[kouru225]

This issue exists in art and I want to push back a little. There has always been automation in art even at the most micro level.

Take for example (an extreme example) the paintbrush. Do you care where each bristle lands? No of course not. The bristles land randomly on the canvas, but it’s controlled chaos. The cumulative effect of many bristles landing on a canvas is a general feel or texture. This is an extreme example, but the more you learn about art the more you notice just how much art works via unintentional processes like this. This is why the Trickster Gods, Hermes for example, are both the Gods of art (lyre, communication, storytelling) and the Gods of randomness/fortune.

We used to assume that we could trust the creative to make their own decisions about how much randomness/automation was needed. The quality of the result was proof of the value of a process: when Max Ernst used frottage (rubbing paper over textured surfaces) to create interesting surrealist art, we retroactively re-evaluated frottage as a tool with artistic value, despite its randomness/unintentionality.

But now we’re in a time where people are doing the exact opposite: they find a creative result that they value, but they retroactively devalue it if it’s not created by a process that they consider artistic. Coincidentally, these same people think the most “artistic” process is the most intentional one. They’re rejecting any element of creativity that’s systemic, and therefore rejecting any element of creativity that has a complexity that rivals nature (nature being the most systemic and unintentional art.)

The end result is that the creative has to hide their process. They lie about how they make their art, and gatekeep the most valuable secrets. Their audiences become prey for creative predators. They idolize the art because they see it as something they can’t make, but the truth is there’s always a method by which the creative is cheating. It’s accessible to everyone.

[latexr]

> Do you care where each bristle lands? No of course not.

Of course you do, that’s why there are so many different types and sizes of paintbrushes, so you can exert exactly as much fine control as you want/need. Learning the craft is to learn to pick and use your tools to get the desired result. Being unable to microscopically predict where each bristle lands is not the same as not wanting to. Some times you’ll pick a more haphazard brush because the small amount of randomness is a feature (e.g. when emulating nature) and other times you’ll use a fine grained tool, maybe even a toothpick instead of a brush because you need it to be precise.

[kouru225]

Choosing a different brush size (and pressing down harder or softer) means varying the range of locations that each bristle can land within, but no one cares about where each bristle lands as long as it's within the range that the artist chooses. The fact that you have to use a different tool than a brush in order to get perfect lines proves my point.

[AuthAuth]

In my opinion, the value of art cant be the quality of the output it must be the intention of the artist.

There are plenty of times in which people will prefer the technically inferior or less aesthetically pleasing output because of the story accompanying it. Different people select different intention to value, some select for the intention to create an accurate depiction of a beautiful landscape, some select for the intention to create a blurry smudge of a landscape.

I can appreciate the art piece made my someone who only has access to a pencil and their imagination more than someone who has access to adobe CC and the internet because its not about the output to me its about the intention and the story.

Saying I made this drawing implies that you at least sat down and had the intention to draw the thing. Then revealing that you actually used AI to generate it changes the baseline assumption and forces people to re-evaluate it. So its not "finding a creative result that they value, but they retroactively devaluing it if it’s not created by a process that they consider artistic

[kouru225]

sorry for the wall of text but this is something I think about a lot so I ended up writing a lot

There are a lot of reasons why the intention of the artist is a bad metric for artistic value and there’s a ton of important literature about this

The first obvious point is that the meaning of communication is defined by its endpoint. If I send a message that says “I love you” and somehow the message gets garbled in transmission and ends up reading “I hate you,” then the message that I’ve sent is “I hate you” regardless of my intentions. You can take this a step further: if you want to write an essay attacking capitalism, but everyone who reads it comes out thinking more highly of capitalism and your essay is successfully used for years to help defend of capitalism from critiques, then what you’ve written is a defense of capitalism. This is the main gist behind what’s called Reader Response Theory: the meaning is generated by the reader (or in between the reader and the text) and not by the writer.

As a communications problem, this is even more relevant for art because art is indirect communication by its very nature. Storytelling, for example doesn’t ever actually try to communicate any single thing. The storyteller creates many fictional people, each of whom have their own messages they want to get across, and creates a web of relationships/events between them. It’s an ecosystem at heart. Without any clear/direct message, the margin for error rapidly increases. The artist obviously has to know that this is the case when they choose to make art. If they wanted to get across a single message or intention, then why did they choose a medium that’s so notoriously bad at getting across a single intention? Obviously some artists are just delusional and don’t accept the reality of their medium, but that doesn’t change the facts

Imagine a hypothetical scenario where a storyteller writes a story with a narrator that clearly handholds the audience and explicitly says what the artist means, but the audience doesn’t agree with the narrator. In that case, how many readers will praise the storyteller for their interesting use of an unreliable narrator? Art functions this way on its own, and this is another reason why intentionality is a bad metric: the artist has to make the art work, and that functionality has properties of its own that supersede the artists intentions. This was the main argument of an historically important essay entitled The Intentional Fallacy by Whimsat and Beardsley: Primarily, the story must work. The meaning comes secondarily from trying to understand why it works. We forget this, but the art that we engage with is always art that has been pre-selected by the demands of the art form itself, which no single artist has control over. We engage with art through survivorship bias.

