I Am An AI Hater

Picasso's Guernica was born of hate, his hate of war, of dehumanization for petty political ends. No computer will ever empathize with the senseless inhumanity of war to produce such a work. It must forever parrot.

A human might generate a piece of media using AI (either via a slot machine spin or with more advanced workflows like ComfyUI) and once they deem it looks good enough for their purpose, they might display it to represent what they want it to represent. If Guernica was AI generated but still displayed by Picasso as a statement about war, it would still be art.

Tools do not dictate what art is and isn't, it is about the intent of the human using those tools. Image generators are not autonomously generating images, it is the human who is asking them for specific concepts and ideas. This is no different than performance art like a banana taped to a wall which requires no tools at all.

To honor the "spirit" of OP's post:

I looked up Picasso's Guernica now out of curiosity. I don't understand what's so great about this artwork. Or why it would represent any of the things you mention. It just looks like deranged pencilwork. It also comes across as aggressively pretentious.

What makes that any better than some highly derivative AI generated rubbish I connect to about the same amount?

We must unironically give the computer pain sensors. :( don’t hurt me mr. Basilisk, I’m just parroting someone else’s idea.

I'm not an art historian, but I think Picasso invented an entire art style.

When you use AI, you might now prompt "in the style of Picasso".

And let's not forget that people call "art" to more things than the popular masterpieces. A guy sold an invisible sculpture¹ clamming it was art. If things like this can be called art, whatever AI makes can be called art too.

1: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/italian-artist-auctioned-o...

That a human made it to express their feelings.

What do I care? Can't even tell what feelings are supposedly being expressed there.

That goes for all art. It either stirs you or it doesn't. I find https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tjstsWoQiw to be one of the most beautiful pieces ever recorded, others can't listen to it and think it is bland and a terrible recording.

You can't argue about taste.

But then why wouldn't AI generated art be able to stir me? Why is a human being in the loop so important as to be supposedly essential?

Needless to say, most humans are unoriginal parrots too, one need only look at the prevalence of memetic desire. Few are capable of artistic genius like Picasso.

One technical definition of empathy is understanding what someone else is feeling. In war you must empathize with your enemy in order to understand their perspective and predict what they will do next. This cognitive empathy is basically theory of mind, which has been demonstrated in GPT4.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01882-z

If we do not assume biological substrate is special, then it's possible that AIs will one day have qualia and be able to fully empathize and experience the feelings of another.

It could be possible that new AI architectures with continuously updating weights, memory modules, evolving value functions, and self-reflection, could one day produce truly original perspectives. It's still unknown if they will truly feel anything, but it's also technically unknowable if anyone else really experiences qualia, as described in the thought experiment of p-zombies.

Why do you care to connect with another human? Try to feel his emotions, what he tried to express? If you see no value in that, there's no discussion to have, honestly. For most people I know there's value in connecting with others and emphasizing with their emotions

It's not. If one takes the fact that art is in the eye of the beholder [0], then yes, even AI art may stir you, especially as a human is the one generating at the end of the day, for a specific purpose and statement about what they want to convey.

There is a good part of the series Remembrance of Earth's Past (of which The Three Body Problem is the first book) where the aliens are creating art and it shocks people to learn that the art they're so moved by was actually created by non-humans. This is exactly what this situation with AI feels like, and not even to the same extent because again AI is not autonomously making images, it's still a human at the end of the day picking what to prompt.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author

This is a debate that existed long before LLMs with things like action painting. If I give you a Jackson Pollock and a piece from someone who randomly splattered paint on a canvas until it looked like Jackson Pollock, are they the same?

> No computer will ever empathize with the senseless inhumanity of war

My computer does. What evidence would change your mind?

Because it is mimicking human input. Effectively you are getting a mixture of many pieces of artwork that humans made distilled down into some sloppy new one that was made without feeling, purpose or skill and that can be described by its prompt, a few kilobytes at best. Original human art can only be approximated but never captured with 100% fidelity regardless of the bitrate, that is what makes it unique to begin with. Even an imitation by another human (some of which can be very good) could stir you in the exact same way but they'd be copies, not original works.

Anyway, this gets hairy quickly, that's why I chose to illustrate with a crappy recording of a magnificent piece that still captures that feeling - for me - whereas many others would likely disagree. Art is made by its creator because they want to and because they can, not because they are regurgitating output based on a multitude of inputs and a prompt.

Paint me a Sistine Chapel is going to yield different results no matter how many times you would give that same prompt to Michelangelo depending on his mood, what happened recently, what he ate and his health as well as the season. That AI will produce the same result over and over again from the same prompt. It is a mechanistic transformation, not an original work, it reduces the input, it does not expand on it, it does not add its own feelings to it.

Same in what sense? That is the real question, and perhaps not even the important one when it comes to art. Because, if the Pollock is more "important," there is an implication that it's better because it's by a more famous person, while art should be able to come from anywhere and anyone.

Agreed, tools do not dictate what art is and isn't - but using those tools for art doesn't relieve them from being ethically justified.

If generating the piece costs half a rain forest or requires tons of soul crushing badly paid work by others, it might be well worth considering what is the general framework the artist operates in.

