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> Humans as a race have created art from literally nothing. No, they didn't? Humans don't have any magic creative juices that allow them to come up with ideas

> Humans as a race have created art from literally nothing. No, they didn't? Humans don't have any magic creative juices that allow them to come up with ideas out of thin air, that's silly. Ideas are created from our brain using our past experiences and knowledge, why do you think some of our earliest art is of animals? Also, I'm not sure comparing artists to horse-drawn carriages is the best analogy to support your argument, considering horse-drawn carriages are almost nonexistent nowadays. I'd argue a better analogy would be something like chess or any other game. When computers beat humans at chess, nobody changed the rules of chess to make computers perform worse. People just acknowledged that computers were better.

Arainach 4y ago
Scale enables all sorts of things in technology that require new rules. In theory, you could have 1000 people watching cameras with a list of people to watch for in 1980, but in practice it was too expensive and not a consideration. Now you can cheaply record tens of thousands of hours of video indefinitely and run analyses on everyone in them. This has huge implications on freedom and society and calls for new rules. Just because technology is doing the "same thing" that was done before at scale does not make it the same thing. AI is the same.
buran77 4y ago
I'm not sure if you understand my point and you're also undermining your own points almost as soon as you make them. I don't want to stop computers in their tracks. To this day in the interest of fairness we apply different rules even between humans in a lot of things. Suddenly bundling computers and humans under the same rules is a severely flawed idea. > Ideas are created from our brain using our past experiences and knowledge Humans experienced random things in life and some created art from it. Sometimes after hallucinogenic drugs they created art even from things that never existed. Then other humans created something new on top of the existing art. AI "experienced" already created art and was tasked to recombine pieces to create more art. Simply put, nobody gave an AI sounds of nature and had it come up with a symphony after some thousands of human years' equivalent of processing. > Also, I'm not sure comparing artists to horse-drawn carriages is the best analogy to support your argument, considering horse-drawn carriages are almost nonexistent nowadays. Not sure why this harms the analogy, it's meant to point out that "speed" makes a difference and changes the rules. Artists may also be nonexistent tomorrow. If AI is doing everything legitimately and creating art the same way as humans but faster and better, why would human artists continue to exist? And then what would you feed as training material to your AI? The dictionary definition of "love"? Sounds of nature? Art created by the previous AIs? > When computers beat humans at chess, nobody changed the rules of chess to make computers perform worse. Right, we just don't allow computers to play the game in official positions. Different rules, as it were.
- kgarten 4y ago
  in the whole discussion, I feel you are missing a point. AI creates something that looks like art to humans based on a probability distribution. for me art is not the end product but the process. I want to understand the artists intentions and often a work that looks blant, because deep because of the artist's explanations. Take Agnes Martin's paintings as an example.
  - techdragon 4y ago
    The way you say “something that looks like art” feels like you don’t consider the output of these AI models as art, and that generally speaking you have specific views on either what art is or what counts as art… So what of the Dadaist, the postmodern and the rest, where art is only art because we say it is art, and the creation of art need only involve the “artist” scribbling their signature on the object to bestow it with “artistic merit”. I cannot see a good way to reconcile a philosophy (law is different here, plenty of art can be illegal, eg: graffiti) involving AI and art like this… Duchamp’s readymades, are the products of a factory’s meant for consumer use, are Art… AI art is the product of an sophisticated set of multiple software tools combined and then used by a person to produce their own artistic vision, the output is Art. If Duchamp signing a urinal makes the urinal art then me using a prompt to craft a specific artistic outcome arguably required more creative effort to understand my “tools” and use them to produce a result that should also be considered art if I want to call it that. I accept that we may come around and regulate and legislate these tools, just like how it’s illegal to make a graffiti masterpiece on someone’s wall without permission, it may eventually be illegal to use models trained with “unlicensed” data and the matter settled… but can we quit with this denigration of the output as somehow not actually art?
    - kgarten 4y ago
      It might be art but it's art created by humans using matrix multiplications and a lot of data. For me the image generators are tools. They don't have intention, consciousness, and don't "know" why they produce something. So if you are asking if AI alone can produce art, I would say no, because AI lacks these properties. You have to present a prompt and press a button, that person is the creator of the Art. The AI when prompted can just produce sth. that looks like art to us humans. The user who prompted it has to add the "process and intention" to it. Regarding Duchamp's Urinal, the intention and the critique it voices is critical for being considered art (and a lot of people still argue about it). https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20170410-the-urinal-that-changed-how-we-think https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20170410-the-urinal-that... There have been a lot of upside down urinals in the world before Duchamp did that, yet nobody considered it art. Here again the intention matters. Matrix multiplications on big data don't have any intention.

