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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

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?

didibus 1y ago
I'm not an art historian, but I think Picasso invented an entire art style. When you use AI, you might now prompt "in the style of Picasso".
jacquesm 1y ago
That a human made it to express their feelings.
- perching_aix 1y ago
  What do I care? Can't even tell what feelings are supposedly being expressed there.
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    That goes for all art. It either stirs you or it doesn't. I find https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tjstsWoQiw 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.
    - perching_aix 1y ago
      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?
      - petralithic 1y ago
        It's not. If one takes the fact that art is in the eye of the beholder [0], then yes, even AI art may stir you, especially as a human is the one generating at the end of the day, for a specific purpose and statement about what they want to convey. There is a good part of the series Remembrance of Earth's Past (of which The Three Body Problem is the first book) where the aliens are creating art and it shocks people to learn that the art they're so moved by was actually created by non-humans. This is exactly what this situation with AI feels like, and not even to the same extent because again AI is not autonomously making images, it's still a human at the end of the day picking what to prompt. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author
        jacquesm 1y ago
        > it's still a human at the end of the day picking what to prompt I think that 'dutch people skating on a lake' or 'girl with a pearl earring' or 'dutch religious couple in front of their barn' without having an AI trained on various works will produce just noise. And if those particular works (you know the ones, right?) were not part of the input then the AI would never produce anything looking like the original, no matter how specific you made the prompt. It takes human input to animate it, and even then what it produces to me does not look original whereas any five year old is able to produce entirely original works of art, none of which can be reduced to a prompt. Prompts are instructions, they are settings on a mixer, they are not the music produced by the artists at the microphones.
        petralithic 1y ago
        Have you actually used image generators today? It can produce things it's never seen if only you describe the constituent pieces. Prompts are a compressed version of the image one wants to create, and these days you don't even need "prompts" per se, you can say, make a woman looking towards the viewer, now add a pearl earing, now adjust this and that etc.
        1y ago
    - bonoboTP 1y ago
      I don't think this is just taste. The painting was made in a specific historic context and commemorates the bombing of Guernica. Without knowing that context, it may be appreciated as a disembodied visual artifact, but that's not how art really works or ever worked. An influential artpiece usually states something relevant to the historic moment and intellectual Zeitgeist of the time. You may like the music of Zombie by The Cranberries, but I'd say it belongs to the complete appreciation of it to know that it's about the Irish Troubles, and for that you need some background knowledge. You may like to smoke weed to Bob Marley songs, but without knowing something about the African slave trade, you won't get the significance of tracks like 400 years. For Guernica you also have to understand Picasso's fascination with primitive art, prehistoric cave art, children's drawings and abstraction, the historic moment when photography took over the role of realistic depiction, freeing painters to express themselves more in terms of emotional impressions and abstractions.
      - jacquesm 1y ago
        Yes, context is really important. But:JS Bach made a whole raft of music, and quite a large fraction of it was religiously inspired. In spite of that it is perfectly possible to appreciate it at a deep emotional level without that particular spiritual connection. This is the genius of art to me: that it opens up an emotional channel between two individual separated by time and space and manages to convey a feeling, as clear as day. Take U2's October as a nice example. (You mentioned Zombie, incidentally one of my favorites, the anger and frustration in there never fail to hit me, I can't listen to it too often for that reason), superficially it is a very simple set of lyrics (8 lines I think) and an even simpler set of chords. And yet: it moves me. And I doubt any AI would have come up with it or even a close approximation if it wasn't part of the input. That's why I refuse to call AI generated stuff art. It's content, not art.