Using more resources to achieve subpar outcomes is not generally something considered artful. Doing a lot with little is.

I read what you wrote, and it seems to me you think these two things are equal:

A human using their creativity to create a painting showcasing a statement about war.

A human asking AI to create a painting showcasing a statement about war.

I do not wish to use strawmen tactics. So I'll ask if you think the above is equal and true.

> No computer will ever empathize with the senseless inhumanity of war to produce such a work.

Neither will a paintbrush.

The tool does need to, though.

There are tons of examples of art that take much more energy than what an AI does, such as an architectural monument. It is not necessarily the case that "Using more resources to achieve subpar outcomes is not generally something considered artful. Doing a lot with little is." as not all artists will agree and even those that do might not follow it. For example, certain pigments in painting could be highly unethically sourced but people still used them and some still do, such as mummy brown, Indian yellow, or ivory black, all from living organisms.

I think this is a reasonable counter in some respects, although I do also think it's specific to the current iteration of AI art.

It's a bit like when people describe how models don't have a will or the likes. Of course they don't, "they" are basically frozen in time. Training is way slower than inference, and even inference is often slower than "realtime". It just doesn't work that way from the get-go. They're also simply not very good - hence why they're being fed curated data.

In that sense, and considering history, I can definitely see why it would (and should?) be considered differently. Not sure this is what you meant, but this is an interesting lens, so thanks for this.

The same Picasso that was notorious for churning them out towards the end of his career?

I'm being slightly flippant but I do think this is a motte and bailey argument.

Not even painting is a Guernica nor does it need to be.

And not every aesthetically pleasing object is art. (And finally - art doesn't even have to be aesthetically pleasing. And actually finally "art" has a multitude of contradictory meanings)

Is a banana taped to a wall "art?" Your answer to that is the answer to your question.

But they just said they don't get what emotions are meant to be expressed, so how can they try to feel his emotions?

Monkey's paw closes.

Now, just like you can with Studio Ghibli art, you can generate new images in the style of Guernica.

Haven't these arguments been the same since Stable Diffusion came out? Someone (A) will say what you said, then someone else (B) will say, well humans remix as well, A: no that's different because we're humans not machines, B: there is no need to prefer a biological substrate over a silicon one; A: AI will produce the same result over and over, B: not if you change the temperature and randomize the seed.

It's tiresome to read the same thing over and over again and at this point I don't think A's arguments will convince B and vice versa because both come from different initial input conditions in their thought processes. It's like trying to dig two parallel tunnels through a mountain from different heights and thinking they'll converge.

What evidence convinced you?

> it's possible that AIs will one day have qualia

As the article says, then we can discuss about it that day. "One day AI will have qualia" is no argument in discussing about AI nowadays.

Two people want to make a statement about war.

One person spent years painting landscapes and flowers.

The other spent years programming servers.

Is one persons statement less important than the other? Less profound or less valid?

The "statement" is the important part, the message to be communicated, not the tools used to express that idea.

And, is the artist the one who taped it, the one who told them to tape it, or the one who created the banana?

The same in whatever sense you want to compare the art rather than the creators. Pollocks try to convey the action and emotion of the creation process. Our hypothetical copycat lacks that higher level meaning, even though they've created an otherwise similar physical product.

As an aside:

    ...art should be able to come from anywhere and anyone.

is an immensely political view (and one I happen to agree with). It's not a view shared by all artists, or their art. Ancient art in particular often assumes that the highest forms of art require divine inspiration that isn't accessible to everyone. It's common for epic poetry to invoke muses as a callback to this assumption, nominally to show the author's humility. John Milton's Paradise Lost does this (and reframes the muse within a Christian hierarchy at the same time), although it doesn't come off as remotely humble.

Don't also forget:

A: but AI only interpolates between training points, it can't extrapolate to anything new.

B: sure it can, d'uh.

It's the person who had the idea to do so and did so. AI doesn't do anything you don't tell it to, it is the banana creator in this case. It is still up to you to get the best looking banana you can then display it.

It depends what the copycat was thinking, maybe they wanted to follow in Pollock's footsteps, maybe they wanted to showcase the point you're making, whether a copycat is as good as the real thing and therefore also considered art, perhaps even as important (apprentices often copied their masters, such as da Vinci's), maybe they are just creating it because it looks good. If there's no other reasoning, then I'd still say they're the same, because how can one say they're not art too? Even as an observer of the art, what if I like the copycat more? These are all open questions to the philosophy of art and I'm glad it's accessible today to everyone rather than only to the historically abled.

nazis held the same believe.

There is no intention in either case. Just a machine doing machine things.

The day I see AI generated art and it moves me in the same way that human generated art does I will concede the point. So far all I've seen is more, not novel.

Art never was about productivity, even though there have been some incredibly productive artists.

Some of the artists that I've known were capable of capturing the essence of the subject they were drawing or painting in a few very crude lines and I highly doubt that an AI given a view would be able to do that in a way that it resonated. And that resonance is what it is all about for me, the fact that briefly there is an emotional channel between the artist and you, the receiver. With AI generated content there is no emotion on the sending side, so how could you experience that feeling in a genuine way?