Where I think most people get tripped up is that one of the recent and most popular demands of art has been Conceptual Art, which focuses on the idea or intention rather than the object itself. This is an outgrowth of an individualistic art movement that, honestly, is popular because of political motives. The CIA straight up funded it. I’m not saying that’s bad. Honestly I love any government that funds the arts. I’m just saying it’s not the entirety of art and we can’t be subservient to it and the ideology it represents. You don’t need to justify your enjoyment of a blurry image because it has a story behind it. Moreover, it doesn’t make sense to ignore the image and argue that the story is the meaning or the value of the art. Art that uses backstories effectively can just be redefined as multimedia art that combines the art medium with storytelling, and now suddenly what you thought was the intention of the artist is just the quality of the output again

[skydhash]

> Do you care where each bristle lands?

Sometimes you do, which is why there’s not only a single type of brush in a studio. You want something very controllable if you’re doing lineart with ink.

Even with digital painting, there’s a lot of fussing with the brush engine. There’s even a market for selling presets.

[hhutw]

I think IMO art is about conveying human ideas/emotions that’s beyond words. So it’s more about what the artist intentionally or unintentionally brought into the piece. With AI “art”, it’s just filling noise into the original prompt. In that case, why don’t you just show me the prompt instead of the noisy lossy “art” piece?

[SamoyedFurFluff]

Man this approach and philosophy about art baffles me because the greatest and most moving works of art to me couldn’t possibly be created by an LLM. For example “Electric Fan (Feel It Motherfuckers): Only Unclaimed Item from the Stephen Earabino Estate”, which is the only item remaining when the artists lover (Stephen Earabino) died of AIDS and his family threw out everything he ever owned leaving just the box fan. It’s just a box fan but there’s so much loss and pain in that installation. Same as “"Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) ", which is just a pile of colorful candy that audience members are welcome to take from, whose original weight is the ideal weight of a Ross who diminished and died of AIDS.

There’s no gatekeeping in the processes of these works, no secrecy, not even really whatever you’re talking about. These works would in fact be utterly diminished by being produced by an LLM because they’re trying to capture the stories of real, existing people who had real, painful experiences. I have no empathy with a machine but I have all the empathy of a man who loved a man whose family hated him so much when he died they wouldn’t even leave his lover with anything more than a box fan and so he decided to declare the box fan to be art.

[kouru225]

What you’re talking about is found object art so I’m confused. These objects are not created by the artist at all. In fact, they were created in a factory by machines. You’re responding to the story behind it, which is also something a LLM could’ve created. I understand if you’d feel betrayed if someone put a found object piece in a museum with a fake story created by an LLM, but let’s not pretend like a LLM is not capable of doing exactly that and getting the exact same response out of you provided that they can convince you it’s real. You might be tempted to argue that what’s real matters and what’s not doesn’t, but now you’re just stuck having to figure out what the hell is real or not. A lot of human biography is arguably fake already. I fw found object art in general, but let’s be clear: found object art is a great example of exactly what I’m talking about. It argues that art doesn’t need to be handmade with intention by an artist. Instead, it can be a random object, created by an environmental process that the artist has little control over

[SamoyedFurFluff]

No, sorry, a lot of the original post I was responding to was my bafflement that artists are supposed to be gatekeeping their strategies or techniques when it’s very evident to me that the art that moves me the most really didn’t gatekeep anything, and in fact the opposite. I’m not particularly anti LLM being involved in the creative process, I just had no idea wtf you were talking about with gatekeeping artistic intent. I also think these pieces fundamentally don’t work if the story they were telling was fiction. There are fictional stories like Pose that speak to very similar cultural moments but Pose is not Paris is Burning and that distinction is fundamentally important to the place of art in society. I’m very baffled that you’re seemingly saying as long as I am lied to about what I think is true, thats the same as a real work existing.

[sodapopcan]

> Coincidentally, these same people think the most “artistic” process is the most intentional one.

While people do think like this, it misses the point.

Yes, all forms of art is FULL of randomness and people copying each other. The thing that makes it special is that it took people going out and living and having experiences to create it. They have to actively absorb prior art, learn about it, analyze it, generally be influenced by it. You have to seek out paints, clay, musical instruments, etc etc and at least somewhat learn how to use them. It's not about being difficult to do (although it's certainly impressive but not part of the emotional takeaway), but everyone's process is different and their experiences go into what they create. When I see a photograph of a tree, I think: "Someone went to where that tree is!" and that's part of the feeling and excitement of a really artful photo.

