[jacquesm]

That goes for all art. It either stirs you or it doesn't. I find https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tjstsWoQiw to be one of the most beautiful pieces ever recorded, others can't listen to it and think it is bland and a terrible recording.

You can't argue about taste.

[bonoboTP]

I don't think this is just taste. The painting was made in a specific historic context and commemorates the bombing of Guernica. Without knowing that context, it may be appreciated as a disembodied visual artifact, but that's not how art really works or ever worked. An influential artpiece usually states something relevant to the historic moment and intellectual Zeitgeist of the time.

You may like the music of Zombie by The Cranberries, but I'd say it belongs to the complete appreciation of it to know that it's about the Irish Troubles, and for that you need some background knowledge.

You may like to smoke weed to Bob Marley songs, but without knowing something about the African slave trade, you won't get the significance of tracks like 400 years.

For Guernica you also have to understand Picasso's fascination with primitive art, prehistoric cave art, children's drawings and abstraction, the historic moment when photography took over the role of realistic depiction, freeing painters to express themselves more in terms of emotional impressions and abstractions.

[perching_aix]

I don't consider context a clear win. I'd argue that there's also quite the disconnect sometimes between what a work is about and why it's popular.

Let's take Zombie by The Cranberries as an example. I really liked this song as a kid, still do, I think it has a great sound. The difference is that I now speak English, can understand the lyrics, and could look up the historical context. Ever since I did so, listening to it has never been the same, and not in a good way.

There are also examples which are not going to be so specific to my opinions. Kendrick's Swimming Pools was a house party staple, despite the song carrying heavy anti-alcoholism messaging. The contrast is almost comical.

For a different example, let's consider temporal contextuality; you describe Guernica being reliant on this. When I try to think of an example, I'm reminded of vague memories of shows with oddly timely subtitles. Subtitles that referenced things that were very specific to the given cultural moment, basically memes, but vanished since. It's not a good experience, and I'd say it would be reasonable to chalk such a thing up as a critique, rather than something worthy of praise.

This is also why I half-seriously referred to the piece being "aggressively pretentious". Rather than coming across as something I'm just genuinely missing the context for, it comes across as something with manufactured sophistication (which then I am indeed missing the context for, but unapologetically). This might still be a mirage, but I think with how pretty much stereotyped this experience is at this point, I'd imagine there's got to be some truth to it at least.

[bonoboTP]

If you value art for aspects that don't require intellectual or historical context knowledge then the best music is bubblegum pop and the best literature is pulp fiction and smut. And indeed people who most lack such context (teens) tend to like those most.

This is not to say that eternal themes aren't important. But art is a kind of social technology that mediates between people in given cultural contexts. Part of "the great conversation" across the ages, the part you can't express in logical essays or propositions. And the eternal themes pop up in different "clothes" at different times. Once you have the key to unlock them, you do discover the same human nature and human problems operating underneath as ever.

And the beautiful cathedrals are not simply beautiful for beauty's sake but their art often conveys very specific theological claims, often hotly debated at the time. Or the choice of subject may have been outrageous or novel at the time but mundane to us now.

Liszt's music may move us even today, but we can't quite appreciate it in the same Lisztomania way as it was then, when it was fresh and novel.

[jacquesm]

Yes, context is really important. But:JS Bach made a whole raft of music, and quite a large fraction of it was religiously inspired. In spite of that it is perfectly possible to appreciate it at a deep emotional level without that particular spiritual connection. This is the genius of art to me: that it opens up an emotional channel between two individual separated by time and space and manages to convey a feeling, as clear as day.

Take U2's October as a nice example. (You mentioned Zombie, incidentally one of my favorites, the anger and frustration in there never fail to hit me, I can't listen to it too often for that reason), superficially it is a very simple set of lyrics (8 lines I think) and an even simpler set of chords. And yet: it moves me. And I doubt any AI would have come up with it or even a close approximation if it wasn't part of the input. That's why I refuse to call AI generated stuff art. It's content, not art.

[bonoboTP]

> And yet: it moves me. And I doubt any AI would have come up with it or even a close approximation if it wasn't part of the input.

I would have thought similarly, but actually feeding 19th century poems to Suno and iterating on the prompts several times I got some results that moved me emotionally, as in, listening/reading the words with this musical presentation enhanced my appreciation of the poems and it felt more visceral. Like making angry revolutionary poems into grunge brought it closer and less of a "histoic", "bookish", "dusty" thing.

[jacquesm]

That's a poster case for it being derivative works then. And of course, the more concentrated the input mixture the bigger the chance of some of that emotion leaking through.

I think there is a great case to be made here using purely synthetic sounds as the basis for emotion. Vangelis (Soil festivities), Klaus Doldinger (Skyscape) are great examples. These are sounds that have been produced exclusively by the mind and in spite of there not being a physical instrument involved they manage to convey imagery and emotion extremely effectively. This is technology used as an enabler. I've yet to come across someone using AI tech in the same liberating manner unlocking novel imaginary constructs in the way that those two did.