        bonoboTP 1y ago
        > And yet: it moves me. And I doubt any AI would have come up with it or even a close approximation if it wasn't part of the input. I would have thought similarly, but actually feeding 19th century poems to Suno and iterating on the prompts several times I got some results that moved me emotionally, as in, listening/reading the words with this musical presentation enhanced my appreciation of the poems and it felt more visceral. Like making angry revolutionary poems into grunge brought it closer and less of a "histoic", "bookish", "dusty" thing.
  - mm263 1y ago
    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
    - petralithic 1y ago
      But they just said they don't get what emotions are meant to be expressed, so how can they try to feel his emotions?
      - mm263 1y ago
        Many things require one to reject self-imposed boundaries. For example[1]: > There's a story that, IIRC, was told by Brian Enos, where he was practicing timed drills with the goal of practicing until he could complete a specific task at or under his usual time. He was having a hard time hitting his normal time and was annoyed at himself because he was slower than usual and kept at it until he hit his target, at which point he realized he misremembered the target and was accidentally targeting a new personal best time that was better than he thought was possible. While it's too simple to say that we can achieve anything if we put our minds to it, almost none of us are operating at anywhere near our capacity and what we think we can achieve is often a major limiting factor. --- Art is nothing like shooting. My first instinct looking at Guernica is that I also feel nothing, but one can limit oneself and say: if I feel nothing initially, I will feel nothing at all. If you prime yourself to be open to an experience of putting yourself into the shoes of the author, you might start feeling something. [1]: https://danluu.com/culture/ https://danluu.com/culture/
        petralithic 1y ago
        Maybe. Or maybe one just gets it, or they don't, for a particular piece.
      - kelnos 1y ago
        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.
  - slipperydippery 1y ago
    To put this in very-online terms: this is a skill issue. Your life will be richer if you learn to take more things in, and to appreciate them. And it may require actual learning! And practice!
DyslexicAtheist 1y ago
nazis held the same believe.
- perching_aix 1y ago
  > nazis held the same believe. Along with being against any form of animal cruelty. They were also pretty obsessed with spiritualistic quackery. Are we giving each other fun facts or what? Surely one does not need to go all the way to the nazis to find a Picasso hater? Or are you just following the footsteps of the blogpost author too?
- jibal 1y ago
  Fallacy of affirming the consequent. "Nazis ate food ... ugh to food!"
averagefluid 1y ago
> What makes that any better than some highly derivative AI generated rubbish I connect to about the same amount? I think this is a fantastic question. Full disclosure, Guernica is one of my personal favorites and I initially felt pretty poorly about this particular string of words. But the implied question, "So what?", is literally what separates art from x. I don't think that there's a direct answer to this, but I'll do my best to articulate my feelings towards it. When I was much younger and first learning how to play guitar, I heard that Eric Clapton was a guitarist that a lot of other guitarists looked up to. I decided to listen to his works and initially dismissed them. To my ears he sounded like a worse, more basic, more derivative version than the artists I was listening to at the time and I wondered how he could even be in the same conversations as other, more modern artists. It was later that I realized I had the arrow of causality wrong. He wasn't revered because he was the best or had taken the artform to the furthest reaches or would be successful today. He was revered because he exposed so many people to a new way of expressing themselves that they likely wouldn't have known about otherwise and certainly wouldn't have invented themselves. This analogy applies directly to Picasso, I think. You mention you felt the piece was "aggressively pretentious". Where do you think that pretense comes from? There is a whole history to the deconstruction of art in the visual