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by jeroenhd 53 days ago
Art can be generated perfectly fine. Only artists and connoisseurs care about details and art style. Most art is purchased by a business, and that business just wants a picture of a woman being happy next to a cake that looks similar enough to the other corporate pictures.

Code can be art the same way writing can be. There's a big difference between artistic code and business code, the same way there's a big difference between poetry and a comment chain on hacker news.

1 comments

I don't mean to be mean, but I don't think you understand what Art is. For example, I don't consider a picture of a woman being happy next to a cake art. That's a decorative artefact. And I don't really consider myself a connoisseurs, nor do I particularly care about details or art style.

I'm not trying to be pretentious or precious about art. But I consider the process of creation to be as much a fundamental part of art as the resulting artefact. If I can't contextualize a work of art to a human's inner life - be it implicitly or through knowing about the artist - it's not really art to me.

Artistic code can be a work of art. But only if created by a human (in a way that humans make art), and I think the same principles should apply to it as any other medium of art. But that kind of code is so rare and insignificant compared to all other code being written and published, that I don't think it's worth watering down the discussion with it.

I would only consider AI generated output art, if the way to get there were a substantial artistic expression.

So I think visual arts and music fall in a different category because it's much more artistic, unconstrained, and personal by nature than code. Even if that difference sits on a spectrum. But on that spectrum they're worlds apart.

I struggle explaining my point of view better and hope I manage to get my point across at least to some extent.

Having said all that, I do consider training LLMs on other people's code without compensation wrong as well. Just not as wrong as I do with other stuff.