Re:AI-generated sad girl with piano performs the text of the...
by criddell on Thursday April 11, 2024 @06:11AM
(#40000485)
I never thought much of Van Gogh’s work until my sister recommended I read Irving Stone’s novel Lust for Life. I loved it and did a deeper dive on Van Gogh and his contemporaries. Now, he’s one of my favorite artists.
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.
Re:AI-generated sad girl with piano performs the text of the...
by skydhash on Thursday April 11, 2024 @01:21PM
(#40004560)
I like listening to Soundtracks, but if you've not played the game/watched the movie, it can be hard to get into it (Listening to NieR: Automata is a journey). Listening to one track is like reading one chapter of a book. It may be your favorite one, but there's something more substantial into consuming the whole work. I know people listen to music to set up moods, but everyone has that playlist/album where they listen to the whole thing just for the sake of listening. Or watch a painting for contemplation, not to judge whether it's beautiful or perfectly made. And that is why I can't enjoy AI generations. There is nothing to connect too.
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.
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.