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>Art is an expression of human emotion

Yet humans are the ones enacting an AI for art (of some kind). Is not therefore not art because even though a human initiated the process, the machine completed it?

If you argue that, then what about kinetic sculptures, what about pendulum painting, etc? The artist sets them in motion but the rest of the actions are carried out by something nonhuman.

And even in a fully autonomous sense; who are we to define art as being artefacts of human emotion? How typically human (tribalism). What's to say that an alien species doesn't exist, somewhere...out there. If that species produces something akin to art, but they never evolved the chemical reactions that we call emotions...I suppose it's not art by your definition?

And what if that alien species is not carbon based? If it therefore much of a stretch to call art that an eventual AGI produces art?

My definition of art is a superposition of everything and nothing is art at the same time; because art is art in the eye of the arts beholder. When I look up at the night sky; that's art, but no human emotion produced that.





You seem to be conflating natural beauty and the arts.

Just because something beautiful can be created without emotion, that doesn't mean it's art. It just means something pleasing was created.

We have many species on earth that are "alien" to us - they don't create with emotion, they create things that are beautiful because that's just how it ended up.

Bees don't create hexagonal honeycomb because they feel a certain way, it's just the most efficient way for them to do so. Spider webs are also created for efficacy. Down to the single cell, things are constructed in beautiful ways not for the sake of beauty, but out of evolution.

The earth itself creates things that are absolutely beautiful, but are not art. They are merely the result of chemical and kinetic processes.

The "art" of it all, is how humans interpret it and build upon it, with experience, imagination, free will and emotions.

What you see in the night sky, that is not art. That is nature.

The things that humans are compelled to create under the influence of all this beauty - that is the art.


With a kinetic structure, someone went through the effort to design it to do that. With AI art, sure you ask it to do something but a human isn't involved in the creative process in any capacity beyond that

This is a very reductionist claim about how people use AI in their art process. The truth is that the best artists use AI in a sort of dance between the human and machine. But always, the human is the prime mover through a process of iteration.

Yes, the BEST artists.

The rest of the people using the Studio Ghibli filter ?


Forgettable. Plagiaristic. The most anti-art qualities.

Sure, but in the case of AI it resembles the relationship of a patron to an art director. We generally don't assign artistry to the person hiring an art director to create artistic output, even if it requires heavy prompting and back and forth. I am not bold enough to try to encompass something as large and fundamental as art into a definition, though I suppose that art does cary something about the craft of using the medium.

At any rate, though there is some aversion to AI art for arts sake, the real aversion to AI art is that it squeezes one of the last viable options for people to become 'working artists' and funnels that extremely hard earned profit to the hands of the conglomerates that have enough compute to train generative models. Is making a living through your art something that we would like to value and maintain as a society? I'd say so.




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