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by PuppyTailWags 1177 days ago
It makes it so that the actual intellectually interesting analysis of art, when viewed through the lens of an LLM, becomes a cognitively simple to understand puzzle of matching prompts to effects. There's not a lot of interesting conversation to ask about color theory or composition.

The interesting stuff is asking what is an artist trying to convey or explore within the nuances of the medium they are working with: why does neon genesis rebuild movies use live action camera techniques and what does that do to the overall themes of the work? Why does one painting use the texture of the paint instead of the color theory of the paint as a message conveyor? How is the use of reflective or matte surfaces communicating an environment in an installed art piece?

Furthermore, of the very smart people I know, the intellectually stimulating stuff is kind of bizarre, and avenues of finding this stuff or funding this stuff is being drowned out by comparatively understimulating works. Artists usually fund their more unusual pursuits with the commercial work that MidJourney/Stable Diffusion targets.

2 comments

> There's not a lot of interesting conversation to ask about color theory or composition. The interesting stuff is asking what is an artist trying to convey or explore within the nuances of the medium they are working with

For some, this is an important aspect of art appreciation, and I would expect those people to continue to gravitate toward human produced art. For other people who don't have that background, and don't think about those things, the difference won't be relevant to them, and they'll judge the end product based on their own personal and arbitrary criteria. What's interesting about an artwork to one person makes it banal to another, and no amount of academic study or criticism will change peoples' tastes.

Let's not forget that often creators themselves aren't always actively thinking about composition, texture, color, etc, and part of the work for them can be as black box out of their subconscious as the creation of a neural network.

Similar to people being fooled by white wine dyed red, I think we'll also have critics who remark on how absolutely human a work of art has to be due to X/Y/Z, only for it to be revealed to be an AI work. That I think encapsulates a lot of what I look forward to in terms of the debate over what exactly about art is human-specific and what it means for something, human or not, to have artistic capabilities.

I'm just pointing out, in my anecdotal experience, that the smartest people I know don't have interest in AI because of the way AI clashes with the things they find the most intellectual stimulation from. None of what you said really addresses any of that, and I really have no interest in debating the subjectivity of AI art on the internet, as there's nothing about it that hasn't already been said.
I spoke to an artist the other say, he just said, in true artists style, that maybe he can collaborate with the bots, otherwise he doesn’t care about AI art.

I thought it would be upset so I kind of introduced the topic lightly.

I was relieved how much he didn’t care.

I completely agree with you. A button click image will never relate to most people like a real work of art.

I think the same about television. I think we all like Seinfeld because we know he is a real person with real experiences that we can relate too. I think this is important.