Comment by rcoveson
8 hours ago
That's silly. There's lots of art with no known creator. Assuming the creator will never be known, it's functionally no different from art that has no creator.
We're already at a point where lots of "art" you look at might have had no human involvement; it could have been generated ad hoc by a web search or in response to the way you hesitated over something else in your feed (okay, maybe not already but certainly in the near future).
But we can't just say that anything that moves you is in a superposition of "art" and "not-art" until sufficient evidence emerges that it was created by a human.
Most people don't experience art through the "art historian" or "true art appreciator" lenses of "who made this and why". They just experience the thing for what it is.
2030's equivalent of Banksy could be a hacker who puts artistic images on major websites. It could then come out, years later, that it was all done by some AI agent. It doesn't matter if that's likely or not, it's obviously possible, and your definition can't just ignore it.
> Assuming the creator will never be known, it's functionally no different from art that has no creator.
This is the key point to argue. I say that it IS different. AI is giving us fits because AI generated works create congnitive dissonance. Knowing a human made something at all is what allows us to connect to it as art. We don't need to know anything about them other than that they are a human, they existed.
The crazy part about it is that it is possible for a human to use AI to make art. It's the intention and the human that make it possible. Where it breaks down is when there's no intention.
I can't remember what show it was (maybe Futurama?), but there's a great bit that lampoons this idea. At a modern art exhibit, somebody leaves something like a banana on an empty pedestal. Later, the attendees are marveling at it, talking about what it means, that sort of thing.
In that is example, there is no artistic intent, but also, the "piece" cannot be readily separated from the other "pieces" in the modern art exhibit that were made with artistic intent.
By your definition of art, people can be "duped" by facts about a piece that don't even accompany many pieces that we think of as "obviously art". They can assume they know the answer, or even a bounding box for the answer like "it was made by a person intentionally", and they can turn out to be wrong, and then... what? It just wasn't art, retroactively?
What if a famous haiku turns out to have been a coded message, 100% instrumental in nature, something like the number and position of enemy forces? "Whoops, guess it wasn't art". What if the best picture I took on a vacation turns out to have been take by a software glitch while my camera sat on my luggage?
We only ever think we know who made something. We do get it wrong. There's a lot of fraud in the art world. Is that likely to get worse or better in the next 100 years, do you think? What are future generations to do, just wonder about whether all their favorite art (that looks like art, feels like art, moves them like art) is "maybe art, maybe not"?
Yes, the modern interpretation of art is just the old adage that beauty is in the eye of the beholder or more crudely it’s all head canon. It’s a degenerate form of what was pursued before the modern era which was to identify and produce art that was unambiguously exceptional to anyone who saw it. Some of that is still present but seems stifled by the requirement to go against tradition so you end up with things like exploiting sheer size or complexity for effect.
> Assuming the creator will never be known, it's functionally no different from art that has no creator.
No. The assumption, since the dawn of time, was that there had to be one, even if unknown to us. That is why we now read intent and intelligence into things produced without either, that's millions of years of evolution. It was impossible for sentences to be generated without a mind behind them, so now we are hardwired to assume there is one there, too. But since we also built these things we know for a fact there is not, and we will re-wire.
This is also why we thought there might be a face on Mars for a while. And if we didn't throw out our understanding of art being an expression of a self, what would "AI" change here? The face on Mars and other things already happened. This is like a fly thinking it will have the impact an elephant didn't have.
We know people can create counterfeit slop, and from all these discussion I also get the feeling some will try to "fool" people just to prove a point in their own minds. But it proves fuck all, just like spiking drinks and raping people doesn't "objectively prove" that person is desirable to anyone conscious. A cuckoo laying an egg into the nest of a different bird doesn't prove they're the same bird.
We already have an unspoken social contract that thou shalt not make a machine to impersonate a person. Some people who aren't very social want to unilaterally change that, so they fuck around and then are exasperated when they find out.