The Nature of Art
The following picture recently won 1st place at the Colorado State Fair:
Don’t know about you, but that looks extremely cool. I could totally see picking up a print of that on canvas and hanging it on my wall, if I were still in charge of decorating my house. Reminds me a bit of the splash screens for Guild Wars 2, which I have always enjoyed.
By the way, that picture was actually generated by an AI called Midjourney.
Obviously people are pissed. Part of that is based on the seeming subterfuge of someone submitting AI-generated artwork as their own. Part is based on the broader existential question that arises from computers beating humans at creative tasks (on top of Chess). Another part is probably because the dude who submitted the work sounds like a huge douchebag:
“How interesting is it to see how all these people on Twitter who are against AI generated art are the first ones to throw the human under the bus by discrediting the human element! Does this seem hypocritical to you guys?” […]
“I’m not stopping now” […] “This win has only emboldened my mission.”
It is true that there will probably just be an “AI-generated” category in the future and that will be that.
What fascinates me about the Reddit thread though, is how a lot of the comments are saying that the picture is “obviously” AI-generated, that it looks shitty, that it lacks meaning. For example:
It reminds me of an article I read about counterfeit art years ago. Most of the value of a piece of artwork is tied up into its history and continuity – a Monet is valuable because it came from Monet’s hand across the ages to your home. Which is understandable from a monetary perspective. But if you just like a Monet piece because of the way it makes you feel when looking at it, the authenticity does not matter. After all, most of us have probably only seen reproductions or JPEGs of his works anyway.
At a certain point though, I have to ask the deeper question… what is a “Monet” exactly?
Monet is rather famous, of course, and his style is distinctive. But aside from a few questions on my high school Art exam decades ago, I do not know anything about his life, his struggles, his aspirations. Did he die in poverty? Did he retire early in wealth? Obviously I can Google this shit at any time, but my point is this: I like The Water Lily Pond. The way it looks, the softness of the scene, the way it sort of pulls you into a season of growth you can practically smell. Who painted it and why couldn’t matter less to me, other than possibly wanting to know where I could find similar works of this quality.
This may just say more about me than it does art in general.
I have long held the position that I do not have favorite bands, I have favorite songs. I have favorite games, not studios or directors. I have favorite movies, not actors. Some of that is probably a defense mechanism – there are many an artist who turn out to be raging assholes, game companies that “betray” your “trust,” and so on. If part of the appeal of a given work is wrapped up in the creator(s), then a fall from grace and the resultant dissonance is a doubled injury. Kevin Spacey is not going to ruin my memories of American Beauty or The Usual Suspects, for example. I may have a jaundiced eye towards anything new, or perhaps towards House of Cards if I ever got around to watching that, as some things cannot be unlearned or fully compartmentalized (or should be).
So in a way, I for one welcome our new AI-art overlords.
Unlike the esteemed Snoo-4878, I do not presume that any given human artist actually adds emotion or intention into their art, or whether its presence enhances the experience at all. How would you even know they were “adding emotion?” I once won a poetry contest back in high school with something I whipped up in 30 minutes, submitted solely for extra credit in English class. Seriously, my main goal was that the first letter of each line spelled out “Humans, who are we?” Granted, I am an exceptionally gifted writer. Humble, too. But from that experience I kind of learned that the things that should matter… don’t. Second place was this brilliant emo chick who basically wrote poetry full-time. Her submission was clearly full of intention and personal emotion and it basically didn’t matter. Why would it? Art is largely about what the audience feels. And if those small-town librarians felt more emotions when hit by big words I chose because they sounded cool, that’s what matters.
Also, it’s low-key possible the emo chick annoyed the librarians on a daily basis, Vogon-style, and so they picked the first thing out of the pile that could conceivably have “won” instead of hers.
In any case, there are limits and reductionist absurdities to my pragmatism. I do not believe Candy Crush Saga is a better game than Xenogears, just because the former made billions of dollars and the latter did not. And if the value of something is solely based on how it makes you feel, then art should probably just be replaced by wires in our head (in the future) or microdoses of fentanyl (right now).
But I am also not going to pretend that typing “hubris of man monolith stars” and getting this:
…isn’t impressive as fuck. Not quite Monet, but it’s both disturbing and inspiring, simultaneously.
