This is a reason why AI art upsets people—we actually want that to be the result of a conscious process.
I agree with the general argument that making boring stuff non-conscious is a good thing. But in the case of art, I think the underlying problem is that people want art to be high-status.
From my perspective, the process of creating a piece of art has many steps, and some of them can legitimately be called boring. The line is not clear—the same step can be interesting when you do it for the first time, and boring when you later repeat it over and over again; or interesting when you introduce some unexpected change on purpose, and boring when you just want to do the usual. So we could use the AI to automate the steps that are no longer interesting for us, and focus on the rest. (Though some people will simply click “generate everything”.)
Consider how much time the painters living centuries ago spent preparing their colors, and learning how to prepare those colors well—and today, painters can simply buy the colors in a supermarket. But (as far as I know) no one cries that selling colors in supermarkets have ruined the art. That’s because colors are not considered mysterious anymore, and therefore they are not high-status, so no one cares whether we automate this step.
Now imagine a hypothetical painting tool that automatically fixes all your mistakes at perspective, and does nothing else. You keep painting, and whenever you complete a shape, it is magically rotated and skewed to make the perspective consistent with the rest of the picture. (Unless you want to have the shape different on purpose; in such case the tool magically understands this and leaves the shape alone. Or you simply press the “undo” button.) This would be somewhat controversial. Some people would be okay with it. There might already be a plugin in some vector editor that helps you achieve this; and if that fact becomes known, most people won’t care.
But some people would grumble that if you can’t get the perspective right on your own, perhaps you don’t deserve to be a painter! I find this intuition stronger when I imagine a literally magical tool that transforms a physical painting this way (only fixes the perspective, nothing else). The painter who uses vector graphics at least needs some computer skills to compensate for being bad at perspective, but having the perspective fixed literally auto-magically is just plain cheating.
Which suggests that an important part of our feelings about art is judging the artist’s talent and effort; assigning status to the artist… but also to ourselves as connoisseurs of the art! Some people derive a lot of pleasure from feeling superior to those who have less knowledge about art. And this is the part that might go away with AI art. (Unless we start discussing the best prompts and hyperparameters instead.)
Thanks, good detail. I am not good at traditional art, but I am interested in using maths to create a shape that is almost impossible for a traditional sculptor to create then 3d printing it.
I agree with the general argument that making boring stuff non-conscious is a good thing. But in the case of art, I think the underlying problem is that people want art to be high-status.
From my perspective, the process of creating a piece of art has many steps, and some of them can legitimately be called boring. The line is not clear—the same step can be interesting when you do it for the first time, and boring when you later repeat it over and over again; or interesting when you introduce some unexpected change on purpose, and boring when you just want to do the usual. So we could use the AI to automate the steps that are no longer interesting for us, and focus on the rest. (Though some people will simply click “generate everything”.)
Consider how much time the painters living centuries ago spent preparing their colors, and learning how to prepare those colors well—and today, painters can simply buy the colors in a supermarket. But (as far as I know) no one cries that selling colors in supermarkets have ruined the art. That’s because colors are not considered mysterious anymore, and therefore they are not high-status, so no one cares whether we automate this step.
Now imagine a hypothetical painting tool that automatically fixes all your mistakes at perspective, and does nothing else. You keep painting, and whenever you complete a shape, it is magically rotated and skewed to make the perspective consistent with the rest of the picture. (Unless you want to have the shape different on purpose; in such case the tool magically understands this and leaves the shape alone. Or you simply press the “undo” button.) This would be somewhat controversial. Some people would be okay with it. There might already be a plugin in some vector editor that helps you achieve this; and if that fact becomes known, most people won’t care.
But some people would grumble that if you can’t get the perspective right on your own, perhaps you don’t deserve to be a painter! I find this intuition stronger when I imagine a literally magical tool that transforms a physical painting this way (only fixes the perspective, nothing else). The painter who uses vector graphics at least needs some computer skills to compensate for being bad at perspective, but having the perspective fixed literally auto-magically is just plain cheating.
Which suggests that an important part of our feelings about art is judging the artist’s talent and effort; assigning status to the artist… but also to ourselves as connoisseurs of the art! Some people derive a lot of pleasure from feeling superior to those who have less knowledge about art. And this is the part that might go away with AI art. (Unless we start discussing the best prompts and hyperparameters instead.)
Thanks, good detail. I am not good at traditional art, but I am interested in using maths to create a shape that is almost impossible for a traditional sculptor to create then 3d printing it.