To me AI art is distortion of art, not new art. It's like listening to multiple pieces of music at the same time, each with a different level of presence, out of tune and without any overarching message. It can even look skilled (skill is easy to imitate, emotion is not).

Ironically, for the first time, I think I found some perspective to the remix argument here.

Normally it's just like you say: I don't find the remixing argument persuasive, because I consider it to be a point of commonality. This time however, my focus shifted a bit. I considered the difference in "source set".

To be more specific, it kind of dawned on me how peculiar it is to engage in creating art as a human given how a human life looks like. How different the "setup" is between a baby just kind of existing and taking in everything, which for the most part means supremely mundane, not at all artful or aesthetic experiences, and between an AI model being trained on things people uploaded. It will also have a lot of dull, irrelevant stuff, but not nearly in the same way or in the same amount, hitting at the same registers.

I still think it's a bit of a bird vs plane comparison, but then that is also what they are saying in a way. That it is a bird and a plane, not a bird and a bird. I do still take issue with refusing to call the result flight though, I think.

"What is or isn't art" didn't simply become a topic because people like to philosophize about the meaning of words. Over the 20th century the art world took fascination with the subversive, transgressive, the postmodern, rejecting authority and standards of beauty that were deemed limiting and oppressive etc. One direct contributing component was photography. Skill of realistic depiction became deemphasized, with mass production, plastic etc., the focus became abstract ideas. It was also a protest against the system that brought the two world wars.

It was considered "anti-art" at the time, but basically took over the elite art world itself and the overall movement had huge impact on what is considered art today, on performance art, sculptures, architecture that looks intentionally upsetting etc.

It's not useful to try to think of the sides as "expansive definitionists" who consider pretty much anything art just because, and "restrictive definitionists" who only consider classic masterpieces art. The divide is much more specific and has intellectual foundation and history to it.

The same motivations that led to the expansive definition in the personally transgressive, radical and subversive sense today logically and coherently oppose the pictures and texts generated in huge centralized profit-oriented companies via mechanization. Presumably if AI was more of a distributed hacker-ethos-driven thing that shows the middle finger to Disney copyrightism, they may be pro-AI.

> it's still a human at the end of the day picking what to prompt

I think that 'dutch people skating on a lake' or 'girl with a pearl earring' or 'dutch religious couple in front of their barn' without having an AI trained on various works will produce just noise. And if those particular works (you know the ones, right?) were not part of the input then the AI would never produce anything looking like the original, no matter how specific you made the prompt. It takes human input to animate it, and even then what it produces to me does not look original whereas any five year old is able to produce entirely original works of art, none of which can be reduced to a prompt.

Prompts are instructions, they are settings on a mixer, they are not the music produced by the artists at the microphones.

Pollock was a part of a coherent intellectual movement across all of art. You can't productively discuss whether it's art without focusing on that. He didn't just wake up one day and think to himself that it would be fun to throw paint on the canvas like this and then people looked and wondered if that's art or not.

It was the intellectual statement conveyed through that medium that made him famous.

> nazis held the same believe.

Along with being against any form of animal cruelty.

They were also pretty obsessed with spiritualistic quackery.

Are we giving each other fun facts or what? Surely one does not need to go all the way to the nazis to find a Picasso hater? Or are you just following the footsteps of the blogpost author too?

The intention is the human prompting or creating the work flow, the computer was never going to autonomous create images, why would it?

I still don't get why you don't see it as a tool and not the creator itself. The human sitting behind the desk is the one attaching their emotions to what they send, because they control what image they want to send, otherwise they reroll or redo their work flow. These days they can even edit the image with natural language so they can build it up just as one does in Photoshop, only using words instead of a mouse.

Have you actually used image generators today? It can produce things it's never seen if only you describe the constituent pieces. Prompts are a compressed version of the image one wants to create, and these days you don't even need "prompts" per se, you can say, make a woman looking towards the viewer, now add a pearl earing, now adjust this and that etc.

I don't think this is just taste. The painting was made in a specific historic context and commemorates the bombing of Guernica. Without knowing that context, it may be appreciated as a disembodied visual artifact, but that's not how art really works or ever worked. An influential artpiece usually states something relevant to the historic moment and intellectual Zeitgeist of the time.

You may like the music of Zombie by The Cranberries, but I'd say it belongs to the complete appreciation of it to know that it's about the Irish Troubles, and for that you need some background knowledge.

You may like to smoke weed to Bob Marley songs, but without knowing something about the African slave trade, you won't get the significance of tracks like 400 years.

For Guernica you also have to understand Picasso's fascination with primitive art, prehistoric cave art, children's drawings and abstraction, the historic moment when photography took over the role of realistic depiction, freeing painters to express themselves more in terms of emotional impressions and abstractions.

By this same logic, AI will also become accepted as art in 50 years. And by the way, no one who's serious about AI "art" uses commercial generators, they use local AI with workflow managers like ComfyUI. They are not just typing into a box like Midjourney. Therefore these are the hackers who're showing the middle finger to Disney, they dislike copyright as much as anyone.

> I still don't get why you don't see it as a tool and not the creator itself.