medium and a whole backlash to that deconstruction and a whole response to that and that's your cultural inheritance when you view pieces like this. You don't have to even be aware of this to know that it's affecting how you feel about the piece. I think one facet of "so what?" is that this piece has existed for long enough to generate discussion about its own worth and value and at the very least is spawning literally this post. The fact that one could find the work with one word and have a discussion about it is also pretty incredible. I don't think a model generated output is that widely known. I do think that sort of cultural reach is a facet of "so what". There are more answers to "so what?", but to answer your question directly, "what makes it any better", I think an argument could be made that it's not. "Better" when applied to art doesn't have any particular meaning in my mind. What makes it more culturally relevant, more widely known, more widely loved, more important, and more gratifying to study each have dozens of answers, and I think that's more interesting.
kelnos 1y ago
You not thinking it's great just means you personally don't like it. Which is fine. > What makes that any better than some highly derivative AI generated rubbish I connect to about the same amount? Because Guernica was made by a human who was passionate about something, and poured that passion into his work. Even if you don't "get it", I hope you can at least acknowledge that truth. To put another way, on one hand we have: 1. Deranged pencilwork created by someone who created it with purpose, to express a feeling he had about something. 2. Deranged pencilwork created by a probabilistic algorithm, that doesn't mean anything to anyone. Even if we look at it in these sorts of terms, #1 is still orders of magnitude "better" to me.
pegasus 1y ago
Since you seem to have no problem dishing it, I hope you can eat it as well, so here you go. It's your comment that can be rightly described as pretentious. First of all, "aggressive" doesn't make sense as a modifier to "pretentious" - you were probably influenced to pick this word because of the subject and the feeling of the mural, then self-indulgently left it in, no doubt imagining yourself an innate art critic taking poetic license. Second, the way you italicized artwork. Thirdly, and mostly, because even though you just "looked up Guernica now out of curiosity", you imagine your uninformed opinion worthy of consideration to someone else out there. It's not.
- perching_aix 1y ago
  Yes. I consider these to be trivial attributes of what I wrote. It was basically all part of the point: I don't appreciate the position taken in the blogpost in the OP, as it is willfully dishonest (its author not only admits, but even flaunts this). This is why I remarked that I'm following in its spirit. All the points you list out are issues I also have in general with discourse like the blogpost, and with derivative discourse spawned by it. I was expecting people to react badly, specifically in order to demonstrate why. Even felt a bit bad about italicizing artwork, and felt it was a bit on the nose in hindsight. Wouldn't quite call it a flamebait, but in a sense I guess it was one. In the end though, I got some reasonable discussion out of it, a bit to my surprise. Still kind of processing whether this was an exception to my conjectured rule, or how else I should wrestle with it. I ended up restoring a bit of "faith in humanity" for myself, rather than confirming my resignations. This isn't to say I don't believe or didn't mean what I said though, to be clear. I just presented it in a way I consider malicious (the way the blogpost is written). You seem to consider so too and have reacted now in kind - although it doesn't read like along this same idea. But then maybe I'm just falling for my own trap at this point.
  - pegasus 1y ago
    I see, you were playing "Picasso hater" to OP's "AI hater". Well played, in this case, but you could have just written what you just have above, it would have prevented some confusion and misdirection. Yes, OP is unreasonable and arrogant and thus ends up going totally overboard, even though there is some truth in his complaints (pinpointing better what that is would be a worthwhile conversation to have). In my book, being a hater is not something to flaunt, but rather something to look into. Deep enough understanding inevitably softens that hate if not all the way into appreciation, at least into tolerance. It's the same with Picasso's work: once the missing historical, emotional and artistic context is perceived, the value of the work will become self-evident as well.

