The Ted Chiang piece, on closer reading, seems to be about denying the identity of the AI prompter as an artist rather than speaking to the particular limitations of the tool. For those who did not read, his claim is:
Being an artist is about making interesting choices in your medium (paintings, novels, photography, digital).
AI tools make all the choices for you; therefore you cannot be an artist when using AI tools.
Further, the way the AI makes choices precludes them from being interesting, because they are a kind of arbitrary average and therefore cannot be invested with meaning.
To set himself apart from luddites and the usual naysayers, he uses Adobe Photoshop as an example of a tool where you can be an artist: it is a computer tool; it used to be derided by photographers as not being real art; but now it is accepted and the reason is that people learned to make interesting choices with it.
He appears to go as far as to say two people could generate an identical digital picture, one via photoshop and one via AI, and the former gets to be an artist and the latter does not.
I think this is an actual interesting question, and roughly agree with his frame, but, he’s just actually wrong on the particulars. AI prompting involves tons of choices (in particular because you’re usually creating art for some particular context, and deciding what sort of art to query the AI for is at least one important choice. I also almost always generate at least 10 different images or songs or whatever, shifting my prompt as i go).
Also think he’s wrong in the particulars, but I can’t quite square it back to his perspective once the particulars are changed.
The bluntest thing that is wrong is that you can specify as precise a choice as you care to in the prompt, and the models usually respond. The only hitch is that you have to know those choices beforehand, whereas it would be reasonable to claim that someone like a photographer is being compelled to make choices they did not know about a priori. If that winds up being important then it would be more like the artist has to make and execute the choices they make, even if they are very simple like picking shading in photoshop or pushing the camera button.
I could see an alternative framework where even the most sophisticated prompt is more like a customer giving instructions to an artist than an artist using a tool to make art, but that seems to push further in the direction of AI makes art.
Lastly, if we take his claims at face value, someone should write an opinion piece with the claim that AI is in fact rescuing art, because once all the commercial gigs are absorbed by the machine then true artists will be spared the temptation of selling out. I mean I won’t write it, but I would chuckle to read it.
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.”
The Ted Chiang piece, on closer reading, seems to be about denying the identity of the AI prompter as an artist rather than speaking to the particular limitations of the tool. For those who did not read, his claim is:
Being an artist is about making interesting choices in your medium (paintings, novels, photography, digital).
AI tools make all the choices for you; therefore you cannot be an artist when using AI tools.
Further, the way the AI makes choices precludes them from being interesting, because they are a kind of arbitrary average and therefore cannot be invested with meaning.
To set himself apart from luddites and the usual naysayers, he uses Adobe Photoshop as an example of a tool where you can be an artist: it is a computer tool; it used to be derided by photographers as not being real art; but now it is accepted and the reason is that people learned to make interesting choices with it.
He appears to go as far as to say two people could generate an identical digital picture, one via photoshop and one via AI, and the former gets to be an artist and the latter does not.
I think this is an actual interesting question, and roughly agree with his frame, but, he’s just actually wrong on the particulars. AI prompting involves tons of choices (in particular because you’re usually creating art for some particular context, and deciding what sort of art to query the AI for is at least one important choice. I also almost always generate at least 10 different images or songs or whatever, shifting my prompt as i go).
Also think he’s wrong in the particulars, but I can’t quite square it back to his perspective once the particulars are changed.
The bluntest thing that is wrong is that you can specify as precise a choice as you care to in the prompt, and the models usually respond. The only hitch is that you have to know those choices beforehand, whereas it would be reasonable to claim that someone like a photographer is being compelled to make choices they did not know about a priori. If that winds up being important then it would be more like the artist has to make and execute the choices they make, even if they are very simple like picking shading in photoshop or pushing the camera button.
I could see an alternative framework where even the most sophisticated prompt is more like a customer giving instructions to an artist than an artist using a tool to make art, but that seems to push further in the direction of AI makes art.
Lastly, if we take his claims at face value, someone should write an opinion piece with the claim that AI is in fact rescuing art, because once all the commercial gigs are absorbed by the machine then true artists will be spared the temptation of selling out. I mean I won’t write it, but I would chuckle to read it.
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.