Arainach 4y ago

Scale enables all sorts of things in technology that require new rules. In theory, you could have 1000 people watching cameras with a list of people to watch for in 1980, but in practice it was too expensive and not a consideration. Now you can cheaply record tens of thousands of hours of video indefinitely and run analyses on everyone in them. This has huge implications on freedom and society and calls for new rules. Just because technology is doing the "same thing" that was done before at scale does not make it the same thing. AI is the same.

buran77 4y ago

I'm not sure if you understand my point and you're also undermining your own points almost as soon as you make them. I don't want to stop computers in their tracks. To this day in the interest of fairness we apply different rules even between humans in a lot of things. Suddenly bundling computers and humans under the same rules is a severely flawed idea. > Ideas are created from our brain using our past experiences and knowledge Humans experienced random things in life and some created art from it. Sometimes after hallucinogenic drugs they created art even from things that never existed. Then other humans created something new on top of the existing art. AI "experienced" already created art and was tasked to recombine pieces to create more art. Simply put, nobody gave an AI sounds of nature and had it come up with a symphony after some thousands of human years' equivalent of processing. > Also, I'm not sure comparing artists to horse-drawn carriages is the best analogy to support your argument, considering horse-drawn carriages are almost nonexistent nowadays. Not sure why this harms the analogy, it's meant to point out that "speed" makes a difference and changes the rules. Artists may also be nonexistent tomorrow. If AI is doing everything legitimately and creating art the same way as humans but faster and better, why would human artists continue to exist? And then what would you feed as training material to your AI? The dictionary definition of "love"? Sounds of nature? Art created by the previous AIs? > When computers beat humans at chess, nobody changed the rules of chess to make computers perform worse. Right, we just don't allow computers to play the game in official positions. Different rules, as it were.

kgarten 4y ago
in the whole discussion, I feel you are missing a point. AI creates something that looks like art to humans based on a probability distribution. for me art is not the end product but the process. I want to understand the artists intentions and often a work that looks blant, because deep because of the artist's explanations. Take Agnes Martin's paintings as an example.
- techdragon 4y ago
  The way you say “something that looks like art” feels like you don’t consider the output of these AI models as art, and that generally speaking you have specific views on either what art is or what counts as art… So what of the Dadaist, the postmodern and the rest, where art is only art because we say it is art, and the creation of art need only involve the “artist” scribbling their signature on the object to bestow it with “artistic merit”. I cannot see a good way to reconcile a philosophy (law is different here, plenty of art can be illegal, eg: graffiti) involving AI and art like this… Duchamp’s readymades, are the products of a factory’s meant for consumer use, are Art… AI art is the product of an sophisticated set of multiple software tools combined and then used by a person to produce their own artistic vision, the output is Art. If Duchamp signing a urinal makes the urinal art then me using a prompt to craft a specific artistic outcome arguably required more creative effort to understand my “tools” and use them to produce a result that should also be considered art if I want to call it that. I accept that we may come around and regulate and legislate these tools, just like how it’s illegal to make a graffiti masterpiece on someone’s wall without permission, it may eventually be illegal to use models trained with “unlicensed” data and the matter settled… but can we quit with this denigration of the output as somehow not actually art?
  - kgarten 4y ago
    It might be art but it's art created by humans using matrix multiplications and a lot of data. For me the image generators are tools. They don't have intention, consciousness, and don't "know" why they produce something. So if you are asking if AI alone can produce art, I would say no, because AI lacks these properties. You have to present a prompt and press a button, that person is the creator of the Art. The AI when prompted can just produce sth. that looks like art to us humans. The user who prompted it has to add the "process and intention" to it. Regarding Duchamp's Urinal, the intention and the critique it voices is critical for being considered art (and a lot of people still argue about it). https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20170410-the-urinal-that-changed-how-we-think https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20170410-the-urinal-that... There have been a lot of upside down urinals in the world before Duchamp did that, yet nobody considered it art. Here again the intention matters. Matrix multiplications on big data don't have any intention.