Interesting take. I personally disagree - I define art as the human experience/emotions being expressed exclusively by humans through various mediums. To me, that human element is what makes art “art” as it were. AI might be able to produce approximations of art and some of it might even look quite nice, but I don’t consider it “art” in the way I define the word.
I was thinking about a mountain (I’m sitting in front of one right now).
A mountain is beautiful, so beautiful that many humans have made paintings of it, take pictures, write poems. They have try to mimic the mountain beauty with their tools. But they did not make the mountain. Erosion made it. In reality here humans are just copying something nature made and calling it “their art”, but they did not make those shapes and colors, they did not create the emotions that everyone seeing the mountain feels. They are just replicating it.
Here the artist is just erosion, the wind and the rain, the trees and the snow, not a human being.
If art is just human creativity and expression, why would the media, format or process used for expressing would matter, then? Why classify between art or not arr depending on which computer program would be used to make it?
Everything a human made being used for expressing something would be art. By that definition.
Also including creativity here would be plain wrong, as a great deal of art is representative, not creative. Like my mountain example, humans that represent that mountain on a canvas are not creating anything, humans taking pictures of that mountain are not using their creativity, they are just representing something that was created by something different. As said before, humans did not created the mountain, they are just representing it.
Specially a photographer for instance, would just be pushing a button and getting a exact picture of the mountain that was created by nature. I don’t think if we could say that creativity was used to take that picture.
Are we starting to notice how ridiculous and useless is to try gatekeep art or shall I go on?
I will try to make it more clear, if you didn’t understand me.
not all art is creative. A great deal of art is representative. Saying that art NEEDS to be creative is conflictive. Art can be representative, just picturing something beautiful or not without any creativity effort on the artist.
Art being expressive does not conflict with AI generated art. As it is just a tool used by a human to express themselves. A human being can use an AI to make true an image they have on their head in order to express that image to the world. So AI art will enter in your definition of art being a product of human expression.
I’m just analysing you definition of art. Let’s be clear that it’s not my own definition, nor I agree with it. But you definition is faulty at its intention which is trying to come out with a definition that excludes only AI art from an art definition while including any other technique. Try again. Let’s see how convoluted could you ad hoc definition of art can be.
Keep trying really. It’s interesting seeing some people realize how in all human history we have been unable to came up with a united and universal definition of art. It is probably one of the most vague concepts we have as humans. And of course pushing politics in the definition (we all know this is truly about politics, there is not facade here) is the oldest trick in the book. I remember when I studied story of art, that this have been a recurrent debate. Is a white toilet art? Is Malevich black square art? People have been debating this for ages. Many times with underlying political agendas, of course.
You’re arguing with a version of me that you’ve created in your head, because nowhere did I say anything about AI art. You’re also again misunderstanding my point - and misunderstanding what creativity is. “Representative art” requires creativity, because a mountain is not two dimensional. Taking a photograph requires decision-making. Even once you’ve taken a pretty picture, though, loop back to my first point - beauty alone is not art.
Again, you’re arguing with a version of me that you’ve created in your head: yes, we use tools to make art. People use spellcheck when writing a play, people use knives when making woodcuts, we use ovens to blow glass. However, if I - without permission - take a photo of my neighbor’s watercolor and print it on T-shirts, do you think I created a work of art? That much is at least arguable. There’s expression, there’s creativity, and it could be aesthetically pleasing in the end. However, one of the main contentions people have with AI gen…do you find it ethical?
Pay close attention to what I’m saying here, please. You’ve been trampling on nuance, so don’t put words in my mouth. I’m not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I’m a scientist that kind of works in tech, and I have a lot of creative pursuits outside of my day job. I think there’s a lot of potential to LLMs and other tools out there, but I think we need to pay careful attention to ethics, and I do think words have meaning, even if definitions drift, and even when we’re talking about challenging subjects.
Keep trying really. It’s interesting seeing some people realize how in all human history we have been unable to came up with a united and universal definition of art. It is probably one of the most vague concepts we have as humans.
I’m glad we agree on something! Yes, the definition of art hard to pin down. Subjectivity is the name of the game. I loathe a lot of modern art, because I think it’s disappeared up it’s own asshole, as Vonnegut would say. It’s strange though, because you seem to be certain that your definition of art is universally correct. Again, my initial point - you’re conflating beauty with art, because you claim a mountain itself is art. I think a mountain is beauty, and there’s beauty in our scientific understanding of why it looks like it does. But I don’t think that qualifies as art.
