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I was in a gift shop recently that had what looked like oil paintings for $40-100, all imported from china or somewhere they were made cheaply, all of some unin

I was in a gift shop recently that had what looked like oil paintings for $40-100, all imported from china or somewhere they were made cheaply, all of some uninspired beach or flowers or something. We also have muzak, we have online "content" that's really just some outsourced minimum to try and do seo. It's already all a commodity. Having ML that can streamlines that changes nothing. It's still not doing anything creative. Even the Kermit pictures I joked about above were really "made" by the person who thought of the cool prompts for the model. It's that creativity that's the human part. ML can be an idiot savant, like a calculator can multiply numbers fast, but it doesn't "create" the ideas or inputs. So it could change the economics of listicles and lower-end gift shop art, etc, from off-shore to computer generated. Maybe for some people that will be enough to call it a kind of industrial revolution. But there is no risk to creativity, anymore than a loom was a risk to creativity in fabrics.

wnkrshm 4y ago
Also, I feel the core of art is some promise of meaning pertaining to human experience. Look at some abstract art and what do you think about? You think about the meaning and what it might represent, inevitably assigning your own meaning to it in some way. Then you get told by the artist "oh I just threw some paint at the wall because people liked my previous experiment", I bet the piece instantly loses the majority of its luster. (Edit: Same goes for representative art, mostly, as in illustration. There is a promise of an entire world hidden behind the painting, which offers a glimpse into it. If it's just an incoherent one-off, that's not that interesting, just like the commercial muzak art you mentioned.) A painting generated entirely by an algorithm is more like looking at a flower, which is also aesthetic but not necessarily art. I feel that the 'real' AI-tools for artists will be more sophisticated and more focused, like "take my catalogue of the last 10 years and train on that" - being able to go back to a former style (which is difficult for artists) and re-experimenting with that, with actually stylistically coherent output. I think we'll see a lot of art made from mashing historic styles with modern subjects in the coming years.

wnkrshm 4y ago

Also, I feel the core of art is some promise of meaning pertaining to human experience. Look at some abstract art and what do you think about? You think about the meaning and what it might represent, inevitably assigning your own meaning to it in some way. Then you get told by the artist "oh I just threw some paint at the wall because people liked my previous experiment", I bet the piece instantly loses the majority of its luster. (Edit: Same goes for representative art, mostly, as in illustration. There is a promise of an entire world hidden behind the painting, which offers a glimpse into it. If it's just an incoherent one-off, that's not that interesting, just like the commercial muzak art you mentioned.) A painting generated entirely by an algorithm is more like looking at a flower, which is also aesthetic but not necessarily art. I feel that the 'real' AI-tools for artists will be more sophisticated and more focused, like "take my catalogue of the last 10 years and train on that" - being able to go back to a former style (which is difficult for artists) and re-experimenting with that, with actually stylistically coherent output. I think we'll see a lot of art made from mashing historic styles with modern subjects in the coming years.