Apologies, but I'm copy/pasting a previous reply of mine to a similar sentiment:
Art is an expression of human emotion. When I hear music, I am part of those artists journey, struggles. The emotion in their songs come from their first break-up, an argument they had with someone they loved. I can understand that on a profound, shared level.
Way back me and my friends played a lot of starcraft. We only played cooperatively against the AI. Until one day me and a friend decided to play against each other. I can't tell put into words how intense that was. When we were done (we played in different rooms of house), we got together, and laughed. We both knew what the other had gone through. We both said "man, that was intense!".
I don't get that feeling from an amalgamation of all human thoughts/emotions/actions.
One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.
Yet humans are the ones enacting an AI for art (of some kind). Is not therefore not art because even though a human initiated the process, the machine completed it?
If you argue that, then what about kinetic sculptures, what about pendulum painting, etc? The artist sets them in motion but the rest of the actions are carried out by something nonhuman.
And even in a fully autonomous sense; who are we to define art as being artefacts of human emotion? How typically human (tribalism). What's to say that an alien species doesn't exist, somewhere...out there. If that species produces something akin to art, but they never evolved the chemical reactions that we call emotions...I suppose it's not art by your definition?
And what if that alien species is not carbon based? If it therefore much of a stretch to call art that an eventual AGI produces art?
My definition of art is a superposition of everything and nothing is art at the same time; because art is art in the eye of the arts beholder. When I look up at the night sky; that's art, but no human emotion produced that.
You seem to be conflating natural beauty and the arts.
Just because something beautiful can be created without emotion, that doesn't mean it's art. It just means something pleasing was created.
We have many species on earth that are "alien" to us - they don't create with emotion, they create things that are beautiful because that's just how it ended up.
Bees don't create hexagonal honeycomb because they feel a certain way, it's just the most efficient way for them to do so. Spider webs are also created for efficacy. Down to the single cell, things are constructed in beautiful ways not for the sake of beauty, but out of evolution.
The earth itself creates things that are absolutely beautiful, but are not art. They are merely the result of chemical and kinetic processes.
The "art" of it all, is how humans interpret it and build upon it, with experience, imagination, free will and emotions.
What you see in the night sky, that is not art. That is nature.
The things that humans are compelled to create under the influence of all this beauty - that is the art.
With a kinetic structure, someone went through the effort to design it to do that. With AI art, sure you ask it to do something but a human isn't involved in the creative process in any capacity beyond that
This is a very reductionist claim about how people use AI in their art process. The truth is that the best artists use AI in a sort of dance between the human and machine. But always, the human is the prime mover through a process of iteration.
Sure, but in the case of AI it resembles the relationship of a patron to an art director. We generally don't assign artistry to the person hiring an art director to create artistic output, even if it requires heavy prompting and back and forth. I am not bold enough to try to encompass something as large and fundamental as art into a definition, though I suppose that art does cary something about the craft of using the medium.
At any rate, though there is some aversion to AI art for arts sake, the real aversion to AI art is that it squeezes one of the last viable options for people to become 'working artists' and funnels that extremely hard earned profit to the hands of the conglomerates that have enough compute to train generative models. Is making a living through your art something that we would like to value and maintain as a society? I'd say so.
No doubt, but if your Starcraft experience against AI was "somehow" exactly same with AI, gave you the same joy, and you cannot even say whether it was AI or other players, does that matter? I get this is kind of Truman Show-ish scenario, but does it really matter? If the end results are same, does it still matter? If it does, why? I get the emotional aspect of it, but in practice you wouldn't even know. Now is AI at that point for any of these, possibly not. We can tell AI right now in many interactions and art forms, because it's hollow, and it's just "perfectly mediocre".
It's kind of the sci-fi cliche, can you have feelings for an AI robot? If you can what does that mean.
I have to say this sort of thing is hard to think about, as it's pretty hypothetical right now. But I can't imagine how the current iteration of AI could give me the same joy? Me and my friend were roommates. We played other games together, including dnd. We struggled with another friend to build a LAN so we could play these games together.
I can't imagine having the same shared experience with an AI. Even if I could, knowing there is no consciousness there does changes things (if we can know such thing).
This reminds me of solipsism. I have no way of knowing if others are conscious, but it seems quite lonely to me if that were true. Even though it's the exact same thing to the outside. It's not?
We lost that like 100 years ago. Sitting and watching someone perform music in an intimate setting rarely happens anymore.
If you listen to an album by your favorite band, it is highly unlikely that your feelings/emotions and interpretations correlate with what they felt. Feeling a connection to a song is just you interpreting it through the lens of your own experience, the singer isn't connecting with listeners on some spiritual level of shared experience.
I am not an AI art fan, it grosses me out, but if we are talking purely about art as a means to convey emotions around shared experiences, then the amalgamation is probably closer to your reality than a famous musicians. You could just as easily impose your feelings around a breakup or death on an AI generated classical piano song, or a picture of a tree, or whatever.
So are photos that are edited via Photoshop not art? Are they not art if they were taken on a digital camera? What about electronic music?
You could argue all these things are not art because they used technology, just like AI music or images... no? Where does the spectrum of "true art" begin and end?
They aren't arguing against technology, they're saying that a person didn't really make anything. With photoshop, those are tools that can aid in art. With AI, there isn't any creative process beyond thinking up a concept and having it appear. We don't call people who commission art artists, because they asked someone else to use their creativity to realise an idea. Even there, the artist still put in creative effort into the composition, the elements, the things you study in art appreciation classes. Art isn't just aesthetically pleasing things, it has meaning and effort put into it
There is also something personally ego-shattering about getting destroyed by another human. If I died 10 times trying to beat a boss in a game I wouldn't care much, but if someone beat me 10 times in a row at a multiplayer game I would be questioning everything.
I actually think this is the same point as who you’re responding to. If the human vs ai factor didn’t matter, you wouldn’t care if it was the human or ai on your co-op. The differences are subtle but meaningful and will always play a role in how we choose experiences
I think your view makes sense. On the other hand, Flash revolutionized animation online by allowing artists to express their ideas without having to exhaustively render every single frame, thanks to algorithmic tweening. And yeah, the resulting quality was lower than what Disney or Dreamworks could do. But the ten thousand flowers that bloomed because a wall came down for people with ideas but not time utterly redefined huge swaths of the cultural zeitgeist in a few short years.
I strongly suspect automatic content synthesis will have similar effect as people get their legs under how to use it, because I strongly suspect there are even more people out there with more ideas than time.
I hear the complaints about AI being "weird" or "gross" now and I think about the complaints about Newgrounds content back in the day.
Art is an expression of human emotion. When I hear music, I am part of those artists journey, struggles. The emotion in their songs come from their first break-up, an argument they had with someone they loved. I can understand that on a profound, shared level.
Way back me and my friends played a lot of starcraft. We only played cooperatively against the AI. Until one day me and a friend decided to play against each other. I can't tell put into words how intense that was. When we were done (we played in different rooms of house), we got together, and laughed. We both knew what the other had gone through. We both said "man, that was intense!".
I don't get that feeling from an amalgamation of all human thoughts/emotions/actions.
One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.