Well there IS a human intent via the input.

This could fall under process, or generative art.

On a side not; A vast portion of art has been purposefully void of meaning for hundreds of years. "l'art pour l'art"

An essential aspect of an artistic work, whether it is structured from words, matter, sound, or behavior is that it has a human author who “intends” it to be art. An important part of this is that it has no other intended purpose. (This is what separates it from design.) So it needs a human author. The AI created images could be turned into art if someone could credibly claim such authorship. In the instance of the images in the post, they are not intended as art, so some kind of metaphysical alchemy would be required to convert them. (A big name modern artist claims them as his own, with permission from the developers, and puts them in a show.)

In addition to the work itself, the framing or presentation is essential to complete the artistic product. Printing the images out on nice material and framing them would help.

John Cage’s 4’33” is (IMO) a brilliant performance piece. It requires the context of a stage, of live musicians to be effective. It doesn’t work so well as a recorded piece!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4′33″

Any restrictions you put on what is and isn’t art will be contradicted by something, somewhere. A large number of pieces of art exist only to raise the question of what art even is.

Then that is already the message—to question what art even is.

Computer generated works don't have that, or any message.

The process of computer-generating a number of pieces itself might be some form of art, but more like in the form of art of programming rather than the art of painting.

There's plenty of avenues here to make art. Simply curating the images which are generated is enough to call it art. In addition, it has a text interface which is somehow connected to the output. The artist could write a poem and show us the output, but they don't have to show us every image, just the one's that contribute in some fashion to the meaning of their words. It's not that different from using aleatory methods, found art, or collage.

The beautiful thing about art is that its meaning is inherently personal and subjective. What the computer is trying to say is secondary to what the computer is saying - more importantly, rather, what it's saying about its dataset. Even how the works are presented could be interpreted as an artistic work in and of itself, the presenter being the artist.

I think these are art, since they affect me in the ways which I typically associate with art.

(Warning: the discourse on the nature of art is a classic debate that will likely never end.)

Art has a quality that is merely not personal and subjective. Interpretation is personal and subjective but if art was, then anything would do because there would be no objective-ish yardsticks to help judge between two random pieces. Postmodernism tried to explore the boundaries of how little is needed for the subject still to be art, which interestingly can be considered an art in itself. But the underlying current even there is that there is a human idea, motivation, or vision behind the art that is created. Computer generated pieces lack that; however, the process of computer generation probably does qualify as art. If an artist used a computer to generate images and make collages out the selected generated images that would be art—much like Warhol created art out of emblems of ordinary or entertainment figures.

Warning heeded :)

I think the fundamental question here is why art requires a "human" element to actually be art, and what that "human" element actually is.

My opinion is that humans aren't really as special as we want to think we are, and that fundamentally there's no real difference between how humans create "art" and how machines create "art"; in the end, we're both drawing on our inputs, applying some subjective evaluation (possibly based on other inputs), and producing a corresponding output. How that "subjective evaluation" step happens might seem different enough to warrant different classifications, but I'm not really convinced it actually is.

I think human art is only defined in the context of humans (or similarly developed entities). The best paintings of human history won't have much artistic value outside human viewers such as pets or possibly even aliens (should they exist).

Conversely, we can only understand, for example, animals' art to the very limited extent we understand animals: that is, we don't really have much of a clue if an animal doodling with pebbles in the sand is making art and trying to make a beautiful (to him) arrangement of stones, or just moving pebbles around for fun.

If we saw alien art, would we even know if it's art or something else? We would have to know the alien species, their culture, and how they live in order to even make educated guesses.

It might be that the concept of art likely carries over across species but we can only see in other species' art what is similar in our species.

If a monkey draws a monkey face we can understand that because we have similar eyes and we could draw a human face. But if we don't share even basic senses with some entity we can't possibly understand what visual art might be for them.

So, a machine producing "art" is something we can only understand as reflections to what a human would produce. We judge the machine's output by as if it was created by a human. But because we know it's not human made but just a compilation of random values and preset rules, it lacks the context we might call the human element and becomes void to us.

At a minimal scale the "human element" could even just be the story of the person who painted the image, even if the image is simple and not skillfully very refined. But if his paintings are a testament to how he after tenuous hardships ended up living on a small island and started painting, then we can reflect back to his story by looking at his pictures and try to see what parts of his life might be captured on the canvas.

The computer doesn’t create the art anymore than a brush painted the Mona Lisa. It’s not just pointing a computer at a canvas and waiting for stuff to happen. There are people behind the models people with intentions, human context and an idea of what they want to create. The AI is just a tool to transform disconnected parts into an interesting work.