If after 33 comments in this thread and countless people trying to explain a part of it you don't get it that may be because you either don't want to get it or are unable to get it. Restating it one more time is not going to make a difference and I'm perfectly ok with you not 'getting it', so don't worry about it.

AI without real art as input is noise. It doesn't get any more concrete than that. Humans without any education at all and just mud and sticks for tools will spontaneously create art.

> Have you actually used image generators today?

Why would you ask this? It sounds like a lead-up to some kind of put down.

> It can produce things it's never seen if only you describe the constituent pieces.

It can produce things it's never seen based on lots of things that it has seen.

> Prompts are a compressed version of the image one wants to create

They emphatically are not. They are instructions to a tool on what relative importance to assign to all of the templates that it was trained on. But it doesn't understand the output image any more than it understood any of the input images. There is no context available to it in the purest sense of the word. It has no emotion to express because it doesn't have emotions in the first place.

> and these days you don't even need "prompts" per se, you can say, make a woman looking towards the viewer, now add a pearl earing, now adjust this and that etc.

That's just a different path to building up the same prompt. It doesn't suddenly cause the AI to use red for a dress because it thinks it is a nice counterpoint to a flower in a different part of the image because it does not think at all.

I performed an "Affective Turing Test" with null results.

Yes, context is really important. But:JS Bach made a whole raft of music, and quite a large fraction of it was religiously inspired. In spite of that it is perfectly possible to appreciate it at a deep emotional level without that particular spiritual connection. This is the genius of art to me: that it opens up an emotional channel between two individual separated by time and space and manages to convey a feeling, as clear as day.

Take U2's October as a nice example. (You mentioned Zombie, incidentally one of my favorites, the anger and frustration in there never fail to hit me, I can't listen to it too often for that reason), superficially it is a very simple set of lyrics (8 lines I think) and an even simpler set of chords. And yet: it moves me. And I doubt any AI would have come up with it or even a close approximation if it wasn't part of the input. That's why I refuse to call AI generated stuff art. It's content, not art.

That's right, and a lot of stuff is being conflated and the "debate" is mostly on the level of soundbites and emotional vibes. Many have strong opinions who have never tried the models or seen someone skilled using them (easy to find YouTube streams), combining LoRAs, ControlNets, etc.

I generally find the specific debate around "whether it's art" super boring. People have squeezed all the juice out of "what even is art" decades before the banana taped to a wall. Duchamp's Fountain, Manzoni's Artist's Shit, John Cage's 4′33″, the Red Square by Malevich, Jackson Pollock etc.

I simply don't care if it's art. It's not an inherently prestigious label to me given this history.

I don't consider context a clear win. I'd argue that there's also quite the disconnect sometimes between what a work is about and why it's popular.

Let's take Zombie by The Cranberries as an example. I really liked this song as a kid, still do, I think it has a great sound. The difference is that I now speak English, can understand the lyrics, and could look up the historical context. Ever since I did so, listening to it has never been the same, and not in a good way.

There are also examples which are not going to be so specific to my opinions. Kendrick's Swimming Pools was a house party staple, despite the song carrying heavy anti-alcoholism messaging. The contrast is almost comical.

For a different example, let's consider temporal contextuality; you describe Guernica being reliant on this. When I try to think of an example, I'm reminded of vague memories of shows with oddly timely subtitles. Subtitles that referenced things that were very specific to the given cultural moment, basically memes, but vanished since. It's not a good experience, and I'd say it would be reasonable to chalk such a thing up as a critique, rather than something worthy of praise.

This is also why I half-seriously referred to the piece being "aggressively pretentious". Rather than coming across as something I'm just genuinely missing the context for, it comes across as something with manufactured sophistication (which then I am indeed missing the context for, but unapologetically). This might still be a mirage, but I think with how pretty much stereotyped this experience is at this point, I'd imagine there's got to be some truth to it at least.

> And yet: it moves me. And I doubt any AI would have come up with it or even a close approximation if it wasn't part of the input.

I would have thought similarly, but actually feeding 19th century poems to Suno and iterating on the prompts several times I got some results that moved me emotionally, as in, listening/reading the words with this musical presentation enhanced my appreciation of the poems and it felt more visceral. Like making angry revolutionary poems into grunge brought it closer and less of a "histoic", "bookish", "dusty" thing.

Many things require one to reject self-imposed boundaries. For example[1]:

> There's a story that, IIRC, was told by Brian Enos, where he was practicing timed drills with the goal of practicing until he could complete a specific task at or under his usual time. He was having a hard time hitting his normal time and was annoyed at himself because he was slower than usual and kept at it until he hit his target, at which point he realized he misremembered the target and was accidentally targeting a new personal best time that was better than he thought was possible. While it's too simple to say that we can achieve anything if we put our minds to it, almost none of us are operating at anywhere near our capacity and what we think we can achieve is often a major limiting factor.

---

Art is nothing like shooting. My first instinct looking at Guernica is that I also feel nothing, but one can limit oneself and say: if I feel nothing initially, I will feel nothing at all. If you prime yourself to be open to an experience of putting yourself into the shoes of the author, you might start feeling something.

