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Don't take this as a trolling question, but I can't help but wonder if this sentiment towards AI generated art and creativity is similar to how a chef might fee

Don't take this as a trolling question, but I can't help but wonder if this sentiment towards AI generated art and creativity is similar to how a chef might feel about shrink wrapped frozen food factories. Just like how a frozen meal can be thrown in the microwave and still be considered a meal, AI generated art can still be considered creative and beautiful. But, as we all know, the timing and execution to properly deliver a "real meal" from a chef is far different than a frozen meal from a factory. I find myself conflicted on this topic as I can see how the makers of yesterday have been replaced by process automation, taking away some of the magic of the creation process. But, just as a frozen meal from Costco has its place, so does AI generated art. The macro level ingredients may be the same, but the final product is different. Before fast food, the number of chefs and home cooking would have had to be far higher and/or more frequent than now. Some would argue that we are paying the price for all that processed food now, but others would argue it's the only way to scale people's lives and their time. I agree that something "feels" different about midjourney making artwork that I likely could never make myself, but I'm struggling to fully have a reason or complete reasoning for why. And then I wrestle with, is this a normal evolution problem? Just this time it hit something nearer to me personally and it impacts my life. Would love to hear other's thoughts on this.

jxf 4y ago
I think there are important differences between this situation and your chef/frozen food analogy that cause it to break down: * A digital image is permanent. A meal, by design, is consumed and has a very specific lifespan. * A digital image is trivial to duplicate and consume again. A meal can be very hard to duplicate (and may even require another chef, or food scientists). No two people can consume exactly the same meal. * A digital image is not required to survival. Regular intake of food and water is (at least for humans). and so on.
- glofish 4y ago
  I think the whole food analogy is missing the main point we are not reusing someone else's food to create a new frozen food. Frozen-ness is about mass production - but not about the origin of that food. It just conflates unrelated issues.
Jataman606 4y ago
Food is essential to our survival. No matter how much effort you put into making food, you have to make something to eat or you buy food that is cooked by someone else. So making it more accessible for people who don't have time, money or necessary skills has completely no downsides. Art is just something we do and consume for fun. We don't need to make art more efficient, because there is already too much art to consume in a lifetime. Also there is no requirement to consume as much art as possible. And automating art making means that there will be even more average art that anyone interested will have to sift through to find something nice. Overall all of this effort could be put into automating something that will make everyday life easier, like if you want to make art more accessible then for example automate translations so we can read books or watch movies that we previously couldn't.
- jkepler 4y ago
  Art is more necessary to survival than one might think. Consider the "Quartet for the End of Time,[1] an eight-movement piece of chamber music by the French composer Olivier Messiaen, written and first performed while he was a Nazi prisoner of war in 1941. And even when it comes to food, eating well involves creativity: arranging textures, colors, nutrition, etc. The French speak of l'art de la table, or the art of a well-served meal that encourages conviviality and conversation. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quatuor_pour_la_fin_du_temps https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quatuor_pour_la_fin_du_temps
glofish 4y ago
But it is not like that ... at all. Analogies run the risk of being completely wrong. A frozen food is made of real food, the process all starts from scratch with "natural" ingredients (well ingredients). The frozen food vs fresh cooked food is more like a film vs live acting. Or listening on tape vs a live concert. Even this analogy is lacking, a frozen food is made fresh at some point, it is about mass production not origin and ownership. The frozen food is not food from your kitchen (or trashcan) remixed and added onto other people's plate.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Um, I'm pretty sure your analogy fell off the truck and got ran over at some point... Trying to take the 'freshness' of food and compare it to storytelling is just an abject failure here as the vaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaast majority of storytelling has no freshness at all, it's rehashing of the same basic plot elements, hell, was it the Greeks that stated this a few thousand years ago?
  - glofish 4y ago
    you are conflating storytelling with the plot ... see how easy is to criticise analogies ... there is/was plenty of fresh storytelling in every age
    - pixl97 4y ago
      And you're confusing the tall flowers from the field. Dime novels and pulp mags are a great example of this. You're remembering the good stuff because it's stuck around and the cheap, mass produced trashed ended up in a burn pile.
epistemer 4y ago
I have gone from using midjourney for hours a day in amazement to being completely sick of it and anything it outputs in less than a month. I have seen hundreds of perfect variations on Duchamp's Fountain in my life too. AI Art is very much like Fountain variations without the human Duchamp involved. Then some AI Art fool extrapolating from that and believing Home Depot has an entire section dedicated to museum quality variations on Fountain. The actual output is a very small aspect of the phenomena of "art".

