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I approach art under the assumption that the Artist has deliebrately and intentionally packed layers of meaning into it that take time and mental effort to dig through. For good art (as I see it) this is true, for bad art it usually isn't and the time and effort are wasted, and for AI art it's categorically never the case. The technical quality of art, which skilled artists achieve through practice, bad ones usually do not, and AI art can do situationally, used to serve as a heuristic for which art is worth engaging with in the first place. Technically competent AI art is still devoid of meaning and intention, so the heuristic becomes worse than useless.
It's probably a matter of taste. Someone who's just out to consume technically competent art regardless of the artist's intention or any potential meaning packed into the artwork can subsist perfectly fine on a diet of AI-generated junk art. A pretentious pseud like me can not, and having my heuristic ruined by AI art is outrageous.
This is a really interesting perspective, but I admit I have a hard time vibing with it. I tried to get into art appreciation when I was younger. Went to the national galleries and the Tate modern, hemmed and hawed at paintings and modern art pieces. This was the top 1% of the top 1% of art, and yet I was disappointed that there was usually very little explanatory notes to go along with the piece. Often when I did find some guide to the 'canon' meaning of the art it was usually perfunctory and not terribly interesting. Usually I preferred my own interpretation to the one I was apparently supposed to draw from the piece. I fully admit this was probably a 'me' problem. Perhaps art appreciation is a deliberately clutivated skill and I simply wasn't able to develop it
All this to say that I'm a 'meaning is in the eye of the beholder' kinda guy when it comes to art. If I draw something meaningful from a piece, I'm not sure it matters if it wasn't the meaning the creator intended, or even if the creator intended no meaning at all.
Besides, what proportion of art that a person consumes on a daily basis actually has layers of meaning deliberately packed into it, let alone deep or philosophical meaning? 1%? Less?
Fair points. We may just be wired differently. For what it's worth, I absolutely despise modern visual art because how the fuck is anyone supposed to get meaning out of three layers of literal shit on canvas? Art to me is mostly literature, with a little music and film on the side, and I am by no means a connoisseur.
Well most "art" that people consume on a daily basis is hardly created by one artist or a few working in unison, but industrially produced slop meant to be consoomed and forgotten. If there's any deep meaning in superhero movies, pop music or corporate imagery, it's "you are a well-trained consumer".
Does this sound like an anti-capitalist screed? That's not what I mean. What I mean is that most people just have a media consumption habit in place of taste. Yes I am an unjustified snob - not like I know what I'm talking about.
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My brother once put it to me this way: Imagine you have a favorite band with several albums of theirs on your top-faves list. You've followed them for years, or maybe even decades. It's not even necessary for this thought experiment, but for a little extra you've even watched or read interviews with them, so you have a sense of their character, history, etc. And then one day it is revealed to you that all of it was generated by an AI instead of human beings. How would you feel?
I think I would feel a profound sense of loneliness. I would never revisit those albums again. And I don't think this basic feeling can be hacked through with some extra applications of rationalism or what have you. This feeling precedes thinking on a very deep level for me.
I don't have much sympathy for the various creative professions getting their oxen gored. Partly because social media has made me lose respect for many of them, their output quality is not commensurate with their whining, and I won't be sad to see them needing employment elsewhere. But also because I can't even see my own regular 'office job' being spared once the tech is good enough. I'm rather clear-eyed about the inevitabilities of this stuff. But I also foresee further alienation that humans may learn to live with but won't necessarily solve.
I think differing intuitions on this is exactly what makes this such a heated and fascinating culture war topic. My response to this thought experiment is that I'd be mostly neutral, with a bit of positivity merely for it being just incredibly cool that all this meaning that I took out of this music, as well as the backstories of the musicians who created it, was able to be created with AI sans any actual conscious or subconscious human intent.
In fact, this thought experiment seems similar to one that I had made up in a comment on Reddit a while back about one of my favorite films, The Shawshank Redemption, which I think isn't just fun or entertaining, but deeply meaningful in some way in how it relates to the human condition. If it had turned out that, through some weird time travel shenanigans, this film was actually not the work of Stephen King and Frank Darabont and Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins and countless other hardworking talented artists, but rather the result of an advanced scifi-level generative AI tool, I would consider it no less meaningful or powerful a film, because the meaning of a film is encoded within the video and audio, and the way that video and audio is produced affects that only inasmuch as it affects those pixels (or film grains) and sound waves. And my view on the film wouldn't change either if it had been the case that the film had been created by some random clerk accidentally tripping while carrying some film reels and somehow damaging them in a way as to make the film.
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