Comment by LogicFailsMe
8 days ago
TBF the anti-AI artists are insisting AI will never create great works of art. I disagree. But I do agree with Richard Sutton that it would need a reward function steering it towards a popular perception of great art, whatever that may be. I can approximate that with sampling and using my subjectivity to pick the ones I like most and then iterate on variants thereof until I am exhausted/satisfied. That's not the same thing because I am in the loop. But RLHF and RLVR demonstrate the path is feasible IMO. Sadly though, if you tell people a work by Monet is AI art, they do the predictably stupid thing about it so the game is rigged.
W/r to code, I do enjoy playing designer and product manager on personal projects after decades of full-stack development and design, and by full-stack I mean all the way down to machine code. The anti-AI retort is complaining I wouldn't be doing anywhere near as well without those decades of experience. Fair point IMO, but the kids who grow up around this technology will likely expend neural plasticity on wielding it far more effectively than the boomers and GenX ever will. And getting an AI to work with them once again seems like a reward function problem rather than an intrinsic roadblock to me.
All while acknowledging it's much easier said than done. I'm just not going to bet against ingenuity both organic and electronic. However, the incessant mania and panic episodes around AI that just keep happening seem to be the algorithms monetizing enragement and fear to me. That's a real and bigger problem IMO.
AI is unlikely to ever create great works of art because art is not, and has never been just about technical excellence; it is fundamentally a human thing: one human communicating to another. Just even knowing that some art was AI produced is enough to not see it as great: there is no human story or experience behind it, no human context, etc. You can definitely appreciate it in the category of AI work, however.
AI still struggles with technical excellence in some genres of art, but even if they master this, this human element they cannot overcome, by definition.
It's like piano performance: AI can already generate a "prefect" performance audio, a MIDI file can already encode that. But, I hate MIDI files, none of the live-ness, the weirdness, and non-repeatable nuances of an actual performance by an actual pianist.
Your entire argument hinges on being able to tell the extent to which generative AI was used in the creation of any given piece of art, which capability you will not have. You therefore fall into the category the commenter mentioned in that your perception of the value of a piece of art can be heavily influenced by someone convincing you it was AI generated, regardless of the facts.
You don't get it.
Jut recently, there was a thread discussing Persepolis, a series of autobiographical graphic novels by Marjane Satrapi (recently deceased) that depict her childhood and early adult years in Iran and Austria during and after the Islamic Revolution. People remarked it was deeply moving.
Part of what makes it deeply moving is the actuality of it. This is a human story based on actual lived experiences. How does an AI produce this?? If it came out later that it was written by an AI (assume for the purpose of argument that we had AI when it was written), then of course m=it's impact would be different.
If a seemingly powerful piece of non-fiction is later exposed as fiction, and AI written fiction at that, won't that change your perception of it? Or if a nice anecdote someone likes to tell is exposed as made up, I would hope that matters.
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Art is subjective, entirely so.
People pay more for works by famous artists or specific artists despite there being artists who can replicate their style exactly.
So having someone discount AI art or what they think is AI art isn't a new phenomenon, just an extension of the existing norms
So what you're saying is it will never be about the art itself, it's entirely about selling you on its origin story? Yeah, that sounds about right. So once it can create human-level art, it just needs to spew human-level BS script along with it for the artist to act out, got it.
Reverse centaur indeed.
You misunderstand art. If art were solely about the outcome, we’d all be staring at photographs instead, as no art will ever have as high fidelity.
Art is about the journey of the artist; the meaning with which that art is impregnated is the point. What you cynically refer to as “human-level BS,” others refer to as “the human condition” because we can relate to other humans, and empathy is a thing.
It’s okay not to like art. But pretending art is just “the painting at the end” is nonsense.
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Photographs made technical skill at recreating reality with paint less relevant, while making point of view, staging, etc, more important. You can absolutely create a photograph that is art, but a camera is not an artist, the person holding it is.
Wow, it's not "human-level BS" what the heck.
Only someone with little appreciation of music will describe the difference between an actual performance and an AI generated one as "human-level BS". It makes a large difference in my enjoyment of the music.
Have you listened to a MIDI file before? And have you listened to (or attended, preferably in person) a piano concert before? You can't compare them, AI changes nothing at all about this.
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This reward function goes against the essence of machinery - there is no reward function in machines. That’s what so great about them.