For a normal person, whether something is art or not, is a mix of 1) whether they like it, 2) whether they can, or conceivably could, enjoy it together with other people, and 3) whether they're supposed to enjoy it or call it art, because other people claim they do (social proof).
Examples:
- Pop songs are strongly 1, 2 and 3a (enjoyment), but not necessarily 3b (considered High Art). Most people don't care, or couldn't even tell, if the songs they like were written and performed by actual humans or by machines; they experience them through some machine anyway.
- Paintings. I recently visited a Van Gogh exhibition, and I can't honestly say I liked most of it. Most paintings, in general, are ugly. We call them art because we're supposed to call some paint scribbles on a canvas art, particularly when they're framed and put in a museum (as opposed to bought off the street!) and decreed Art by People In Authority Over What Is or Isn't Art. For this exhibit in particular, my ability to enjoy the paintings was proportional to how much I knew about Vincent van Gogh's life - for those paintings I had some context for, I enjoyed them even though they're otherwise pretty bad to me. But most people, most of the time, don't have any context for paintings they're viewing, and they still call them art.
Hell, arguably, the best "paintings" in that exhibit were a couple that were obviously AI-generated - like Vincent wearing VR goggles, or animated Vincent inviting the patrons to the exhibit.
Nah, what I think is death of art for regular people is quantity and personalization. The most important aspect of day-to-day art experience is that you can enjoy it together with people around you. It's a problem for TV shows and books these days, and even more with "Internet original" videos - there's just so many of them, and with everyone's getting their own personalized feed, it's getting hard to find common creative works you and your conversational partners both seen. Everyone's experience is becoming disjoint from everyone else's (except for occasional superhero or wizard movie) - at which point you eventually realize that enjoying unique art no one else has is pointless waste of life.
For me, one problem with AI art is that there isn’t context for any of it. It’s just there and didn’t come from anywhere.
Eventually, some prompt engineer may build up a coherent body of work that is moving or provocative, but we aren’t there yet.
P.S. I don't mind people using AI as tools, but the human agency needs to be visible and relatable. If it's only a prompt, don't ask why I don't value it.
The prompt can be detailed, creative, and innovative. Kinda like a composer comes up with an idea for a new piece. But now the composer won't need the technical ability to translate it into musical notation.
All our current AIs need prompts to produce content. So, you'd need to enter a prompt so that AI can produce a prompt for you.
But I guess you could develop some variant which just generates prompts in a cycle. But most of the generated prompts will pretty bad, so it will in turn produce heaps of crap.
That's where the human element is still needed - try a prompt, evaluate the result, tweak the prompt again. If this doesn't produce a good result, try a different idea. It's not even that different from how artists produce content these days (the create <-> evaluation cycle). Current AI is not good enough to be able to judge the produced content (that's why it produces so much crap after all).
> I've not heard of any art classes that train you by copying everything that has been produced.
You don't have to learn it, because it's the second nature for humans. We learn by imitation. Babies learn to talk by imitating sounds from parents. Artists learn by imitating style by masters. That's what generative AI does as well.
All of these had immense impact on the way we create (or make art). And despite all this, we still use waterpaint, perform music on ancient instruments, make furniture with minimalistic tools, or use clay to make objects.
I'm not pessimistic about generative AI. If anything, It'll allow more people to create. Allow new and unprecedented art forms. It will have an effect on the way people make money with art. But so did photoshop, digital audio mixers, a table saw, and a CAD/CAM machines.
Like the banana. The bananas isn't art, taping a random banana to a random wall and eating a banana isn't art. A particular person taping a banana to a particular wall for a particular reason is what make the whole thing art.
I definitely agree that you shouldn't. To me absolutist arguments about if AI-generated content is art or not makes no sense. AI is a tool, like for example carpentry, that can be used for many purposes. Most carpentry isn't art, it's craftsmen building useful things and solving practical problems. But there are definitely artists out there using carpentry as the medium in which they express their artistic intent.