And of course pushing politics in the definition (we all know this is truly about politics, there is not facade here) is the oldest trick in the book.
What politics do you think I’m pushing? How do you think whatever politics you are pushing have impacted your view of what defines art?
I’m sorry if I misunderstood your points. Sometimes I get so much pressure defending AI as legit that I tend to think everyone is being extra-hostile. Sorry.
If was thinking of creativity as creating something that os not there, by contrast to representation that would be the pursuit of replicating something that is already there.
Creativity as the tool which humans use to make their ideas materialize in the world… I can buy that concept. I I could be ok with a definition of art that requires creativity, thus human involved. Not my favourite definition, I still think that art can exist without human or intelligent intervention. But it’s true that a creative art in that way will be very coherent.
I’m not that sure about permission being important in art would led to coherent definition. How could art know if it had permission to be made or not?
Taking a picture and printing it on a t-shirt is art? I don’t know. What if you took a picture of your own art and put it on the t-shirt. What if the idea of the art needed to be on a t-shirt?"
Imagine I take a picture of the mona lisa on a t-shirt and with some text like “it is not smiling” or something clever. Because my idea is to make a t-shirt like that. Is that much different if instead of the mona lisa (whose artists cannot consent) I use AI to give me any other image?
About the mountain being art:
I talked about a beautiful mountain, but it does not need to be beautiful. It could be horrible, scary, ugly, peaceful, agitated. What I meant is that it had some emotions in it. And the artists will try to take those aspects, those emotions and copy them, but the mountain had those inherently.
For instance an attacking lion, it’s scary. And an artist could try to portray that emotion by copying the lion, but the artist did not create the scaryness of it. For my the attacking lion itself could be considered art, if you see it with your own eyes, without needing it to be portrayed by an artists before it became art.
Another approach to this would be the infinite monkey problem. Infinite monkeys with typewriter write Shakespeare’s plays. Are those versions of Hammlet not art because they were not written by Shakespeare, or Hammlet being art is inherent to the play deapite how it came to be?
It doesn’t need to be beauty. For me art is anything that provoque a feeling or emotion. It’s an incredibly open interpretation, and subjective. But I like it because it lets everything to be art, without it being able to gatekeep anything. Again pushing my own political agenda probably, as I like things open.
Thanks for a thorough reply, there’s a lot to tackle, so apologies that I’m not responding to everything in it. You make good points, but it’s clear we have fundamentally different perspectives on this.
I’m not that sure about permission being important in art would led to coherent definition. How could art know if it had permission to be made or not?
I tried to be explicit that permission is not required to make art - because I want to disentangle the two arguments. One of the biggest contentions I have with AI gen stuff is the ethics involved. No ethical consumption under capitalism, so I get arguments that the paint brushes I have were produced unethically to some degree, so pot meet kettle, but I think there’s degrees we can find some nuance in. But I don’t think it’s useful, either, to just shrug and toss the ethics aside. It must be acknowledged, and grappled with.
As for the rest of your comment about the artist copying preexisting emotions, tapping into things that are already there - or the infinite monkeys thing - I do think some amount of intentionality is required to call something art. That said, we all create derivative works to a degree: that’s just impossible to avoid. We’re only human, and we filter our environments through our brains and experiences, and that allows some unique (but again, derivative to a degree) works. If you ask ten people to paint a scary lion, we’re all drawing on some shared fear, and maybe a single photograph of a lion, but you’ll get different works as a result. The art, for me, is the product of the creative process. Art requires intentional action, IMHO. It’s a more narrow definition than yours, but I think being overbroad makes the word meaningless, and indistinguishable from…beauty, or (to include grotesque images, or other emotions), simply aesthetics. AI tools can make beautiful images, but this all circles back to my initial point (with some modified wording): aesthetics are not inherently art, art is not just aesthetic. If we get to AGI, I’ll buy the things it creates as being art. For now, it’s really impressive math. Doesn’t undermine the beauty in it, but it’s something different.
Again, this is my personal opinion. In my science career I’m more of a lumper than a splitter - when talking about evolution, you can “lump” together groups into species, or “split” them into subspecies (really for any clade). So I get your impulse to be open and not gatekeep. I’m not trying to gatekeep, but I do think there is utility in defining things. I don’t like splitting species, but there are differences in crocodiles and alligators. We can’t just lump them into one species - but they are related by broader terms. In this case, I think you’re talking about aesthetics, and not art. Just my personal opinion, and not making a value judgement any more than calling an alligator an alligator, and not a crocodile. They’re different things, and yes: species that look nearly identical but are genetically distinct qualify as different species. The way something beautiful is made matters. IMHO
Interesting take. I personally disagree - I define art as the human experience/emotions being expressed exclusively by humans through various mediums. To me, that human element is what makes art “art” as it were. AI might be able to produce approximations of art and some of it might even look quite nice, but I don’t consider it “art” in the way I define the word.
