An update I wanted to come back to make was “art is a scalar, not a boolean.” Art that involves more interesting choices, technique, and deliberate psychological effects on viewers is “more arty.” Clicking a filter in photoshop on a photo someone else took is, maybe like, a .5 on a 1-10 scale. I honestly do rank much photography as lower on the “is it art?” scale than equivalent paintings.
A lot of AI art will be “slop” that is very low-but-nonzero on the art scale.
Art is somewhat anti-inductive or “zero sum”[1], where if it turns out that everyone makes identical beautiful things with a click that would previously have required tons of technique and choicefulness to create, that stuff ends up lower on the artiness scale than previously, and the people who are somehow innovating with the new tools count as more arty.
The first person to make the Balenciaga Harry Potter AI clip was making art. Subsequent Balenciaga meme clips are much less arty. I like to think that my WarCraft Balenciaga video was “less arty than the original but moreso than most of the dross.”
An update I wanted to come back to make was “art is a scalar, not a boolean.” Art that involves more interesting choices, technique, and deliberate psychological effects on viewers is “more arty.” Clicking a filter in photoshop on a photo someone else took is, maybe like, a .5 on a 1-10 scale. I honestly do rank much photography as lower on the “is it art?” scale than equivalent paintings.
A lot of AI art will be “slop” that is very low-but-nonzero on the art scale.
Art is somewhat anti-inductive or “zero sum”[1], where if it turns out that everyone makes identical beautiful things with a click that would previously have required tons of technique and choicefulness to create, that stuff ends up lower on the artiness scale than previously, and the people who are somehow innovating with the new tools count as more arty.
The first person to make the Balenciaga Harry Potter AI clip was making art. Subsequent Balenciaga meme clips are much less arty. I like to think that my WarCraft Balenciaga video was “less arty than the original but moreso than most of the dross.”
this is somewhat an abuse of what ‘zero sum’ means, I think the sum of art can change, but is sort of… resistant to change.