Which was precisely what I was going for when I made it.
Posted on September 2, 2022, in Philosophy and tagged AI, Art, Midjourney, Monet, Reddit. Bookmark the permalink. 12 Comments.
In An Age 
Okay, Tipa mentioned Midjourney and now you have shown me what it can do so I guess I’d better add that to the four other AI art generators I have bookmarked. I agree with everything you said, by the way but I’ve said enough about AI creativity recently so I’ll leave it at that.
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I would hang that last image on my wall.
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Link to the 3.78 MB file, if you want.
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Art is largely about what the audience feels. And if those small-town librarians felt more emotions when hit by big words I chose because they sounded cool, that’s what matters.
Coming down on the side of the mob in the marketplace, again. Incorrigible.
For my part, I’m on Team Douchebag. I’m tempted to agree with Jason Allen in that he acted as an artist using an exceptionally sophisticated paintbrush – and consequently that we should embrace AI image generation as nothing more than a unique medium that mines our collective consciousness. The ethical thing would be to make such art strictly public-domain, but of course good luck with that.
And I agree with Snoo-4878 that deliberate intent defines art, particularly modern art. Pollock’s drip paintings or Duchamp’s ‘found art’ objects are redeemed more by the creativity of their concept (which does generate audience feelings of satisfaction and discovery) than by the aesthetic value of the outcome. On the other hand, Norman Rockwell had excellent technique and made pretty realistic paintings, but as far as I know he (correctly) claimed to be only a mere illustrator. Perhaps the AI-as-auteur should follow his example.
Tl;dr you can take credit for creating an awesome poster.
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Here’s the thing: how do we know “deliberate intent?”
Up to this point in history, the question would be a bit absurd. But Midjourney created those pictures based on a string of words I inputted, and then refined it based on my further selections, e.g. which of the four options I wanted more variations on, and which I wanted to “upscale.” So sure, I will even agree that I was using a sophisticated paintbrush, similar to taking a picture with my phone and using Photoshop to turn it into a stained-glass image with filters.
But it’s really just a matter of time until someone starts using another AI to feed Midjourney generated words based on whatever (possibly even random phrases), and then select things at random afterwards. In which case we have purely AI-generated art. Or non-art, if deliberate human intent is required.
If you happened across that specific piece though… how would you know?
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Intent is right there in prompt. Words are inherently compressed (and often lossy) information.
By choosing that particular picture out of all other possible pictures AI could produce with same prompt “prompt creator” certified that it sufficiently embodies what he wanted to convey.
Of course some AI could run “prompt generation”; and result without “human feedback” are much more likely end up as random squiggly lines then something “profound”.
With “human feedback” it would become “suggestion for prompts that produce things people like”; another layer in overall complexity.
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There are a couple of issues with that though:
Really though, I’ve always had a problem with “intent.” Why does it matter what the artist intended? It’s trivia, assuming it is even knowable in the first place. My enjoyment of something is not dependent on understanding the process of how it came to be. Art, like arguments, should be able to stand on their own. And once they are released into the wild, you cede control over how it is interpreted and received.
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Up to this point in history, the question would be a bit absurd.
Not as absurd as it might at first appear. Your mention of photography is quite on point – even before fancy filters, its advent precipitated some of the same questions. Once it took a tremendous amount of skill to create visual hyperrealism, then suddenly every rube with some chemicals could do it. And then we accepted that photography itself is art, resting on choice of subject, composition, lighting, and increasingly sophisticated technical tricks.
Experimental art, including crowd-sourced art, and the aforementioned ‘found object’ stuff has been around before machine learning. Going back to Pollock, he used to toss paint at a canvas on the floor with varying force, deliberately incorporating randomness and emphasising the medium rather than the image. That was a cool idea. The paint-lashed canvas might not have stirred a profound emotion on its own (although it could very well feel quite arresting) but once you understood the idea, it could go so far as to feel downright political.
Not linking it back to the deliberate design is fine; it’s your right to ignore all that and dismiss e.g. Convergence as a lot of mildly interesting dripped paint. But you’d be missing out, and I’d argue you end up experiencing something qualitatively other than Convergence.
Here’s the thing: how do we know “deliberate intent?”