Now, someone who has only ever heard the term "free jazz" can sit in their parents' basement and type out "make me a free jazz song" and shit out the result onto the internet. It's really not the same thing at all.

[kouru225]

Yea I definitely agree that AI has definitely a problem with spam, and that spam is effecting the art world negatively

[ThrowawayR2]

AI bros: "You're gatekeeping because you think the result isn't art!"

Rest of the world: "No, we're gatekeeping because we think the result isn't good."

If someone can cajole their LLM to emit something worthwhile, e.g. Terence Tao's LLM generated proofs, people will be happy to acknowledge it. Most people are incapable of that and no number of protestations of gatekeeping can cover up the unoriginality and poor quality of their LLM results.

[kouru225]

What concerns me is how easily the “rest of the world” is changing their opinions about what’s good. If the result isn’t good, then it isn’t good, sure. But in my experience there’s a large contingent of people, especially the youth, that are more reactionary about AI than they are interested in creativity. Their idea of creative value is inherently tied to self-expression and individualism, which AI and systems-based creative processes are threatening. When they don’t understand the philosophical case for non-individualistic/systems-based creative processes, they can’t differentiate between computer assisted creativity and computer assisted slop

[squidsoup]

The reality is there is very little non-individualistic art (algorithmic, AI generated etc) that has much qualitative merit. Art for the most part has always been the expression of an individual, even art tightly bound to a cultural context.

[kouru225]

>The reality is there is very little non-individualistic art (algorithmic, AI generated etc) that has much qualitative merit

Big opinions there. A large amount of art that you think comes from individual expression is often not. There are countless examples of artists that secretly used algorithmic processes. A great example is Vermeer: https://youtu.be/94pCNUu6qFY?si=M6UQ-XuHNtoj2-3a.

This is what I mean about how this individualistic philosophy of creativity actually just results in artistic gatekeeping and manipulation of the audience

It’s very common for artists to add on individual expression narratives at the end of the process just so they can market the art, and the reality is that the individualism was never there to begin with. It’s just manipulation and advertising, and it sucks because the success of advertising like this actually undermines the quality of the art world. Because audiences are so susceptible to advertising narratives, artists are forced to spend more time on advertising more than art

> Art for the most part has always been the expression of an individual, even art tightly bound to a cultural context.

This is also not true. This idea mostly comes from the Romantic period. Modern day versions of it are often really just referencing a single book from the 1930s called The Principles of Art by a guy named R.G. Collingwood. It’s a very recent way of seeing art. Historically, art was connected to religion, and therefore thought to be valuable because it was universal rather than individualistic and personal

[squidsoup]

Well aware of Hockney's work related to the use of technology in art, but there's a difference between producing purely algorithmic work and using a specific technique. Vermeer's style and work is still uniquely his.

> Historically, art was connected to religion, and therefore thought to be valuable because it was universal rather than individualistic and personal

If that were actually the case, we wouldn't be able to identify the style of individual artists and artisans, and yet we can of course, regardless of their intent. Giotto's only intent may have been to glorify god in his work, but of course, inevitably, his work is also a reflection of who he was.

This is precisely why AI art is so hideous and anti-humanistic - it can never been a singular reflection of the individual.

[kouru225]

We can retroactively value art of the past using an individualistic philosophy, but that doesn’t change how it was valued in past. Artists of the past were considered good artists when they were capable of putting their own selves aside and allow God to flow through them. We now value their individuality, but they probably would’ve seen their individuality as their failures. It was a virtue to be objective rather than subjective. In literature especially we have are tons of letters between writers where they insult each other for writing in styles that are unintelligible to other people

I don’t necessarily ascribe to their views, but I bring it up because you said art has always been this way and it hasn’t always been this way

[spopejoy]

> in my experience there’s a large contingent of people, especially the youth, that are more reactionary about AI than they are interested in creativity.

First off -- are you an artist? As in, are you making your argument with skin in the game for something you _need_ to do, not just a pastime that makes dayjobs livable?

Not gatekeeping! Trying to see if you are formulating your position as a creator or a consumer.

If the latter, hate to say it, but your opinion is kind of irrelevant. Ultimately, only artists really understand what's involved in creating real art. Not what's good or bad, but what's at stake and how to tell if somebody's for real.

If you're a creator I'm a little puzzled. Are you really worried that AI is so freaking great that the horrible luddites at bandcamp et al are going to "gatekeep" us away from incredible AI art? This is NOT something that keeps me up at night.