didibus 1y ago

I'm not an art historian, but I think Picasso invented an entire art style. When you use AI, you might now prompt "in the style of Picasso".

jacquesm 1y ago

That a human made it to express their feelings.

perching_aix 1y ago
What do I care? Can't even tell what feelings are supposedly being expressed there.
- jacquesm 1y ago
  That goes for all art. It either stirs you or it doesn't. I find https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tjstsWoQiw 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.
  - perching_aix 1y ago
    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?
    - petralithic 1y ago
      It's not. If one takes the fact that art is in the eye of the beholder [0], then yes, even AI art may stir you, especially as a human is the one generating at the end of the day, for a specific purpose and statement about what they want to convey. There is a good part of the series Remembrance of Earth's Past (of which The Three Body Problem is the first book) where the aliens are creating art and it shocks people to learn that the art they're so moved by was actually created by non-humans. This is exactly what this situation with AI feels like, and not even to the same extent because again AI is not autonomously making images, it's still a human at the end of the day picking what to prompt. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author
      - jacquesm 1y ago
        > it's still a human at the end of the day picking what to prompt I think that 'dutch people skating on a lake' or 'girl with a pearl earring' or 'dutch religious couple in front of their barn' without having an AI trained on various works will produce just noise. And if those particular works (you know the ones, right?) were not part of the input then the AI would never produce anything looking like the original, no matter how specific you made the prompt. It takes human input to animate it, and even then what it produces to me does not look original whereas any five year old is able to produce entirely original works of art, none of which can be reduced to a prompt. Prompts are instructions, they are settings on a mixer, they are not the music produced by the artists at the microphones.
        petralithic 1y ago
        Have you actually used image generators today? It can produce things it's never seen if only you describe the constituent pieces. Prompts are a compressed version of the image one wants to create, and these days you don't even need "prompts" per se, you can say, make a woman looking towards the viewer, now add a pearl earing, now adjust this and that etc.
        1y ago
  - bonoboTP 1y ago
    I don't think this is just taste. The painting was made in a specific historic context and commemorates the bombing of Guernica. Without knowing that context, it may be appreciated as a disembodied visual artifact, but that's not how art really works or ever worked. An influential artpiece usually states something relevant to the historic moment and intellectual Zeitgeist of the time. You may like the music of Zombie by The Cranberries, but I'd say it belongs to the complete appreciation of it to know that it's about the Irish Troubles, and for that you need some background knowledge. You may like to smoke weed to Bob Marley songs, but without knowing something about the African slave trade, you won't get the significance of tracks like 400 years. For Guernica you also have to understand Picasso's fascination with primitive art, prehistoric cave art, children's drawings and abstraction, the historic moment when photography took over the role of realistic depiction, freeing painters to express themselves more in terms of emotional impressions and abstractions.
    - jacquesm 1y ago
      Yes, context is really important. But:JS Bach made a whole raft of music, and quite a large fraction of it was religiously inspired. In spite of that it is perfectly possible to appreciate it at a deep emotional level without that particular spiritual connection. This is the genius of art to me: that it opens up an emotional channel between two individual separated by time and space and manages to convey a feeling, as clear as day. Take U2's October as a nice example. (You mentioned Zombie, incidentally one of my favorites, the anger and frustration in there never fail to hit me, I can't listen to it too often for that reason), superficially it is a very simple set of lyrics (8 lines I think) and an even simpler set of chords. And yet: it moves me. And I doubt any AI would have come up with it or even a close approximation if it wasn't part of the input. That's why I refuse to call AI generated stuff art. It's content, not art.
      - bonoboTP 1y ago
        > And yet: it moves me. And I doubt any AI would have come up with it or even a close approximation if it wasn't part of the input. I would have thought similarly, but actually feeding 19th century poems to Suno and iterating on the prompts several times I got some results that moved me emotionally, as in, listening/reading the words with this musical presentation enhanced my appreciation of the poems and it felt more visceral. Like making angry revolutionary poems into grunge brought it closer and less of a "histoic", "bookish", "dusty" thing.
- mm263 1y ago
  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
  - petralithic 1y ago
    But they just said they don't get what emotions are meant to be expressed, so how can they try to feel his emotions?
    - mm263 1y ago
      Many things require one to reject self-imposed boundaries. For example[1]: > There's a story that, IIRC, was told by Brian Enos, where he was practicing timed drills with the goal of practicing until he could complete a specific task at or under his usual time. He was having a hard time hitting his normal time and was annoyed at himself because he was slower than usual and kept at it until he hit his target, at which point he realized he misremembered the target and was accidentally targeting a new personal best time that was better than he thought was possible. While it's too simple to say that we can achieve anything if we put our minds to it, almost none of us are operating at anywhere near our capacity and what we think we can achieve is often a major limiting factor. --- Art is nothing like shooting. My first instinct looking at Guernica is that I also feel nothing, but one can limit oneself and say: if I feel nothing initially, I will feel nothing at all. If you prime yourself to be open to an experience of putting yourself into the shoes of the author, you might start feeling something. [1]: https://danluu.com/culture/ https://danluu.com/culture/
      - petralithic 1y ago
        Maybe. Or maybe one just gets it, or they don't, for a particular piece.
    - kelnos 1y ago
      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.
- slipperydippery 1y ago
  To put this in very-online terms: this is a skill issue. Your life will be richer if you learn to take more things in, and to appreciate them. And it may require actual learning! And practice!

DyslexicAtheist 1y ago

nazis held the same believe.

perching_aix 1y ago
> nazis held the same believe. Along with being against any form of animal cruelty. They were also pretty obsessed with spiritualistic quackery. Are we giving each other fun facts or what? Surely one does not need to go all the way to the nazis to find a Picasso hater? Or are you just following the footsteps of the blogpost author too?
jibal 1y ago
Fallacy of affirming the consequent. "Nazis ate food ... ugh to food!"