Without getting myself nerd-sniped into writing a long essay in reply: let’s take some edge case in which we don’t. We’re a bunch of snooty art critics who just got Sokalled by two-year-old Freddie Linsky. That’s perfectly fine! All that happened is that we’ve made a mistake. We’ve mistaken something unintended for art because it resembled other stuff we know is art, and assumed the presence of yet-unknown meaning where there is none. Our fallibility does not demolish the principle.
But it’s really just a matter of time until someone starts using another AI to feed Midjourney generated words based on whatever (possibly even random phrases), and then select things at random afterwards.
And some human’s volition will have set all that in motion anyway, like with fractal art. The paintbrush gets even more insanely sophisticated. But it’s really no different than my persuading half a dozen hippies to play tag on a huge canvas laid around a paint fountain. The rules of tag and the agency of the hippies are part of the artwork, but the final canvas is still mine, the result of my idea. And you’re free to call my art really bad art (you can’t even tell they were playing tag!) but your critique would be incomplete without slagging my idea along with the visual.
Here’s my question to you: if you encountered your poster in the wild, would your aesthetic appreciation be completely unchanged by learning that it resulted from the prompt ‘hubris of man monolith stars’? Would the emotions be exactly the same as if the prompt had been ‘rejection of rapture’ implying the subject is the tiny figure to the right of the megaliths?
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We’ve mistaken something unintended for art because it resembled other stuff we know is art, and assumed the presence of yet-unknown meaning where there is none.
I recognize we are simply defining words past each other. But does this really not register as absurd? That something you recognize as art, suddenly isn’t, based on a third-party’s “meaning” and intention when those are effectively unknowable and could have been made up?
You see a picture you recognize as art. Then you find out it was a 2-year old throwing ketchup around or whatever. Now it’s not art. But the picture was submitted by the Art lecturer mother on purpose, so it doesn’t seem too functionally different from someone else submitting the “hippie paint tag” piece. So now it’s art again. But her intention of trying to trick the critics possibly leads it back towards non-art. Or maybe you saw the picture in a magazine 15 years ago but never read the article so you don’t know it was done by a 2-year old, which makes it… Schrödinger’s art?
All the while, the picture itself has not changed.
Here’s my question to you: if you encountered your poster in the wild, would your aesthetic appreciation be completely unchanged by learning that it resulted from the prompt ‘hubris of man monolith stars’? Would the emotions be exactly the same as if the prompt had been ‘rejection of rapture’ implying the subject is the tiny figure to the right of the megaliths?
Yes, I imagine that had the title been “Colonoscopy prep” my initial experience with the poster would have been different. Which really is all the more reason the piece should speak for itself.
Incidentally, I ran “Rejection of Rapture” through Midjourney, and here you go:
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Incidentally, I ran “Rejection of Rapture” through Midjourney, and here you go:
One good turn deserves another. ‘Colonoscopy’ is proscribed on Midjourney, so (content warning: mild body horror) ‘invasive medical procedure prep’ had to suffice.
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Some of the art coming out of Midjourney is truly breathtaking. Authorial (or artist) intent in a piece of work is very much a secondary consideration, if considered at all, for myself.
I’m certainly quite the pleb in the arena of art though; I don’t typically behold much ‘value’ in simplistic abstract pieces, nor a great deal more in the styles of Monet, Picasso, etc.
All to say — as a viewer seeking enjoyment of art; it makes not a whit of difference to me whether it came from the hand of a human or generated by machine. I like what me likes!
Still… Entering such a piece without disclosing it as such into a competition is still probably not exactly a great thing to do from an ethical perspective.
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A competition like the state fair is not intended to find the best piece of artwork that could possibly be made, but rather to reward who demonstrates the most talent within the local population. So entering an AI generated piece is effectively cheating, akin to having a famous artist paint you something and entering that. Or to take the joke about monkeys writing Shakespeare, a writing contest is about how well someone can write, not how many monkeys they can assemble. This is also why there shouldn’t be an “ai generated” category or anything like that — that’s just not the point of these contests.
Given how AI works, I have a hard time seeing how AI generated art could be truly great. “Great” implies innovativeness or trailblazing of some kind, and AI generated anything is necessarily derivative.
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