I don’t even mean AI here.
I was thinking about a mountain (I’m sitting in front of one right now).
A mountain is beautiful, so beautiful that many humans have made paintings of it, take pictures, write poems. They have try to mimic the mountain beauty with their tools. But they did not make the mountain. Erosion made it. In reality here humans are just copying something nature made and calling it “their art”, but they did not make those shapes and colors, they did not create the emotions that everyone seeing the mountain feels. They are just replicating it. Here the artist is just erosion, the wind and the rain, the trees and the snow, not a human being.
It sounds like you’re conflating art and beauty.
Art is about human creativity and expression. It doesn’t have to be beautiful, and beauty doesn’t have to be art.
If art is just human creativity and expression, why would the media, format or process used for expressing would matter, then? Why classify between art or not arr depending on which computer program would be used to make it?
Everything a human made being used for expressing something would be art. By that definition.
Also including creativity here would be plain wrong, as a great deal of art is representative, not creative. Like my mountain example, humans that represent that mountain on a canvas are not creating anything, humans taking pictures of that mountain are not using their creativity, they are just representing something that was created by something different. As said before, humans did not created the mountain, they are just representing it. Specially a photographer for instance, would just be pushing a button and getting a exact picture of the mountain that was created by nature. I don’t think if we could say that creativity was used to take that picture.
Are we starting to notice how ridiculous and useless is to try gatekeep art or shall I go on?
None of what you just said has anything to do with the point I was making.
I will try to make it more clear, if you didn’t understand me.
not all art is creative. A great deal of art is representative. Saying that art NEEDS to be creative is conflictive. Art can be representative, just picturing something beautiful or not without any creativity effort on the artist.
Art being expressive does not conflict with AI generated art. As it is just a tool used by a human to express themselves. A human being can use an AI to make true an image they have on their head in order to express that image to the world. So AI art will enter in your definition of art being a product of human expression.
I’m just analysing you definition of art. Let’s be clear that it’s not my own definition, nor I agree with it. But you definition is faulty at its intention which is trying to come out with a definition that excludes only AI art from an art definition while including any other technique. Try again. Let’s see how convoluted could you ad hoc definition of art can be.
Keep trying really. It’s interesting seeing some people realize how in all human history we have been unable to came up with a united and universal definition of art. It is probably one of the most vague concepts we have as humans. And of course pushing politics in the definition (we all know this is truly about politics, there is not facade here) is the oldest trick in the book. I remember when I studied story of art, that this have been a recurrent debate. Is a white toilet art? Is Malevich black square art? People have been debating this for ages. Many times with underlying political agendas, of course.
You’re arguing with a version of me that you’ve created in your head, because nowhere did I say anything about AI art. You’re also again misunderstanding my point - and misunderstanding what creativity is. “Representative art” requires creativity, because a mountain is not two dimensional. Taking a photograph requires decision-making. Even once you’ve taken a pretty picture, though, loop back to my first point - beauty alone is not art.
Again, you’re arguing with a version of me that you’ve created in your head: yes, we use tools to make art. People use spellcheck when writing a play, people use knives when making woodcuts, we use ovens to blow glass. However, if I - without permission - take a photo of my neighbor’s watercolor and print it on T-shirts, do you think I created a work of art? That much is at least arguable. There’s expression, there’s creativity, and it could be aesthetically pleasing in the end. However, one of the main contentions people have with AI gen…do you find it ethical?
Pay close attention to what I’m saying here, please. You’ve been trampling on nuance, so don’t put words in my mouth. I’m not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I’m a scientist that kind of works in tech, and I have a lot of creative pursuits outside of my day job. I think there’s a lot of potential to LLMs and other tools out there, but I think we need to pay careful attention to ethics, and I do think words have meaning, even if definitions drift, and even when we’re talking about challenging subjects.
I’m glad we agree on something! Yes, the definition of art hard to pin down. Subjectivity is the name of the game. I loathe a lot of modern art, because I think it’s disappeared up it’s own asshole, as Vonnegut would say. It’s strange though, because you seem to be certain that your definition of art is universally correct. Again, my initial point - you’re conflating beauty with art, because you claim a mountain itself is art. I think a mountain is beauty, and there’s beauty in our scientific understanding of why it looks like it does. But I don’t think that qualifies as art.