[1]: https://danluu.com/culture/

If you value art for aspects that don't require intellectual or historical context knowledge then the best music is bubblegum pop and the best literature is pulp fiction and smut. And indeed people who most lack such context (teens) tend to like those most.

This is not to say that eternal themes aren't important. But art is a kind of social technology that mediates between people in given cultural contexts. Part of "the great conversation" across the ages, the part you can't express in logical essays or propositions. And the eternal themes pop up in different "clothes" at different times. Once you have the key to unlock them, you do discover the same human nature and human problems operating underneath as ever.

And the beautiful cathedrals are not simply beautiful for beauty's sake but their art often conveys very specific theological claims, often hotly debated at the time. Or the choice of subject may have been outrageous or novel at the time but mundane to us now.

Liszt's music may move us even today, but we can't quite appreciate it in the same Lisztomania way as it was then, when it was fresh and novel.

That's a poster case for it being derivative works then. And of course, the more concentrated the input mixture the bigger the chance of some of that emotion leaking through.

I think there is a great case to be made here using purely synthetic sounds as the basis for emotion. Vangelis (Soil festivities), Klaus Doldinger (Skyscape) are great examples. These are sounds that have been produced exclusively by the mind and in spite of there not being a physical instrument involved they manage to convey imagery and emotion extremely effectively. This is technology used as an enabler. I've yet to come across someone using AI tech in the same liberating manner unlocking novel imaginary constructs in the way that those two did.

Or perhaps your initial premise ("AI without real art as input is noise") is simply wrong. By "get it," I'm trying to understand why you'd believe such a premise, yes even after 33 comments, because there is no underlying rationale to it, or rather, you never state it in a direct manner.

Maybe. Or maybe one just gets it, or they don't, for a particular piece.

Art is not art. Art is the thought manifested into something which convey the thought. If an artist is using an AI to manifest a thought, then that can be art.

Similar, music is not music, but rather the thought of an musician manifested is what we call music. This is why silence can be music, but silence without the thought is not.

Images generated through an AI that lacks the human thought is not art. It can look like art, have similarities to art, but it is no more art than silence is music. Same goes to music and text generated by AI.

People can inject defective thoughts into the process like "what generates me most money" or "how can I avoid doing any thinking", in which case the output of the AI will reflect that.

> Your answer to that is the answer to your question.

In what logical or philosophical framework does my opinion dictate your opinion? You're not making a grand philosophical point, you're frustrating the attempts of other people to understand your point of view and either blocking them from understanding your point of view or addressing your argument in a meaningful way.

If you cannot or will not engage in the conversation it would be more efficient and more purposeful for you to say so than the "whatever you say is what I say" falseness you're expressing in the above comment.

> What makes that any better than some highly derivative AI generated rubbish I connect to about the same amount?

I think this is a fantastic question. Full disclosure, Guernica is one of my personal favorites and I initially felt pretty poorly about this particular string of words. But the implied question, "So what?", is literally what separates art from x. I don't think that there's a direct answer to this, but I'll do my best to articulate my feelings towards it.

When I was much younger and first learning how to play guitar, I heard that Eric Clapton was a guitarist that a lot of other guitarists looked up to. I decided to listen to his works and initially dismissed them. To my ears he sounded like a worse, more basic, more derivative version than the artists I was listening to at the time and I wondered how he could even be in the same conversations as other, more modern artists. It was later that I realized I had the arrow of causality wrong. He wasn't revered because he was the best or had taken the artform to the furthest reaches or would be successful today. He was revered because he exposed so many people to a new way of expressing themselves that they likely wouldn't have known about otherwise and certainly wouldn't have invented themselves.

This analogy applies directly to Picasso, I think. You mention you felt the piece was "aggressively pretentious". Where do you think that pretense comes from? There is a whole history to the deconstruction of art in the visual medium and a whole backlash to that deconstruction and a whole response to that and that's your cultural inheritance when you view pieces like this. You don't have to even be aware of this to know that it's affecting how you feel about the piece. I think one facet of "so what?" is that this piece has existed for long enough to generate discussion about its own worth and value and at the very least is spawning literally this post.

The fact that one could find the work with one word and have a discussion about it is also pretty incredible. I don't think a model generated output is that widely known. I do think that sort of cultural reach is a facet of "so what".

There are more answers to "so what?", but to answer your question directly, "what makes it any better", I think an argument could be made that it's not. "Better" when applied to art doesn't have any particular meaning in my mind. What makes it more culturally relevant, more widely known, more widely loved, more important, and more gratifying to study each have dozens of answers, and I think that's more interesting.

What about musical synthesizers? Can they be used to create art?

> Is one persons statement less important than the other? Less profound or less valid?

To whom?

One of my favorite quotes is "The product of your art is you." (I heard it from Brandon Sanderson, not sure if he's the original.) I have come to believe this is true on multiple levels. So in your example, I can answer "they're both equally valid and profound" assuming they put similar levels of effort, skill, and basically themselves into that work.

I think that's the part where generative art falls behind. Sure, I can generate some art of a frog, print it, and hang it on my wall. But the print next to it, that I took with my actual camera after wading through a swamp all day? That will have much more profound meaning to me.

