Reply To: Here’s a good video to listen to concerning your AI-"art"

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@onlyonepinman I think we’re in danger of agreeing on the basic principles of what’s going on, but failing to recognise it! I chose Stock Aitken and Waterman deliberately to try to make the point: their music was robotic, formulaic, predictable, “lacked soul” and all the rest – every argument thrown against AI art was thrown at these guys. But they also made music. Undeniably, their output was music. And – now our dreams of joining the cool kids have long passed, we can finally admit that – *some* of it was….ok (I nearly went with “quite good”).

Now, there are/were some who made the same claims against SAW, that they weren’t musicians, they weren’t talented, they weren’t creating music. But such claims were objectively wrong – they *did* create music. You might not have liked it. Anyone who thought they had “taste” might have derided it as pap. But lots of people loved it, they were successful, they had to work at producing a song, the end result was that they made music.

Often they weren’t actively involved in the creative process – Pete Waterman, in an interview, admitted that their distinctive sound happened when someone accidentally left a tape-based reverb running overnight – they often weren’t emotionally involved in the production of their music, they were writing to a formula, building on what they had been told worked, avoided what wasn’t commercially successful, and were entirely focussed on getting a finished product out of the door. The called their studio “The Pop Factory”.

This doesn’t mean they weren’t creating music. This doesn’t mean there wasn’t an art to what they produced, and their end results lacked artistic merit. The same applies to creating imagery – you don’t have to be emotionally involved in its creation, to create art. Paintings by elephants have sold for hundreds of thousands. Aztec and geometric designs have been the basis for art – they don’t require “emotional investment”.

Yet in this video about AI, the main arguments seem to be “unless an artist is rewarded for the images they’ve freely shared online, they shouldn’t be used as an influence by anyone or anything else” and “if you’re not emotionally involved in the creation of an image, it’s not art”.
I disagree with these basic principles.
In fact, there’s very little in the video I can agree with.

Art can be generated. It has been for decades.
From Andy Warhol to Damien Hirst to fractal pattern-based art – sometimes someone just sets the parameters and lets someone or something get on with the actual construction of the image/object. That doesn’t mean the end result is not artistic. Sure, art critics can’t wang on about the deeper meaning of what they’re looking at – because it was never there in the first place – but that doesn’t mean it’s not artistic.