i'm already tired of thinking about this. and yet!!

[desecrets]

Nic Cage on AI and creativity (x), nicked from FFA:

I am a big believer in not letting robots dream for us. Robots cannot reflect the human condition for us. That is a dead end if an actor lets one AI robot manipulate his or her performance even a little bit, an inch will eventually become a mile and all integrity, purity and truth of art will be replaced by financial interests only. We can’t let that happen. The job of all art in my view, film performance included, is to hold a mirror to the external and internal stories of the human condition through the very human thoughtful and emotional process of recreation. A robot can’t do that. If we let robots do that, it will lack all heart and eventually lose edge and turn to mush. There will be no human response to life as we know it. It will be life as robots tell us to know it. I say, protect yourselves from AI interfering with your authentic and honest expressions.

I'm just putting this on my journal because I had a conversation about AI art with my tech bro-y flatmate maybe a week ago which frustrated me no end, and which I've been thinking about with irritation ever since.

He essentially argued that AI could create art that was just as good as that made by a person, because his only criteria for 'good' were, "It's nice to look at, and it elicits an emotion". (This was made especially infuriating by the fact that this is a guy who is a decent visual artist and enjoys playing the guitar.) I wasn't immediately able to make a succinct rebuttal, because for me, the list of ways in which AI art is completely inadequate compared to human-made art is so long I didn't even know where to begin. When I brought up, as just one example, that an AI cannot comprehend contexts, or art periods, and that while you can ask it to make something that looks, say, 19th century, it will never get it right, he responded by saying that he would simply never notice this, because as he knew nothing about art history, it would never occur to him to even consider it.

I think he thought I was just being pedantic -- that my argument was along the lines of "An AI would use the wrong brush technique for the period" -- which clearly made no dent in his conviction that in all the ways that matter (i.e., "Looking good and making you feel something"), AI art was perfectly adequate. Just the memory of it has been making me grumpy, so I wanted to save this quotation on here because it articulates so much better what I was trying to say, namely that a robot is not trying to say anything with its art; its art expresses nothing because the robot thinks nothing and feels nothing; robot art has no cultural context because a robot does not participate in culture. Robot art does not express or create meaning, and if art doesn't express or create meaning, then what is there left in it to be called art?

Art is a human response to life. Thanks, Nic Cage. 🙏

Comments

[vriddy]

Thank you for sharing that quote, it's a good one. I find these discussions really difficult to navigate on the spot as well.

[desecrets]

It is! And yeah, they're so frustrating, in part because most of the time you're arguing from a point of not even agreeing on the fundamentals, or where you'd have to explain so many things from the ground up to get anywhere that it just doesn't seem feasible.

[rhoda_rants]

Ugh, tech bros. The thing is, a lot of art might be pretty to look at, and make you feel your feelings, but that's also fundamentally NOT why it exists. It's art because someone made it, on purpose, to express something.

All the work computers forced Copilot through on the most recent update, so I've been grumbling to myself at my desk, going, "Oh, piss off," and manually uninstalling it. I don't know how long that'll work, but I'm trying my best.

[desecrets]

Right, exactly! And it's so maddening because if you are someone who either has studied art, or has spent a lot of time making art, the idea that art is about expression is so blindingly obvious, but trying to explain that to someone who hasn't done either of those things... Why would I want to look at a picture that nobody could be arsed to take an hour to create??

Oof, same, I'm dreading the day my own laptop becomes riddled with all the latest bs, Recall especially. So far I've been safe from Copilot because I uninstalled Edge and I'm not using Office, but I'm sure I can't avoid it forever.

[rhoda_rants]

Yes, it's about all that, and it's not even about the time spent making it. It's about the fact that you cared enough to make the effort in the first place. There's this idea floating around out there that art is just a product to be consumed, and if only it was possible for "regular" people to do it just as well as "real" artists, it would even the playing field, or something? But. Art isn't a contest. It doesn't work like that.

I'm only having this problem with my work computer; one of the reasons I switched to a Mac at home (although comes with its own ethical problems) is because I was tired of the constant pushes for updates I didn't want or need. This one doesn't do that, and so far it's lasted me ten years. Manually turning off things I wasn't using just got exhausting.

[desecrets]

Yeah! It really comes down to caring enough, being into it. This idea that AI is there to "level the playing field" annoys me so much -- so many of its proponents are just people who have never been interested in making art but have discovered that art is a good way to get likes online, so now they're saying that it's unfair to them that they aren't as good at it as the people who have practiced loads?? As if how you spend your spare time isn't a choice everyone has, as if artists aren't just regular people who have made a lot of art. (And, as you say -- as if the entire point of art is to amass the greatest amount of money/online clout/whatever.)