Okay so, AI-generated art and What It Means For Society. I'm going to put my thoughts here instead of polluting someone else's thread.
This doesn't mean that you need to have someone else look at your art for it to be art, or that all art needs to have an artist, because art is also like this:
Okay, to summarize my view in a very simple way, art is about a connection between two things, Expression (creating and making) and Impression (experiencing and interpreting.)
An artist creates a thing. The artist cannot beam what they are experiencing or thinking into another person's head like telepathy, so they have to translate it into something that a person's senses can experience.
It is also possible that there is no "what they are experiencing" to be translated, and that the artist is simply creating to see what happens. However, the "art" process still happens, because the artist experiences their own art with their senses both while they are creating it and after they are done, which causes them to interpret it.
If you are drawing a guy, you have to look at it and ask yourself, "Does this look like a guy?" and "Do I like it?" 1000 times. Which means the whole thing is a fractal of itself, because Creating has both Creating and Interpreting inside of it.
Is the other side also a fractal? When a viewer sees a random thing and interprets it, are they creating? YES. They are adding their own ideas and experiences to the thing. If this were not true, it wouldn't be possible to get interpretations the author didn't intend out of a piece of writing.
Sometimes there are posts that say "I accidentally read this as a poem." Do you see? Somehow, art happened even though you were doing nothing but interpreting.
Now, how this relates to AI art:
I find AI-generated art to be really interesting, and I think it is "real art," though I don't think that means it's without problems.
I've had a lot of fun using AI to generate poems and writing prompts. I think of it as a way to accelerate and optimize the "interpretation" side of art.
Humans will see meaning in random stimuli. This means that we can experience art without very much "artist." We will create more meaning when there is not very much meaning in something.
Our ability to "fill in" gaps in what we are looking at is very, very powerful. Here's a small example.
How do you know that all of these images are "cat," when they show you only a small fraction of the traits that could mean "cat?" How do you know it almost instantly, without having to narrow down possibilities?
The answer is heavy on psychology and I don't remember how it all works, but basically you understand everything about the world by filling in gaps.
AI art is where that gets weird.
You instantly know that this is a cat too, but you're probably also able to tell that there's something very wrong with this cat.
If you've seen AI-generated art before and know what it is, you're probably immediately able to tell that this is AI-generated. If you haven't seen AI-generated art before, I can only imagine that this image would repulse you. To me, even knowing what it is, the image is uncanny. It's wrong. It's just close enough to "right" to feel so wrong.
The AI successfully activated the part of my brain that recognizes cats, but something is missing. The more I look at it, the more it falls apart.
And I think that last sentence summarizes one of the main problems with AI art.
Human-created art sparks more meaning the more closely you look at it or listen to it or read it. The intentionality of every detail, the fact that the piece was made from multitudes of tiny iterations of create-interpret-create-interpret-create-interpret, means the tiniest detail can make that magic in your brain that is Art.
Every single word in a novel was included based on a human decision, which means that in theory, every single word can be a direct invitation for you to play and reinvent and diverge.
Now let's look at the AI-generated artwork that sparked this post:
This artwork appears incredibly intricate and detailed, and does something the cat doesn't do: it inspires positive emotions.
But...look at it more closely.
Linger on this image for more than a few seconds, and it becomes confusing what kind of structure it is depicting. What looked like the distant end of a cathedral-like chamber, now looks like the outer facade of a domed building against a cloudy sky.
The "pillars" are irregular bars that don't clearly begin or end anywhere. The garlands of "flowers" permeate and distort every space and surface like fungus; they're just a repeated pattern throughout the image that varies in intensity. What initially looks like water due to the blue cast doesn't have a consistent surface and stops looking like water at all after a bit—there is just a contradictory distribution of blue shading toward the bottom of the image, that looks here and there like it might have a surface, but it's impossible to work out where that is.
In what would have to be the "floor" or the bottom of the "pool," you'll notice shapes that look like trees or shrubs viewed from a distance. The shapes of up-close flowers and flower petals are visible in the walls. The longer you look at it, the worse it gets. It's an incoherent jumble. It's frustrating, even disturbing after a while.
This image was posted to Instagram, by an account with 44k followers that posts exclusively AI-generated art of this type. Instagram is relevant here. This art is popular because its viewers aren't paying attention to it. Viewers glance at it for 3 seconds before moving on.
Really, it's a damning commentary on social media: users are barely interacting with art outside of the briefest corner-of-the-eye impressions. It doesn't matter if the art actually contains anything worth looking at or interpreting.
When I was like 12 years old, I covered the walls around my desk in gorgeous digital paintings from DeviantArt, depicting amazing fantasy cities and creatures. I could stare at the details in them and feel immersed in the worlds they were windows into.
AI art, as it is now, can't inspire or sustain attention in the same way. Unless you're purposefully messing with the chaos and uncanniness of the details (something I've done!) there's just nothing there. It's a "vibe" or "aesthetic."
Is AI art really art? Yes.
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