print is a faithful copy of the original art. No additional artistic or expressive intent went into the mass production of the print.
There's not one answer.
It’s a print of a piece of art.
IMO the original painting is art, a faithful copy is also lesser art, but a print is not art, because it takes significantly less skill and creativity to print thousands of it. It isn't worthless nor slop, though.
Basically, art speaks to our sensibilities, so we expect to find a message in there. LLMs can't create, only mix-and-match what exists in their training data set. You could slop a new painting, make a special canvas printer, and exhibit it in a blind test. Some people will think it's art because they find meaning in it, while others will think it's not art because they'll recognize several meanings slopped together in a nonsensical way.
In reality, it was never art, because the creator, a statistical algorithm, never had any message to convey in the first place.