[willvarfar]

Is your problem that you know its bot-generated, or that you think there's some flaw in the pictures?

What if you didn't know that the painting was the work of a bot?

What if it was just some abstract painting that someone took enough fancy to to pay to have put on a canvas?

Personally, I couldn't really tell them from the human-generated wikiart pictures that seeded the algorithm. Those human-generated pieces didn't speak to me either.

I'd love to see the algorithm work on some other art style seeds.

[jsaldes]

I'd say it depends. For me art is as much about the artist behind a specific piece as it is about the actual piece. I agree with the person you responded to. I want human feelings in my art, no matter how abstract, for it to truly speak to me!

[willvarfar]

Playing devil's advocate: it sounds like you're deluding yourself ;)

Perhaps the Vogels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_and_Dorothy_Vogel knew the artist? The way they amassed their collection is truly inspiring.

Picaso's wife infamously knew he was having an affair with his muse from glancing at a painting. But did every other Picaso fan who saw that same painting? Did truly know anything about the artist behind the picture?

So the chances of everyone else who appreciates an artist actually truly knowing anything about the actual artist? Complete rubbish, say I!

Take Turner, for example: turns out, the location of a lot of his pictures have been wrongly attributed! How everyone can claim to 'know' the artist and yet not realise that the picture is of Portsmouth or a lake in Scotland instead of Venice or somewhere else seems like they didn't really know the artist after all?

So there's a picture on the wall by Satoshi Nakamoto. You feel that genuine, because it's signed? Then when you get told that its painted by a bot, you feel cheated? Because you felt you knew something about the artist by looking at the art?

[jacobwilliamroy]

Having bot-made art in the office just gets me asking all the wrong questions like "What is this? Why is it here? Why am I here? What am I doing with my precious finite time on earth? Why did they automate the creation of art? Why didn't they automate my job?"

[gradschool]

Ironically a human artist who could evoke a response like that would be doing better than most.

[ribs]

Those seem like difficult questions, and maybe we don’t usually want to grapple with them, but they don’t sound like the wrong ones.

[mental1896]

One might argue that there is plenty of human feeling in this bot-art. After all, it's trained on art with human feelings. Seems like it might be a very effective way to propagate it. It's a sort-of dispassionate third party who finds the thread common to all of the cubist pieces in the training sets.