averagefluid 1y ago

> What makes that any better than some highly derivative AI generated rubbish I connect to about the same amount? I think this is a fantastic question. Full disclosure, Guernica is one of my personal favorites and I initially felt pretty poorly about this particular string of words. But the implied question, "So what?", is literally what separates art from x. I don't think that there's a direct answer to this, but I'll do my best to articulate my feelings towards it. When I was much younger and first learning how to play guitar, I heard that Eric Clapton was a guitarist that a lot of other guitarists looked up to. I decided to listen to his works and initially dismissed them. To my ears he sounded like a worse, more basic, more derivative version than the artists I was listening to at the time and I wondered how he could even be in the same conversations as other, more modern artists. It was later that I realized I had the arrow of causality wrong. He wasn't revered because he was the best or had taken the artform to the furthest reaches or would be successful today. He was revered because he exposed so many people to a new way of expressing themselves that they likely wouldn't have known about otherwise and certainly wouldn't have invented themselves. This analogy applies directly to Picasso, I think. You mention you felt the piece was "aggressively pretentious". Where do you think that pretense comes from? There is a whole history to the deconstruction of art in the visual medium and a whole backlash to that deconstruction and a whole response to that and that's your cultural inheritance when you view pieces like this. You don't have to even be aware of this to know that it's affecting how you feel about the piece. I think one facet of "so what?" is that this piece has existed for long enough to generate discussion about its own worth and value and at the very least is spawning literally this post. The fact that one could find the work with one word and have a discussion about it is also pretty incredible. I don't think a model generated output is that widely known. I do think that sort of cultural reach is a facet of "so what". There are more answers to "so what?", but to answer your question directly, "what makes it any better", I think an argument could be made that it's not. "Better" when applied to art doesn't have any particular meaning in my mind. What makes it more culturally relevant, more widely known, more widely loved, more important, and more gratifying to study each have dozens of answers, and I think that's more interesting.

kelnos 1y ago

You not thinking it's great just means you personally don't like it. Which is fine. > What makes that any better than some highly derivative AI generated rubbish I connect to about the same amount? Because Guernica was made by a human who was passionate about something, and poured that passion into his work. Even if you don't "get it", I hope you can at least acknowledge that truth. To put another way, on one hand we have: 1. Deranged pencilwork created by someone who created it with purpose, to express a feeling he had about something. 2. Deranged pencilwork created by a probabilistic algorithm, that doesn't mean anything to anyone. Even if we look at it in these sorts of terms, #1 is still orders of magnitude "better" to me.

pegasus 1y ago

Since you seem to have no problem dishing it, I hope you can eat it as well, so here you go. It's your comment that can be rightly described as pretentious. First of all, "aggressive" doesn't make sense as a modifier to "pretentious" - you were probably influenced to pick this word because of the subject and the feeling of the mural, then self-indulgently left it in, no doubt imagining yourself an innate art critic taking poetic license. Second, the way you italicized artwork. Thirdly, and mostly, because even though you just "looked up Guernica now out of curiosity", you imagine your uninformed opinion worthy of consideration to someone else out there. It's not.

perching_aix 1y ago
Yes. I consider these to be trivial attributes of what I wrote. It was basically all part of the point: I don't appreciate the position taken in the blogpost in the OP, as it is willfully dishonest (its author not only admits, but even flaunts this). This is why I remarked that I'm following in its spirit. All the points you list out are issues I also have in general with discourse like the blogpost, and with derivative discourse spawned by it. I was expecting people to react badly, specifically in order to demonstrate why. Even felt a bit bad about italicizing artwork, and felt it was a bit on the nose in hindsight. Wouldn't quite call it a flamebait, but in a sense I guess it was one. In the end though, I got some reasonable discussion out of it, a bit to my surprise. Still kind of processing whether this was an exception to my conjectured rule, or how else I should wrestle with it. I ended up restoring a bit of "faith in humanity" for myself, rather than confirming my resignations. This isn't to say I don't believe or didn't mean what I said though, to be clear. I just presented it in a way I consider malicious (the way the blogpost is written). You seem to consider so too and have reacted now in kind - although it doesn't read like along this same idea. But then maybe I'm just falling for my own trap at this point.
- pegasus 1y ago
  I see, you were playing "Picasso hater" to OP's "AI hater". Well played, in this case, but you could have just written what you just have above, it would have prevented some confusion and misdirection. Yes, OP is unreasonable and arrogant and thus ends up going totally overboard, even though there is some truth in his complaints (pinpointing better what that is would be a worthwhile conversation to have). In my book, being a hater is not something to flaunt, but rather something to look into. Deep enough understanding inevitably softens that hate if not all the way into appreciation, at least into tolerance. It's the same with Picasso's work: once the missing historical, emotional and artistic context is perceived, the value of the work will become self-evident as well.