Excellent question though. I had to think for awhile on this, and most importantly, I learned something while doing it. Thank you.

> Is one persons statement less important than the other? Less profound or less valid?

In my opinion, yes. But that's the entire point here: art is in the eye of the beholder. I think much much much less of AI-generated art than I do of human-generated art. Even if an artist who is well-known for his human-generated art were to use an AI to make art, I would still likely think less of that art than of their earlier work.

> The other spent years programming servers.

I will be the first to shut down people who try to say that programming isn't a creative endeavor, but to me this is not "art".

> The "statement" is the important part, the message to be communicated, not the tools used to express that idea.

I don't agree with that. Consider just regular argumentation. If I'm trying to argue a point, how I express my argument matters. The way in which I do it, the words I use, whether I am calm and collected or emotional and passionate, perhaps graphs or charts or some other sort of visual aid, all of that will influence whether or not you buy my argument.

So If art is to make a statement, each individual has to believe that the way it's presented is powerful and resonates with them. This is a personal thing, and people are going to differ in how they react.

You not thinking it's great just means you personally don't like it. Which is fine.

> What makes that any better than some highly derivative AI generated rubbish I connect to about the same amount?

Because Guernica was made by a human who was passionate about something, and poured that passion into his work. Even if you don't "get it", I hope you can at least acknowledge that truth.

To put another way, on one hand we have:

1. Deranged pencilwork created by someone who created it with purpose, to express a feeling he had about something.

2. Deranged pencilwork created by a probabilistic algorithm, that doesn't mean anything to anyone.

Even if we look at it in these sorts of terms, #1 is still orders of magnitude "better" to me.

Art is a difficult, subjective matter sometimes. I don't think we can expect everyone to "get" every piece of art. If the poster upthread wanted to, they could read more about the painting, in detail, where perhaps someone writes about various specific features of it and what people believe those features mean. Maybe that would provide more understanding, and they could feel his emotions that way.

I'm not saying they have to or should do that; maybe they just don't care enough. And that's fine. But the option is there.

If someone prompts an AI, "generate an image in the style of Picasso's Guernica", then the result of that, by definition, has no deeper meaning. No emotion went into creating it. The person who prompted the AI could make something up, but it's hard to say what's "real" there. Even if they were to guide the image generation by describing their own emotions, the result wouldn't really be their own expression of their emotions. It would be the AI's probabilistic guess as to what those emotions look like on paper, when rendered using Guernica's style, based on a mish-mash of thousands of different artists and art history research. Ultimately it just doesn't mean anything.

I accept the idea that a talented artist could guide the AI with much deeper specifics about what to "draw", how to draw it, etc. And maybe -- maybe -- that's something that would convey the human's emotions faithfully. But I don't think that's what we're talking about here.

This is where you might be "not getting it". A human can carefully weigh every word, every swipe of a brush, or every tone... weigh it for the emotional expression and connection it produces (frequently subconscious). Whereas AI as a tool simply can't.

This is a difference between using a gradient in Photoshop, which is still a tool, and generative AI which will make "decisions" you as an author can't explain or connect with.

Flight has immediate utility, art not necessarily, other than to be or to experience. Movies can be art, instruction videos usually are not.

Flight isn't necessarily utilitarian. Not animals', not machines'.

A connected discourse is (certain, increasingly dwindling maybe) part of the art community's rejection of large swaths of works because they're meant for mass entertainment.

And so I'm not sure robbing AI generated images of being labeled art isn't a similar kind of snobbery, at least in part, with models just being a much more morally convenient punching bag this time around than other humans.

Something not being necessarily utilitarian does not mean that it isn't mainly utilitarian. There is knitting as an art form. But it was definitely mainly utilitarian at some point.

And this is how it goes with many things: at first we do them because they are utilitarian, after that there may be people who start using it as a medium for art.

> And so I'm not sure robbing AI generated images of being labeled art isn't a similar kind of snobbery, at least in part, with models just being a much more morally convenient punching bag this time around than other humans.

Then show me the art. Just one single image that moves you and that was generated by AI.

> Something not being necessarily utilitarian does not mean that it isn't mainly utilitarian.

In terms of extents, I'd say machine flight is about as utilitarian as animal flight. Which is why you don't see it differentiated in verbiage I'd imagine. I'm generally not sure where you were going with this.

> Then show me the art. Just one single image that moves you and that was generated by AI.

There isn't a single drawing (picture) that I remember to have ever moved me, manmade or machine generated, so that's quite the tall order.

For examples on AI generated images I see, that'd be on Pixiv. They're almost always tagged up and you can filter for (and against) them. And there are of course people who exploit this for harassment, because no good deed goes unpunished.

With the proliferation of AI, I saw styles, poses, framings that I haven't before there, as well as their combinations. Were they just underrepresented among other people's drawings? I'm not so sure - some are for sure referencing actual photographs instead, and some are assisted rather than fully generated. I did enjoy these greatly, even though they were not straight from the remotest figment of someone's personal imagination, and they haven't per-se "moved" me.

> In what logical or philosophical framework does my opinion dictate your opinion?

