[jerf]

You phrase it well. It's not the AI themselves. You can as easily get an AI to take something fundamentally banal and write it into something exciting, dynamic, exotic, or strange.

If you analyze these systems as a work of art, using the postmodern toolset, the people and systems taking one of the most potent technologies humanity has ever created and using it to craft a banality machine is just... very revealing. Like the great-uncle who can't even finish protesting how non-racist he is without using a racial slur in the process.

"We're innovative! We're hip! We're on the cutting edge! We're setting trends! Now here, let me help you turn your text into the grayest corporate sludge imaginable."

It's art. It's probably not art they intended to make, but it's art.

[pjc50]

> postmodern

It is, isn't it. It's the Sokal Hoax on a society-wide automated scale: rather than being concerned with what a "text" might "mean", generate millions upon millions of "text" sequences and mechanically separate those which pass as real enough. Baudrillard's simulacrum.

> It's art. It's probably not art they intended to make, but it's art.

People seem to be very insistent that the output of AI is not capital-A art, because that threatens their worldview, ignoring how artists had previously pushed to expand "art" away from any concerns of technique, intent, legibility etc.

[jerf]

I mean the system itself is art. The output is some kind of anti-art, but the system that uses the world's most amazing technology to extract the art out of everything that passes through it is an amazing piece of inadvertent outsider art on its own.