AI Generated 'Art'

[BBB]

Philosophers have asked, "What is art?" basically since art existed. But an example comes to mind when considering AI art.

Roughly in the 1980's, technology became popular that allowed musical artists to sample existing sound recordings. The samples are edited/manipulated/recombined to create new musical works. I'd consider AI art to be effectively a more sophisticated and automated way of doing the same thing. It's trained on existing art, and its results are technically a recombination of prior artworks, even if at an imperceptible scale. So if there's virtually anyone in the hip hop or electronic music scene you think deserves to be called an artist, it would follow that those using AI art are, too.

From another perspective, artists have always had tools and technology at their disposal. Do we say the computer animator is really more of an art supervisor, as the computer calculates all the pixels in all the in between frames that weren't manually keyed? Do we say the photographer is really more of an art assistant, as the camera's image processor did most of the computation and adjusting some sliders for post processing handled the rest?

I'd say generally not. And yet, it's easy to use AI art in a way that takes the absolute minimum of effort (e.g. type "the Mona Lisa" into DALL-E and do nothing else). So what makes it art or just an overdesigned copy machine could come down to originality: did the creator add something significant? If so, call the result art.

[Prof_Sai]

Originally Posted by BBB

Do we say the photographer is really more of an art assistant... So what makes it art or just an overdesigned copy machine could come down to originality: did the creator add something significant? If so, call the result art.

I think the photography example is the most apt:


I expect that the park service put in about a thousand times as much effort into this as I did - simply building the road to get here is a major undertaking. And I expect that a thousand people have taken photos indistinguishable from this. (I deliberately picked something rather bland for discussion's sake.) But it is still my art and my copyright, for whatever that is worth.

Part of the reason for that is the impossibility of placing an objective legal distinction between the above pic, and something truly valuable.

I think AI will end up rather like that. If you put a hundred carefully chosen words into your request, and pick the best out of 20 results, well that IS some effort. But if someone else gets a virtually identical result with a two word input, well you have to give them that too.

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What if there was a person who was no more creative than an AI? All they ever did was remember the art of others, and recreate bits and pieces of them with minor changes. What fraction of real artists today could reasonably be accused of being this? How could they prove themselves otherwise?