[lokl]

I think AI is currently able to generate images I find pleasant to look at, but they have no impact on me beyond that momentary enjoyment. It is still decoration and not yet art, according to my personal definitions.

When I can tell an AI to make an image about the Spanish Civil War and it produces Guernica, then I will be impressed in the way human artists impress me. And then we will have a powerful new tool to communicate. I would like my own personal Guernica each day to help me learn about something happening in the world.

[mikepurvis]

But how much of that is context? Is the absence of deeper impact because you're aware that a soulless NN produced these, or is it something intrinsic in them?

I'm not at all an art expert, but I definitely looked at several of them and could easily picture a critic describing the significance of the relationship between the shapes and colours.

[lokl]

I feel the same way about many human-produced works, regardless of critics' views, so the fact that I'm aware these are produced by NN is probably not the only explanation.

[mikepurvis]

Yeah, it sounds like in that case your criticism may be more about abstract art as a style than it is about whether a given piece was produced by a human or a machine.

[lokl]

Not all abstract art. Some Kandinsky, for example, is more than decoration to me.

[jjk166]

"Well you asked me to paint an authentic Guernica so of course I had to bomb Guernica"

[jameslk]

This doesn't sound like it would be unrealistic. I think this can be partially solved by two systems: one that paints and one that finds the best painting to match a current event (in the form of a topic). The latter system could be trained on a set of paintings and corresponding topics or meanings, and then uses this training to match newly generated paintings to topics/meanings.

[dropofwill]

There are definitely people working on this sort of thing. I recently read this conf paper on generating modified flags based on a topics (e.g. Cyprus + peace):

https://cdv.dei.uc.pt/ever-changing-flags/

Maybe not as technically exciting, as a super generic NN, but I think projects scoped like this are useful to think about.

[wimpypistol]

Correct. This is actually quite doable with word embedding or image classification of a topic, semantic analysis, and then providing those as input to a network like the one I used for 1SecondPainting. I love the future.

[staycoolboy]

> It is still decoration and not yet art, according to my personal definitions.

This isn't a personal definition. There literally is a distinction in fine arts study.