AI Generated 'Art'

BBB · 10-07-2022

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.

10-07-2022	#3
BBB Process Fan Join Date: Apr 2007 Posts: 39	Re: AI Generated 'Art' 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.