Comment by perching_aix
1 day ago
The way I think of art has two main components: the aesthetics and the higher level impressions invoked through those aesthetics. For me, art is specifically about the experimentation-with and the then-intentional use of aesthetics, to evoke a specific set of impressions within its audience. A form of communication, a transfer of experiences, frames of mind, and ideas. The more effectively and intelligently one can do this, the more skilled of an artist they are in my book.
When I see generative AI produced illustrations, they'll usually be at least aesthetically pleasing. But sometimes they are already more than that. I found that there are lots and lots of illustrations that already deliver higher level experiences that go beyond just their quality of aesthetics delivery. They deliver on the goal they were trying to use those aesthetics for to begin with. Whether this is through tedious prompting and "borrowed" illustrational techniques I think is difficult to debate right now, but just based on what I've seen so far of this field and considering my views and definitions, I have absolutely zero doubts that AI will 100% generate artworks that are more and more "legitimately" artful, and that there's no actual hard dividing line one can draw between these and manmade art, and what difference does exist now I'm confident will gradually fade away.
I do not believe that humans are any more special than just the fact that they're human provides to them. Which is ultimately ever-dwindling now it seems.
It's human intent.
AI is technically another tool, and it can be used poorly (what people refer to "AI slop", using default settings, some LoRA and calling it a day) and it can be used properly (forcing compositions, editing, fixing errors...) to convey an idea or emotion or tell a story. Critical eye does the rest.
After all, the machine doesn't do anything on its own, it needs a driver. The quality of the output is directly proportional to the operator's amount of passion.
Sure, but intent is a very fickle thing.
Consider zero and single click deployments in IT operations. With single click deployments, you need to have everything automated, but the go sign is still given by a human. With zero click, you'll have a deployment policy instead - the human decision is now out of the critical path completely, and only plays part during the authoring and later editing of said policy. And you can also then generate those policies, and so on.
Same can be applied to AI. You can have canned prompts that you keep refining to encode your intent and preferences, then you just use them with a single click. But you can also build a harness that generates prompts and continuously monitors trends and the world as a whole for any kind of arbitrary criteria (potentially of its own random or even shifting choice), and then follows that: a reward policy. And then like with regular IT, you can keep layering onto that.
Because of this, I don't think that intent is the point of differentiation necessarily, but the experience and shared understanding of human intent. That people have varying individual, arbitrary preferences, and are going through life of arbitrary and endless differences, and then source from those to then create. Indeed, this is never going to be replicated, exactly because of what I said: this is humans being human, and that giving them a unique, inalienable position by definition.
It's like if instead of planes we called aircraft "mechanical birds" and dunked on them for not flying by flapping their wings, despite their more than a century long history and claims of "flying". But just like I think planes do actually fly, I do also think that these models produce art. [0]
[0] https://youtu.be/ipRvjS7q1DI