Because priors affect your conclusions.

For example, I don't like licorice, that makes me not like many kinds of candy. But I know that if a person likes licorice, they will have a very different view on these candies. Similarly how you define art affects how you see AI art, because its meaning is completely different to different people.

So for the example in question, I don't view a banana taped to a wall as art, but I know some other people do, and I understand why they do so, so answering that question tells us a lot about a persons priors.

Why end there, why isn't the manager who told the artist to make a piece the artist?

> AI doesn't do anything you don't tell it to, it is the banana creator in this case

So if I tell the AI "create me a piece of art", and it gives me a cool image, I am the artist? So, if a manager tells a person "create a piece of art", the person goes and tapes a banana to the wall, the manager was the one who created the art?

Edit: And if you think an AI can't handle that question, I just gave it to an image model and got this. Did I create this art-piece? If not, who did? Did the AI create it?

https://imgur.com/aWT8YCb

> I don't view a banana taped to a wall as art

If some don't understand why, I argue art needs to stand on its own, without the surrounding social context. If you view trash as art just because an artist told you, then the art isn't the trash the art is the artists explanation.

So, if you see a banana taped to a wall on a house when out walking, would you see that as beautiful art? If not, it isn't art according to my definition. The art piece is the whole thing, the banana and the explanation.

But many pictures can be considered art on their own without the social context, they are just beautiful and nice to look at. A banana taped to a wall doesn't pass that test.

Edit: So according to this definition AI art can be art, since some of those images can stand on their own as beautiful pieces of art without needing a social context.

Ok. Thank you for the answer and the exchange in general. I suspect one part of the issue here is that some people are more sensitive to stuff like this than others.

For instance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_wsSIuv_po

Never fails to give me gooseflesh every time I listen to it. And where it gets interesting is that that is a cover of a piece by another composer, so it serves as a very high level commentary and compliment rather than an original and still manages to maintain a lot of the emotional content and adds new elements. The original is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vE2O_yfgtBU

Adagio starts at 3:32.

See if you get a different take away from each. I find both beautiful but as different as jam and cheese.

There are drawings and paintings that move me in a similar way. And I'm sure there are people who are not touched by any of this. I've been steeped in art pretty much since I was a toddler, my dad was a painter (in my opinion not a very good one but that did not stop him from endlessly trying) and our house was always full of music, antiques and conversations about that stuff. This probably sensitized me in a way that I would not have been if not for that environment.

The interesting thing is: even bad art is still art.

Since you seem to have no problem dishing it, I hope you can eat it as well, so here you go. It's your comment that can be rightly described as pretentious. First of all, "aggressive" doesn't make sense as a modifier to "pretentious" - you were probably influenced to pick this word because of the subject and the feeling of the mural, then self-indulgently left it in, no doubt imagining yourself an innate art critic taking poetic license. Second, the way you italicized artwork. Thirdly, and mostly, because even though you just "looked up Guernica now out of curiosity", you imagine your uninformed opinion worthy of consideration to someone else out there. It's not.

To put this in very-online terms: this is a skill issue.

Your life will be richer if you learn to take more things in, and to appreciate them. And it may require actual learning! And practice!

I think you're reading too much into my comment. It's not a put down, I'm genuinely asking because it seems many people still think anyone serious about AI just types prompts into Midjourney, but it's become a lot more complex than that, akin to electronic music production; producers haven't played every single note with a physical instrument their synths synthesize yet their arrangement of the notes is what makes them a producer, and so too with AI workflows such as those seen in ComfyUI. If one is not familiar then they might not understand where the field is today.

Regarding prompts, I never said a computer "understands" or is "emotional" about an image, I don't think anyone actually thinks that, on either side of the debate so not sure why you're bringing that up. By "compressed" I just meant in the information theory way, in that if you have a specific series of words, and a given temperature and other settings for a given model, it will deterministically produce the same image, hence the set of those attributes can be thought of as a compressed representation of that image. I made no claims about it thinking whatsoever.

> It can produce things it's never seen based on lots of things that it has seen.

Yes, just like humans, as I had said in my initial comment about the same old arguments being said since 2021 when Stable Diffusion came out. But again that's tiresome so let's not repeat that here too.

Cavemen probably once had the same argument about whether musical instruments could be considered “music”; something previously only possible by singing.

Obviously, the answer is yes; musical instruments, including synthesizers, can be music and art.

"be polite"

Project much?

Some people are simply irrational, and there's no point trying to point out to them their logic errors.

Fallacy of affirming the consequent.

"Nazis ate food ... ugh to food!"

> But I don't think that's what we're talking about here.

Actually that is exactly what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about AI beginners putting in some words into a text box, I'm talking about creatives who use workflow managers like ComfyUI to create exactly the output they envision in their minds. In this way, the AI generation is merely a tool to get out whatever is in their head via synthesized means rather than manual (literally, hand) means. For example, this is a list of node work flows, it's similar to game programming in that you have inputs and you want to transform them to certain outputs, and that transformation work is thoughtful by the human and is what I imbue the creative aspect to.

https://modal.com/blog/comfyui-custom-nodes

The AI created it but you choosing to display it is the art, performance art specifically, not that the image itself is art (but again if someone looks at it and it moves them, the image itself could also be considered art); did Duchamp manufacture the urinal he turned into The Fountain? No, but then why do we still consider that art? By your logic, he wouldn't be an artist.

