• CrushKillDestroySwag@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    6 months ago

    I mean, with weird avant garde/experimental art you have a person making decisions about what they’re making, how they’re doing it, where they’re displaying it, etc. There’s intentionality to it - the artist has to visualize what they’re going to do before they do it, and in that process the differences between one experimental artist who paints their canvasses all a single color and a different person doing something similar become alighted.

    With generated images, however, the entire decision-making process has been offloaded to a machine, which by definition does not understand what it’s doing or why, cannot have intentionality, and can only give a weighted average of the decisions that other artists have made in the past. From the “artist”'s point of view, you have an idea of what you want to see and you put in keywords related to it, and then you cycle through generated images until you get to one that’s “close enough”. Your input on the production of the image itself is completely alienated from it - you’re like a producer telling someone what to paint, and then telling them to try again if you don’t like it.

    • Omniraptor [they/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      edit-2
      6 months ago

      I mean, we have avant garde art where the author only transforms the raw materials very lightly, the most famous and controversial example perhaps being a certain porcelain fountain.

      Also for AI specifically, depending on the model the artist has a pretty significant degree of control over various parameters of the generation, e.g. by ‘fine tuning’ and grafting your own data on top of the existing weights. It’s certainly not just typing in different words. In the end I don’t really see how it’s fundamentally different from an artist applying various algorithmic filters and other transforms in Photoshop or whatever.

      • WithoutFurtherBelay [none/use name]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        6 months ago

        Yes but that’s a decision, they were presented with the entire toilet and made a conscious decision to keep it. Choosing to use the instant art button isn’t a “decision”, because you have no information about what you’ll get from it unless you yourself are the algorithm

          • WithoutFurtherBelay [none/use name]@hexbear.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            6 months ago

            People don’t actually consider it that deeply. Dadaism has a cultural backdrop of artistic conflict that the creator thinks about when making it. When they make these art pieces and installations, they do so purposely knowing it’s base nature, and riff off of it. This would be fine if AI artists actually did this… but no. They think they’re actually Picasso. If there’s any artistic value to it, it’s own statement reflects negatively on itself.

            Edit: This is because the toilet, which is a physically manifested object in reality, the AI generated pieces are effectively manifestations of societal attitudes, so using it without any modification or thought is just reproducing those attitudes.