What politics do you think I’m pushing? How do you think whatever politics you are pushing have impacted your view of what defines art?
I’m sorry if I misunderstood your points. Sometimes I get so much pressure defending AI as legit that I tend to think everyone is being extra-hostile. Sorry.
If was thinking of creativity as creating something that os not there, by contrast to representation that would be the pursuit of replicating something that is already there.
Creativity as the tool which humans use to make their ideas materialize in the world… I can buy that concept. I I could be ok with a definition of art that requires creativity, thus human involved. Not my favourite definition, I still think that art can exist without human or intelligent intervention. But it’s true that a creative art in that way will be very coherent.
I’m not that sure about permission being important in art would led to coherent definition. How could art know if it had permission to be made or not?
Taking a picture and printing it on a t-shirt is art? I don’t know. What if you took a picture of your own art and put it on the t-shirt. What if the idea of the art needed to be on a t-shirt?"
Imagine I take a picture of the mona lisa on a t-shirt and with some text like “it is not smiling” or something clever. Because my idea is to make a t-shirt like that. Is that much different if instead of the mona lisa (whose artists cannot consent) I use AI to give me any other image?
About the mountain being art:
I talked about a beautiful mountain, but it does not need to be beautiful. It could be horrible, scary, ugly, peaceful, agitated. What I meant is that it had some emotions in it. And the artists will try to take those aspects, those emotions and copy them, but the mountain had those inherently.
For instance an attacking lion, it’s scary. And an artist could try to portray that emotion by copying the lion, but the artist did not create the scaryness of it. For my the attacking lion itself could be considered art, if you see it with your own eyes, without needing it to be portrayed by an artists before it became art.
Another approach to this would be the infinite monkey problem. Infinite monkeys with typewriter write Shakespeare’s plays. Are those versions of Hammlet not art because they were not written by Shakespeare, or Hammlet being art is inherent to the play deapite how it came to be?
It doesn’t need to be beauty. For me art is anything that provoque a feeling or emotion. It’s an incredibly open interpretation, and subjective. But I like it because it lets everything to be art, without it being able to gatekeep anything. Again pushing my own political agenda probably, as I like things open.
Thanks for a thorough reply, there’s a lot to tackle, so apologies that I’m not responding to everything in it. You make good points, but it’s clear we have fundamentally different perspectives on this.
I tried to be explicit that permission is not required to make art - because I want to disentangle the two arguments. One of the biggest contentions I have with AI gen stuff is the ethics involved. No ethical consumption under capitalism, so I get arguments that the paint brushes I have were produced unethically to some degree, so pot meet kettle, but I think there’s degrees we can find some nuance in. But I don’t think it’s useful, either, to just shrug and toss the ethics aside. It must be acknowledged, and grappled with.
As for the rest of your comment about the artist copying preexisting emotions, tapping into things that are already there - or the infinite monkeys thing - I do think some amount of intentionality is required to call something art. That said, we all create derivative works to a degree: that’s just impossible to avoid. We’re only human, and we filter our environments through our brains and experiences, and that allows some unique (but again, derivative to a degree) works. If you ask ten people to paint a scary lion, we’re all drawing on some shared fear, and maybe a single photograph of a lion, but you’ll get different works as a result. The art, for me, is the product of the creative process. Art requires intentional action, IMHO. It’s a more narrow definition than yours, but I think being overbroad makes the word meaningless, and indistinguishable from…beauty, or (to include grotesque images, or other emotions), simply aesthetics. AI tools can make beautiful images, but this all circles back to my initial point (with some modified wording): aesthetics are not inherently art, art is not just aesthetic. If we get to AGI, I’ll buy the things it creates as being art. For now, it’s really impressive math. Doesn’t undermine the beauty in it, but it’s something different.
Again, this is my personal opinion. In my science career I’m more of a lumper than a splitter - when talking about evolution, you can “lump” together groups into species, or “split” them into subspecies (really for any clade). So I get your impulse to be open and not gatekeep. I’m not trying to gatekeep, but I do think there is utility in defining things. I don’t like splitting species, but there are differences in crocodiles and alligators. We can’t just lump them into one species - but they are related by broader terms. In this case, I think you’re talking about aesthetics, and not art. Just my personal opinion, and not making a value judgement any more than calling an alligator an alligator, and not a crocodile. They’re different things, and yes: species that look nearly identical but are genetically distinct qualify as different species. The way something beautiful is made matters. IMHO