I Am An AI Hater

I appreciate seeing this point of view represented. It's not one I personally hold, but it is one a LOT of my friends hold, and I think it's important that it be given a voice, even if -- perhaps especially if -- a lot of people disagree with it.

One of my friends sent me a delightful bastardization of the famous IBM quote:

A COMPUTER CAN NEVER FEEL SPITEFUL OR [PASSIONATE†]. THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER CREATE ART.

Hate is an emotional word, and I suspect many people (myself included) may leap to take logical issue with an emotional position. But emotions are real, and human, and people absolutely have them about AI, and I think that's important to talk about and respect that fact.

† replaced with a slightly less salacious word than the original in consideration for politeness.

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.

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?

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?

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.