[api]

I have yet to see a LLM generated piece of writing or art that I like as art or that evokes anything.

Art is about communicating human emotion. I feel like I can tell when there’s nothing really on the other end. I don’t think AI is a threat to real capital-A Art. I think it is a threat to any form of content milling since it definitely churns out filler much faster and cheaper and better than humans. It’s also probably a threat to pseudointellectual sophistry since it can do that very well.

I wonder if the appearance of genuinely compelling art coming from an autonomous AI might be the most compelling sign of sentience?

If so then William Gibson nailed it again. That’s what the final superintelligent AI at the end of Mona Lisa Overdrive (final book in that trilogy) is doing.

[RugnirViking]

I disagree that its not capable of producing worthwhile creative writing, I've had great fun getting it to generate good art, usually by giving it writing tips. Things like: "show, don't tell. Give characters (but only some, not all) internal motivations they try to hide from others, and indirectly, the reader. create interesting worldbuilding, hinting at complexities and structures without fully explaining them. "

to tell the truth, there is a creativity and and art required to prompt it to produce interesting results. be thankful of this fact. There is also a fun perhaps inversion of values for me when you start using it this way (I find I value interesting story aspects the AI came up with more than ones I told it to use. I guess because it's not always that great at it so its a plesant surprise. A time it out of nowhere decided to set an unrelated story I asked for in a religious dictatorship with strict and specific rules I couldn't trace to any religion I knew of was particularly delightful, where it might be merely a "meh" framing device if I knew it were written by a human)

Another great prompt I found gives great results was asking gpt4 to use a "staccato writing style". I've had some really creative writing styles come out of things like this, sometimes I go into a little more detail like "use only short sentences punctuated with particularly resonant words that make use of hard consonants" but often leaving it to its own devices when you use more "flowery" descriptions of writing styles can work quite well.

My favorite was one I asked gpt4 some months ago to write about a kafkaesque story set in a world where animals held all real power and were generally dismissive of humans' concerns.

I won't post the whole things, thats assanine, but it did a great job with worldbuilding, writing style, characters, keeping it artsy and mysterious etc

[api]

If you're working really hard to prompt the AI into generating a piece of compelling art, I'd argue that you're the artist and are using it as a tool. The key is that you're putting in effort and it's driven by an artist's intent. The artist is not being replaced.

This is more like photography. A camera is just a dumb box that records images, but in the hands of an artist it can be used as a tool to make art.

People were really afraid cameras would replace artists too, but they didn't. They replaced portraiture which was when painters would try to render photorealistic portraits of people and things, but they didn't replace painting as art and in fact opened new avenues to art.

[AnimalMuppet]

I think "pseudointellectual sophistry" is just a subcategory of "filler"/"content milling", because there's nothing real there.