Not sure why you're talking about managers, that seems one step removed. Michaelangelo was commissioned by the Pope to create something, is the Pope the artist? But then let's say Michaelangelo then uses some machine or hires his subordinate to paint for him, who is the artist then?

It is a rhetorical device that nevertheless clearly explains the various thought groups of AI art. If one requires human creation rather than mere human intent to be art, then similarly they can't consider a banana taped to a wall as art, nor AI as art either. But if one considers the former but then discounts the latter, then that's a logical hypocrisy. I am of the group that considers both as art, because both require human intention.

You are mixing up what artists do and what is considered artful. Not everything artists do is artful, even by their own standard.

> It is not necessarily the case that "Using more resources to achieve subpar outcomes is not generally something considered artful. Doing a lot with little is." as not all artists will agree and even those that do might not follow it. For example, certain pigments in painting could be highly unethically sourced but people still used them and some still do, such as mummy brown, Indian yellow, or ivory black, all from living organisms.

I put forward the proposition "Using more resources to achieve subpar outcomes is not generally something considered artful. Doing a lot with little is." - yet you argue "but there are exceptions" - i know that, hence my usage of the term "generally". I'll be glad to learn how my proposition is wrong, but not inclined to defend your strawman

When I see rude behavior I respond in kind, since that's clearly what the person understands. To do otherwise is to reward trolling.

ALL of the rude behavior and trolling was yours (and you're still doing it) ... there's nothing rude about "Is a banana taped to a wall "art?" Your answer to that is the answer to your question.". And your behavior violates the site guidelines, whether it was "in kind" or not.

I need to bathe after reading your grossly dishonest excuses. Over and out.

Deflecting a question with a different question is rude. You seem to be taking this a mite personally; I'm not responsible for your bathing schedule.

Yes. I consider these to be trivial attributes of what I wrote.

It was basically all part of the point: I don't appreciate the position taken in the blogpost in the OP, as it is willfully dishonest (its author not only admits, but even flaunts this).

This is why I remarked that I'm following in its spirit. All the points you list out are issues I also have in general with discourse like the blogpost, and with derivative discourse spawned by it. I was expecting people to react badly, specifically in order to demonstrate why. Even felt a bit bad about italicizing artwork, and felt it was a bit on the nose in hindsight. Wouldn't quite call it a flamebait, but in a sense I guess it was one.

In the end though, I got some reasonable discussion out of it, a bit to my surprise. Still kind of processing whether this was an exception to my conjectured rule, or how else I should wrestle with it. I ended up restoring a bit of "faith in humanity" for myself, rather than confirming my resignations.

This isn't to say I don't believe or didn't mean what I said though, to be clear. I just presented it in a way I consider malicious (the way the blogpost is written). You seem to consider so too and have reacted now in kind - although it doesn't read like along this same idea. But then maybe I'm just falling for my own trap at this point.

I see, you were playing "Picasso hater" to OP's "AI hater". Well played, in this case, but you could have just written what you just have above, it would have prevented some confusion and misdirection. Yes, OP is unreasonable and arrogant and thus ends up going totally overboard, even though there is some truth in his complaints (pinpointing better what that is would be a worthwhile conversation to have). In my book, being a hater is not something to flaunt, but rather something to look into. Deep enough understanding inevitably softens that hate if not all the way into appreciation, at least into tolerance. It's the same with Picasso's work: once the missing historical, emotional and artistic context is perceived, the value of the work will become self-evident as well.

How is this different from an electronic music producer? They similarly arrange notes without having played them physically. So too with people generating an image as a rough draft then editing every part of it, which is mainly what I'm talking about, not someone who types in a prompt and accepts whatever comes out.

It's more that I reject your premise of "Using more resources to achieve subpar outcomes is not generally something considered artful. Doing a lot with little is." because there is no backing behind that statement except your opinion and so I provided counter examples, but I did not need to do so because your statement has no rationale itself and can thus not need to be heeded.

>> The human sitting behind the desk is the one attaching their emotions to what they send

natural question: to you draw? Even a simple thing, even a doodle of a cat would count. A particular emoji drawn for a joke. Have you ever drew a line, and then smile to yourself "yes, that is what i want other people to see?"

People can draw poorly or make collages, and come up with pretty expressive art. Those who say "well I can't express myself with stick figures" coincidentally can't express anything without stickfigures too. They just never payed enough attention to the subject to express it.

Personal anecdote: when I ask people why X is in the art they send me, they answer happily. When I ask people with AI art that, they say "oh, you nitpicking". As if some details don't and shouldn't influence art expression. As if all details that weren't in a prompt, shouldn't express anything.

AI art is a concept muddled. It's a grave for intentionallity. It's not easy to decipher creators intent through a cacophony of other intents mixed in because almost none of art choices were made with the intent to convey.

Well yeah, I could have done that, but then outcome would have been impacted. Apologies for pulling a fast one on you like this.