[perching_aix]

But then why wouldn't AI generated art be able to stir me? Why is a human being in the loop so important as to be supposedly essential?

[jacquesm]

Because it is mimicking human input. Effectively you are getting a mixture of many pieces of artwork that humans made distilled down into some sloppy new one that was made without feeling, purpose or skill and that can be described by its prompt, a few kilobytes at best. Original human art can only be approximated but never captured with 100% fidelity regardless of the bitrate, that is what makes it unique to begin with. Even an imitation by another human (some of which can be very good) could stir you in the exact same way but they'd be copies, not original works.

Anyway, this gets hairy quickly, that's why I chose to illustrate with a crappy recording of a magnificent piece that still captures that feeling - for me - whereas many others would likely disagree. Art is made by its creator because they want to and because they can, not because they are regurgitating output based on a multitude of inputs and a prompt.

Paint me a Sistine Chapel is going to yield different results no matter how many times you would give that same prompt to Michelangelo depending on his mood, what happened recently, what he ate and his health as well as the season. That AI will produce the same result over and over again from the same prompt. It is a mechanistic transformation, not an original work, it reduces the input, it does not expand on it, it does not add its own feelings to it.

[perching_aix]

I think this is a reasonable counter in some respects, although I do also think it's specific to the current iteration of AI art.

It's a bit like when people describe how models don't have a will or the likes. Of course they don't, "they" are basically frozen in time. Training is way slower than inference, and even inference is often slower than "realtime". It just doesn't work that way from the get-go. They're also simply not very good - hence why they're being fed curated data.

In that sense, and considering history, I can definitely see why it would (and should?) be considered differently. Not sure this is what you meant, but this is an interesting lens, so thanks for this.

[petralithic]

Haven't these arguments been the same since Stable Diffusion came out? Someone (A) will say what you said, then someone else (B) will say, well humans remix as well, A: no that's different because we're humans not machines, B: there is no need to prefer a biological substrate over a silicon one; A: AI will produce the same result over and over, B: not if you change the temperature and randomize the seed.

It's tiresome to read the same thing over and over again and at this point I don't think A's arguments will convince B and vice versa because both come from different initial input conditions in their thought processes. It's like trying to dig two parallel tunnels through a mountain from different heights and thinking they'll converge.

[perching_aix]

Ironically, for the first time, I think I found some perspective to the remix argument here.

Normally it's just like you say: I don't find the remixing argument persuasive, because I consider it to be a point of commonality. This time however, my focus shifted a bit. I considered the difference in "source set".

To be more specific, it kind of dawned on me how peculiar it is to engage in creating art as a human given how a human life looks like. How different the "setup" is between a baby just kind of existing and taking in everything, which for the most part means supremely mundane, not at all artful or aesthetic experiences, and between an AI model being trained on things people uploaded. It will also have a lot of dull, irrelevant stuff, but not nearly in the same way or in the same amount, hitting at the same registers.

I still think it's a bit of a bird vs plane comparison, but then that is also what they are saying in a way. That it is a bird and a plane, not a bird and a bird. I do still take issue with refusing to call the result flight though, I think.

[jacquesm]

Flight has immediate utility, art not necessarily, other than to be or to experience. Movies can be art, instruction videos usually are not.

[perching_aix]

Flight isn't necessarily utilitarian. Not animals', not machines'.

A connected discourse is (certain, increasingly dwindling maybe) part of the art community's rejection of large swaths of works because they're meant for mass entertainment.

And so I'm not sure robbing AI generated images of being labeled art isn't a similar kind of snobbery, at least in part, with models just being a much more morally convenient punching bag this time around than other humans.

[jacquesm]

The day I see AI generated art and it moves me in the same way that human generated art does I will concede the point. So far all I've seen is more, not novel.

Art never was about productivity, even though there have been some incredibly productive artists.

Some of the artists that I've known were capable of capturing the essence of the subject they were drawing or painting in a few very crude lines and I highly doubt that an AI given a view would be able to do that in a way that it resonated. And that resonance is what it is all about for me, the fact that briefly there is an emotional channel between the artist and you, the receiver. With AI generated content there is no emotion on the sending side, so how could you experience that feeling in a genuine way?

To me AI art is distortion of art, not new art. It's like listening to multiple pieces of music at the same time, each with a different level of presence, out of tune and without any overarching message. It can even look skilled (skill is easy to imitate, emotion is not).

[petralithic]

I still don't get why you don't see it as a tool and not the creator itself. The human sitting behind the desk is the one attaching their emotions to what they send, because they control what image they want to send, otherwise they reroll or redo their work flow. These days they can even edit the image with natural language so they can build it up just as one does in Photoshop, only using words instead of a mouse.

