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.

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

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

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.