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by joshcryer 1537 days ago
It's fascinating how in our hubris we were thinking that art would be the last thing for AI to tackle, but it appears to be the first (Sam Altman made a similar statement on the launch of DALL-E). Which makes art more meaningful to me, for some reason. There's something in the billion parameters and exabytes of data that this neural net had to process and it was so ... easy. Natural. Because it is us. It is our expression. Our creativity. Our outpouring of data, and all it is doing is reflecting us. It's beautiful.
3 comments

I'm an amateur painter and AI hasn't even kissed high art yet IMO, although it's nominally good at amateur illustration.

I'm going to have to write up a piece on this sometime, my argument is a little too involved for an HN post. But the gist is that the heart of what a fully trained painter does is make personal choices. A quick and dirty example of the difference:

Suppose you train an AI on Picasso's pre-1901 pieces. It's not going to decide it's time for a blue period.

That’s because the entire corpus of art is stored in the neural network weightings as memory. It’s built to imitate human art by optimizing towards these weightings.
There is something about clouds. Facial recognition software frequently finds faces in clouds just like we do.

This thing will kill art dead.

Check my post prior to this one. Art will be fine.

Well, representational art. I'd like to say post-abstract expressionists are at risk, but they still have their admirers convinced they're wearing clothes, and there's no indication those idiots will ever change their minds.

I agree with your post. Good luck convincing every child with a big Dall-E button on their iPad that they are not in fact Picasso. I mean, just look at this thread. And these are supposed to be adults.