jxf 4y ago

I think there are important differences between this situation and your chef/frozen food analogy that cause it to break down: * A digital image is permanent. A meal, by design, is consumed and has a very specific lifespan. * A digital image is trivial to duplicate and consume again. A meal can be very hard to duplicate (and may even require another chef, or food scientists). No two people can consume exactly the same meal. * A digital image is not required to survival. Regular intake of food and water is (at least for humans). and so on.

glofish 4y ago
I think the whole food analogy is missing the main point we are not reusing someone else's food to create a new frozen food. Frozen-ness is about mass production - but not about the origin of that food. It just conflates unrelated issues.

Jataman606 4y ago

Food is essential to our survival. No matter how much effort you put into making food, you have to make something to eat or you buy food that is cooked by someone else. So making it more accessible for people who don't have time, money or necessary skills has completely no downsides. Art is just something we do and consume for fun. We don't need to make art more efficient, because there is already too much art to consume in a lifetime. Also there is no requirement to consume as much art as possible. And automating art making means that there will be even more average art that anyone interested will have to sift through to find something nice. Overall all of this effort could be put into automating something that will make everyday life easier, like if you want to make art more accessible then for example automate translations so we can read books or watch movies that we previously couldn't.

jkepler 4y ago
Art is more necessary to survival than one might think. Consider the "Quartet for the End of Time,[1] an eight-movement piece of chamber music by the French composer Olivier Messiaen, written and first performed while he was a Nazi prisoner of war in 1941. And even when it comes to food, eating well involves creativity: arranging textures, colors, nutrition, etc. The French speak of l'art de la table, or the art of a well-served meal that encourages conviviality and conversation. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quatuor_pour_la_fin_du_temps https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quatuor_pour_la_fin_du_temps

glofish 4y ago

But it is not like that ... at all. Analogies run the risk of being completely wrong. A frozen food is made of real food, the process all starts from scratch with "natural" ingredients (well ingredients). The frozen food vs fresh cooked food is more like a film vs live acting. Or listening on tape vs a live concert. Even this analogy is lacking, a frozen food is made fresh at some point, it is about mass production not origin and ownership. The frozen food is not food from your kitchen (or trashcan) remixed and added onto other people's plate.

pixl97 4y ago
Um, I'm pretty sure your analogy fell off the truck and got ran over at some point... Trying to take the 'freshness' of food and compare it to storytelling is just an abject failure here as the vaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaast majority of storytelling has no freshness at all, it's rehashing of the same basic plot elements, hell, was it the Greeks that stated this a few thousand years ago?
- glofish 4y ago
  you are conflating storytelling with the plot ... see how easy is to criticise analogies ... there is/was plenty of fresh storytelling in every age
  - pixl97 4y ago
    And you're confusing the tall flowers from the field. Dime novels and pulp mags are a great example of this. You're remembering the good stuff because it's stuck around and the cheap, mass produced trashed ended up in a burn pile.

epistemer 4y ago

I have gone from using midjourney for hours a day in amazement to being completely sick of it and anything it outputs in less than a month. I have seen hundreds of perfect variations on Duchamp's Fountain in my life too. AI Art is very much like Fountain variations without the human Duchamp involved. Then some AI Art fool extrapolating from that and believing Home Depot has an entire section dedicated to museum quality variations on Fountain. The actual output is a very small aspect of the phenomena of "art".