[bambax]

You're right that pure formal perfection is not the only component in art; art has to mean something.

But quality has always been a very important aspect of popularity in art as well as in music (see: Renaissance sculptors & painters, Baroque and Classical composers, etc.)

Great art is when a unique, profound emotion or insight is expressed with great execution.

AI helps with the last part; real artists should still provide the emotional seed.

[jacquesm]

But effort itself is also a quality. The fact that a human took out a substantial fraction of their time on planet earth to create something is already a sign that at least one individual cared about the work: the creator. If art is like vomit then that initial round of validation is absent.

[bambax]

I don't think I agree with that. "A for effort"? Who cares if someone spent time on something, if the result isn't good? They wasted their time, which is their problem; but they shouldn't waste mine as well to compensate for that.

There are even artists who don't actually make anything: they formulate an idea and then commission craftsmen to produce what they imagined. While the resulting oeuvre involves some degree of effort by someone, that someone isn't the artist themselves; this is quite similar to AI.

Now, there's something to be said for scarcity. If producing something becomes so easy that anyone can output anything, then sure it may become a problem.

Yet the history of the arts is in many ways a history of explosion, and the number of things produced did not kill art. Often, it invented new art forms.

Baudelaire had this to say about photography in 1865:

> As the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of a blindness, an imbecility, but had also the air of a vengeance. (…) it is nonetheless obvious that this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy, and that the confusion of their several functions prevents any of them from being properly fulfilled. Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place. If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.

I think he was dead wrong.

Photography may have influenced painting and force it into non-figurative territories (or it may have gone there by itself), but 1/ painting in general, even figurative painting, survived, 2/ photography became a new art form, and 3/ if abundance of photography did in fact, eventually, devalue the work of professional photographers, it didn't block the existence of great photographic art.

[jacquesm]

Not an 'A for effort' but 'effort for initial validation'. It shouldn't lead to automatic approval but zero effort is less of a signal than some effort and probably a weaker signal than 'a lot of effort' assuming the basic skills are present.

Photography is interesting because it has very subtle parallels with for instance painting. One of the more interesting ones to me is that it ranges the gamut from 'technical documentation' through 'personal memento' all the way up to very high end art. The big thing missing in photography is spirituality, which arguably was the driver (and often the patron in a financial sense) of lots of great art in paint.

[quectophoton]

This.

A videogame AI[1] (the AI itself; we're not talking about its developers here) in a FPS being invincible with omniscience and perfect accuracy, at most makes me think "nice".

But a flawed meaty human with enough skill to be the best human at that same game, makes me think "wtf is this witchcraft", with full respect and acknowledgment, and I'll have way more interest in them than in the perfect omniscient flawless AI.

[1]: Yes, I know here "AI" is not used in the same sense as in the article. The point still stands.

[genman]

I think there are two kind of AI uses.

I as an artist can come up with an idea want to archive and then use AI tools to reach it or an artist is completely cut out of the loop.

I don't believe that the later can be called an art or even a creation. It is just a patterned noise and more of it is produced the more noisy our environment becomes.

[UncleMeat]

One of my very favorite pieces of visual art is just some text painted on a canvas taken from a review of some of the artist's other work. It probably took her maybe ten minutes to put together.

You have to care to put in effort, but effort isn't the core of art.

So what if humans make a lot of not especially interesting art. More art is good! You can choose what you connect with.

[tchaffee]

Now you need to define what a unique, profound emotion is.

And you need to define great execution.

And you need to explain why intentionally having poor execution couldn't express a unique, profound emotion. On Radiohead's biggest hit Creep "That's the sound of Jonny trying to fuck the song up. He really didn't like it the first time we played it, so he tried spoiling it. And it made the song."

At the end of the day it's always going to seem all subjective and a matter of opinion. Because it's too hard to pinpoint the objective part of what we are doing when we decide what's great and what's garbage. If there even is an objective part.

[darkerside]

That true? Haven't heard that story

[phatskat]

Quick google and found this[0] - fun little read so far

[0] https://www.theringer.com/2021/11/17/22785868/radiohead-cree...

[darkerside]

Ha! Great article, thanks

[criddell]

> But quality has always been a very important aspect

But what is quality? I used to think it was just degree of goodness, then I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and now I have no idea what it is (or what it isn’t).

[coldtea]

It doesn't have to be something that you can objectively measure to exist and people to be able to recognize it (even if not perfectly) - which is the whole point of Z.A.M.M. by the way.

[andsoitis]

> Great art is when a unique, profound emotion or insight is expressed with great execution.

Emphasis on unique

[tchaffee]

Can you give an example of a unique insight or emotion? A lot of the classic books I read, the greatest films of all time, and the most celebrated visual artists are unique mostly in style or execution, but all express the same basic universal human truths.