@gumwars If an advertising executive asks David to...

@gumwars If an advertising executive asks David to draw Pepper drinking a lovely can of cola, does that make the advertising executive an artist?

If you want to call these AI images art, then it's far to ask "who is the artist?" in that case.

I can see an argument for the artist being the people who produced all the training data, or maybe the team that built the model.

But definitely not the person who just typed a prompt.

They can maybe be the executive producer or something, but not the artist.

Like 29 Jun 2023 at 17:32 | Wall-to-wall | Open on boing.world

5 comments

Adam Dalliance

@gumwars
The prompt itself may be art, an expression born of the suffering and emotion of the prompter who wants to tell a story.

But the image isn't art, the image is just a mashup caused by the flow of electrons in response to the art of the prompt, rather than the passion or rage of a human being being human.

29 Jun 2023 at 17:37 | Open on boing.world

Gumwars

@pre You still haven't answered the question underpinning this matter; what is art? Before we can put to bed if AI generated images can be art, or not, you need to define art itself. It isn't fair to say AI art can't exist if you can't define what art is to begin with.

29 Jun 2023 at 18:09 | Open on mastodon.social

Adam Dalliance

@gumwars Yeah I did, I said it's what artists do.

Lying in bed all day can be art if an artist does it.

Good art is born from human passion and experience, it's an expression of their frustration and pain and joy and curiosity.

Which are all things that the machine hasn't got, and which preclude it from being an artist, and so preclude it from making art.

That's these machines that are just mashing up pixel technique anyway. It may be possible one day to build a machine which can experience joy and curiosity and longing and which is about to express that.

But these machine's aren't it.

The art of AI images is in the prompt writing, and I would rather read the prompt.

@gumwars Yeah I did, I said it's what artists do.

Lying in bed all day can be art if an artist does it.

Good art is born from human passion and experience, it's an expression of their frustration and pain and joy and curiosity.

Which are all things that the machine hasn't got, and which preclude it from being an artist, and so preclude it from making art.

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29 Jun 2023 at 18:14 | Open on boing.world

Adam Dalliance

@gumwars

And an artist may use these machines in their work. If they have a story to tell, and illustrate the story with photographs or a collection of pebbles or a film of a plastic bag floating, or the pixels that fall out of a pixel grinder that's all cool and legit.

But the art is in the story there, the human communication, mind to mind, not the pebbles or pixels.

29 Jun 2023 at 18:23 | Open on boing.world

Gumwars

@pre So, you're saying it's art if and only if an artist does it. Then who is and who can be an artist? I've got more than a decade of professional training as a classical artist, but I work for a railroad, am I an artist? Is what I do through stable diffusion art, while a layperson doing the same isn't? Do you see how arbitrary your definition is?

29 Jun 2023 at 19:13 | Open on mastodon.social