Comment by slg
6 days ago
Whole libraries have been written over millennia about the importance and purpose of art, and that specific quote reduced it all down to nothing more than the creation of a product with a specific and mundane function as part of some other product. I genuinely feel bad for people with that mindset towards art.
I think that quote is talking about commercial art and there being a market willing to pay a large number of artists to do relatively mundane artworks. It does not exclude the possibility of artists doing art for art's sake as a hobby or a few elite artists doing paid high culture art. It's like when photography became a thing and there was a lot less paid work available to painters.
I don't see that as a distinction worth making. Commercial art is still art.
Music, for example, is an incredibly commercialized art. Replacing every song or album I have ever purchased with AI generated facsimiles is also an incredibly depressing thought. And let me tell you, my tastes aren't "a few elite artists doing paid high culture art".
I would hope people still find value in painting, especially in a world with photography. That is even ignoring the strained nature of this analogy. The context of the original quote was in a discussion of the inherent plagiarism of AI. Photography wasn't invited by stealing painters work.
There will be people who see something created by AI, are told it was made by a human, and have an emotional reaction as if it were. That alone challenges the idea that emotional impact depends on human authorship.
Does knowing a human made something automatically make it more valuable? Should it? Shouldn't the work speak for itself, rather than rely on the cult of personality around its creator?
These discussions always seem to focus on form as if that is what defines art. But in many cases concept is more important. Duchamp didn't craft the urinal. The idea was the art. If a piece moves someone, and that reaction changes based on who or what made it, what does that really say about how we judge art?
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The big distinction is that the cheaper AIs will crowd out the humans out of the market, so mass market commercial art will be made by AIs if it is possible to produce that art. But some people will still want non-AI art, which I believe will be focused on less commercial focused art sectors.
> Music, for example, is an incredibly commercialized art. Replacing every song or album I have ever purchased with AI generated facsimiles is also an incredibly depressing thought.
And just to be clear, I'm not saying you're wrong.
> I would hope people still find value in painting, especially in a world with photography.
Sure, people do, but it is now a hobby for some and high art for a smaller number of professional painters, but the market willing to sustain a large number of professional painters doing portraits is gone.
> That is even ignoring the strained nature of this analogy. The context of the original quote was in a discussion of the inherent plagiarism of AI. Photography wasn't invited by stealing painters work.
I think the analogy is relevant because I am discussing the plagiarism of AI in relation to the economic aspects of copyright infringement and the impacts on the market for artists and SW devs. Not in relation to the moral rights[1] of authors. The issue of artists being annoyed on principle, not on economic effects, that some souless computer is producing plagiarist art that imitates their artstyle without attribution is a separate but closely related issue. I'm not sure but I think the article is more concerned with the former issue.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights
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> Replacing every song or album I have ever purchased with AI generated facsimiles
The error here is that the quote from the article says "the median artist" and you have never purchased a song or album by a median musician.
art to them is a commodity, not a facet of expression or cultural participation.
Nobody talks about art that survived millennia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf_(2007_film)
Never been to an archeological museum? There's a couple just in my city, they definitely show art that survived millennia.
Not sure what you’re talking about specifically.
My point is that nobody argues that AI replaces art that survived millennia.
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Huh? just because most of my day spent writing simple scripts for cleaning up data, to use as an example, doesn't mean I didn't have many many years honing my programming skills.
Someone who points out I'm mostly doing mundane things is telling the truth, not that they underestimate my knowledge or skills or don't appreciate the beauty of code.
I don't know how you interpreted my comment about art being undervalued as me undervaluing coding, but it is the wrong interpretation of what I said.