hey what’s up, i think you’re pretty cool but disagree with you on the whole ai can make art thing. to me, without the purpose from an actual person creating the piece, it’s not art but an image; as all human art has purpose. some driving factor in a work, compared to a program which purely creates the prompt without further intention. i was wondering what your insight on this is? either way, hope you have a great day
well, first of all, does art require 'purpose'? there's this view of art which has very much calcified in "anti-AI" rhetoric, that art is some linear process of communication from one individual to another: an Artist puts some Meaning into a unit of Art, which others can then view to Recieve that Meaning. you can hold this view, but i don't! i'm much more of a stuart hall-head on this, i think that there is no such transfusion of Intent and that rather the 'meaning' of a piece is something that exists only in the interplay between text and reader. reading is an active, interpretative process of decoding, not a passive absorptive one. so i dispute, firstly, that 'purpose' is to begin with a necessary or even imporant element of art.
moreover i think this argument rests on a very arbitrarily selective view of what counts as "an actual person creating the piece" -- 'the prompt' is, itself, an obvious artistic contribution, a place where an artist can impart huge amounts of direction, vision, and so on. in fact, i completely reject the claim of both the technology's salesman and its biggest detractors that genAI "makes art" -- to quote kerry mitchell's fractal art manifesto: "Turn a computer on and leave it alone for an hour. When you come back, no art will have been generated." in the past, i've posed questions about generative art pieces to demonstrate this
secondly, of course, the process does not end after image generation from prompt for serious generative artists--the ones who are serious about the artform (rather than tech guys trying to do marketing for the Magical Art Box) frequently iterate and iterate, generating a range of iterations and then picking one to iterate on further, so on and so forth, until the final image they choose to share is one that contains within it the traces of a thousand discrete choices on behalf of the artist (two pretty good explanations of this from people who actually do this stuff can be found here and here)
third and finally, that very choice to share the image is itself an artistic decision! we (and by we, i mean, anyone who cares about what art is) have been talking about this since fountain -- display is a form of artistic intent, taking something and putting it forward and saying 'this is art' is in and of itself an artistic decision being made even if the thing itself is unaltered: see, for example, the entire discipline of 'found art'. once someone challenged me, yknow, "if you did a google search, would that be art?" and my answer to that is, if you screenshot that google search and share it as art, then yes, resoundingly yes! curation and presentation recontextualizes objects, turning them into rich texts through the simple process of reframing them. so even if you granted that genAI output is inherently random computer noise (i don't, of course) -- i still think that the act of presenting it as art makes it so.
since i assume you're not familiar with anything interesting in the medium, because the most popular stuff made with genAI is pure "lo-fi girl in ghibli style" type slop, let me share some genAI pieces (or genAI-influenced pieces) that i think are powerful and interesting:
the meat gala, rob sheridan (warning: body horror!)
secret horses (does anyone know the original source on this?)
infinite art machine, reachartwork
ethinically ambigaus, james tamagotchi
mcdonalds simpsons porn room, wayneradiotv
software greatman, everything everything (the music is completely made by the band, but genAI was partially responsible for the lyrics -- including the title and the several interesting pseudo-kennings)
i want a love like this music video, everything everything
cocaine is the motor of the modern world, bots of new york
poison the walker, roborosewatermasters (here's my analysis posts on it too)
not all of these were necessarily intended as art: but i think they are rich and fascinating texts when read that way -- they have certainly impacted me as much as any art has.
anyways, whether you agree or not, i hope this gives you some stuff to think about, thanks for sharing your thoughts :)
on the subject of google searches that are art, consider american psycho (2010):
American Psycho was created by sending the entirety of Bret Easton Ellis' violent, masochistic and gratuitous novel American Psycho through GMail, one page at a time. We collected the ads that appeared next to each email and used them to annotate the original text, page by page. In printing it as a perfect bound book, we erased the body of Ellis' text and left only chapter titles and constellations of our added footnotes. What remains is American Psycho, told through its chapter titles and annotated relational Google ads.