[lesostep]

>> The human sitting behind the desk is the one attaching their emotions to what they send

natural question: to you draw? Even a simple thing, even a doodle of a cat would count. A particular emoji drawn for a joke. Have you ever drew a line, and then smile to yourself "yes, that is what i want other people to see?"

People can draw poorly or make collages, and come up with pretty expressive art. Those who say "well I can't express myself with stick figures" coincidentally can't express anything without stickfigures too. They just never payed enough attention to the subject to express it.

Personal anecdote: when I ask people why X is in the art they send me, they answer happily. When I ask people with AI art that, they say "oh, you nitpicking". As if some details don't and shouldn't influence art expression. As if all details that weren't in a prompt, shouldn't express anything.

AI art is a concept muddled. It's a grave for intentionallity. It's not easy to decipher creators intent through a cacophony of other intents mixed in because almost none of art choices were made with the intent to convey.

[jacquesm]

> I still don't get why you don't see it as a tool and not the creator itself.

If after 33 comments in this thread and countless people trying to explain a part of it you don't get it that may be because you either don't want to get it or are unable to get it. Restating it one more time is not going to make a difference and I'm perfectly ok with you not 'getting it', so don't worry about it.

AI without real art as input is noise. It doesn't get any more concrete than that. Humans without any education at all and just mud and sticks for tools will spontaneously create art.

[_DeadFred_]

There is no intention in either case. Just a machine doing machine things.

[petralithic]

The intention is the human prompting or creating the work flow, the computer was never going to autonomous create images, why would it?

[TeMPOraL]

Don't also forget:

A: but AI only interpolates between training points, it can't extrapolate to anything new.

B: sure it can, d'uh.

[petralithic]

It's not. If one takes the fact that art is in the eye of the beholder [0], then yes, even AI art may stir you, especially as a human is the one generating at the end of the day, for a specific purpose and statement about what they want to convey.

There is a good part of the series Remembrance of Earth's Past (of which The Three Body Problem is the first book) where the aliens are creating art and it shocks people to learn that the art they're so moved by was actually created by non-humans. This is exactly what this situation with AI feels like, and not even to the same extent because again AI is not autonomously making images, it's still a human at the end of the day picking what to prompt.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author

[jacquesm]

> it's still a human at the end of the day picking what to prompt

I think that 'dutch people skating on a lake' or 'girl with a pearl earring' or 'dutch religious couple in front of their barn' without having an AI trained on various works will produce just noise. And if those particular works (you know the ones, right?) were not part of the input then the AI would never produce anything looking like the original, no matter how specific you made the prompt. It takes human input to animate it, and even then what it produces to me does not look original whereas any five year old is able to produce entirely original works of art, none of which can be reduced to a prompt.

Prompts are instructions, they are settings on a mixer, they are not the music produced by the artists at the microphones.

[petralithic]

Have you actually used image generators today? It can produce things it's never seen if only you describe the constituent pieces. Prompts are a compressed version of the image one wants to create, and these days you don't even need "prompts" per se, you can say, make a woman looking towards the viewer, now add a pearl earing, now adjust this and that etc.

[jacquesm]

> Have you actually used image generators today?

Why would you ask this? It sounds like a lead-up to some kind of put down.

> It can produce things it's never seen if only you describe the constituent pieces.

It can produce things it's never seen based on lots of things that it has seen.

> Prompts are a compressed version of the image one wants to create

They emphatically are not. They are instructions to a tool on what relative importance to assign to all of the templates that it was trained on. But it doesn't understand the output image any more than it understood any of the input images. There is no context available to it in the purest sense of the word. It has no emotion to express because it doesn't have emotions in the first place.

> and these days you don't even need "prompts" per se, you can say, make a woman looking towards the viewer, now add a pearl earing, now adjust this and that etc.

That's just a different path to building up the same prompt. It doesn't suddenly cause the AI to use red for a dress because it thinks it is a nice counterpoint to a flower in a different part of the image because it does not think at all.

[petralithic]

I think you're reading too much into my comment. It's not a put down, I'm genuinely asking because it seems many people still think anyone serious about AI just types prompts into Midjourney, but it's become a lot more complex than that, akin to electronic music production; producers haven't played every single note with a physical instrument their synths synthesize yet their arrangement of the notes is what makes them a producer, and so too with AI workflows such as those seen in ComfyUI. If one is not familiar then they might not understand where the field is today.

Regarding prompts, I never said a computer "understands" or is "emotional" about an image, I don't think anyone actually thinks that, on either side of the debate so not sure why you're bringing that up. By "compressed" I just meant in the information theory way, in that if you have a specific series of words, and a given temperature and other settings for a given model, it will deterministically produce the same image, hence the set of those attributes can be thought of as a compressed representation of that image. I made no claims about it thinking whatsoever.

> It can produce things it's never seen based on lots of things that it has seen.

Yes, just like humans, as I had said in my initial comment about the same old arguments being said since 2021 when Stable Diffusion came out. But again that's tiresome so let's not repeat that here too.