It is however random generated, so you cannot expect the same output from the same input.

Many forms of creative endeavour, from landscape gardening to Jackson Pollock drip paintings, have allowed for a large amount of the gap between the creator's broad intent and the final appearance to be filled by processes that aren't 100% predictable. There's also a lot of intent going on in which works to display and which to discard

Whether largely unintended consequences or not, the abstract forms of the man in the tie are interesting enough to not look out of place in a gallery, and the renderings of sheep and clocks are clearly the products of a mind (even though it's a human one)trying to get a response from the viewer attuned to the idea of androids dreaming of electric sheep, melting clocks being an iconic surrealist thing and failure to interpret "one (1) single clock" being funny. The grassy hillside, sans sheep, not so much. A quick play with the algorithm suggests a lot of its outputs are unrecognisable forms with no correspondence to anything, so he'd already thrown away a lot of uninteresting results to get to that point.

Let an artist draw the same picture a second time without seeing the first one.

Art doesn't have to have something to say, it does not require a message, there does not have to be a thought-out why to its creation. It's strictly subjective, without exception. I can give whatever meaning to computer / AI generated art that I please.

To intentionally use an exaggerated example: I can urinate on a wall, tell nobody else about it, give it no further meaning or consideration, have done it for no particular reason other than my need to urinate, and call it art (regardless of whether the setup premise is offensive to some).

I can look at this image from the site:

https://78.media.tumblr.com/015901ac8ded0c711dcec8f8de7ec223...

And I can decide that is art which represents my emancipation from indentured servitude in another life when I was a coal miner for BigCorp on Mars. Or any other seemingly ridiculous meaning I choose to give it.

Sorry, but as someone with an art degree I have to respectfully disagree.

Pissing on a wall and arbitrarily calling it art does not make it art. That style of thinking worked during the Dada movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada but is no longer something that would work today, unless you were doing a live art installation, in which case you are committing to some kind of commentary on some factor of the world anyways.

Artists almost always create art with meaning, and in the rare cases they don’t they are still attempting to make genuinely thought provoking works of art, even if it’s simply showing off their skills. If you go to an art gallery there is always the artist’s thesis statement or message written out at the entrance.

You are correct that art is subjective though. What an artist envisions and what their audience gets out of it has been shown time and again to not line up in many cases. And in a way, that is the beauty of art - our shared experiences while appreciating it.

It doesn't matter if the artist's meaning is portrayed, though, so long as viewers give it meaning. I'd argue that if the viewer doesn't give some meaning or attach some emotion to it, it has failed. I might not have meaning in mind when I create things, but I know others perceive that stuff in my art. I know a few tricks to make others feel things or think about things, and employ those. I'm mostly just making stuff I like for whatever reason, though.

These AI pictures would wind up being called art if someone purposefully produced them as such and if necessary, provided some meaning or context to them all.

You say "sorry that's not how art works" but then immediately talk about an art movement that did just that? You're contradicting yourself.

I get what you're trying to say. That sort of thing isn't common in contemporary art, especially not in a gallery setting. But that's a tiny portion of all the art in the world.

For example - I know an artist in Tuscon who drinks his own piss. That's the performance. He might have a personal meaning behind it, but he doesn't explain it to anyone. And he does plenty of other meaningless things intentionally.

He's not world renowned or anything, but he is known among some artists in Tuscon, he considers himself an artist, and thats how he makes his living. He also has an art degree.

I get what you are saying, but the Dada movement doesn't contradict what I said, it emphasizes that there was a time when doing what was considered anti-art was itself a message. It was a strong world wide protest among aritsts against World War I, as well as the heavily traditional train of thought around art during that era. It's still a controversial topic even today!

> Pissing on a wall and arbitrarily calling it art does not make it art.

> You are correct that art is subjective though.

"art degree"

“context”

> Pissing on a wall and arbitrarily calling it art does not make it art.

That's my argument against (most) graffiti.

...unless you are a big name in art, in which case the same act will suddenly be daring and expressive - viz. piss-filled jars with crosses in 'm and similar works of 'art'.

So how could you tell an AI-generated Rothko from the real thing? If you can't tell the difference, is there a difference?...a kind of Turing test applied to art.

Personally, I think that a helluva lot of modern art has a high BS level, and welcome the uproar that a computer could bring to it.

No. The best working definition I've run into said that Everything unnecessary that is done on purpose is art. If you want the art to mean something that's your problem, not the artist's.