Another clueless person attempts to defend generative AI "art"

Can we cut this shit out already

Even “I’ll smear some paint on a canvas” is a concept of the mind. Photo by Kseniya Lapteva on Unsplash

Matteo Wong while writing for The Atlantic tried a clueless defense of generative AI “art.”

Here is the feckless bloc of text in question:

Some of the most towering artists and artistic movements in recent history have divorced human skill and intention from their ultimate creations. Making a smaller number of decisions or exerting less intentional control does not necessarily imply less vision, creativity, brilliance, or meaning. In the early 1900s, the Dada and surrealist art movements experimented with automatism, randomness, and chance, such as in a famous collage made by dropping strips of paper and pasting them where they landed, ceding control to gravity and removing expression of human interiority; Salvador Dalí fired ink-filled bullets to randomly splatter lithographic stones. Decades later, abstract painters including Jackson Pollock, Joan Mitchell, and Mark Rothko marked their canvases with less apparent technical precision or attention to realism—seemingly random drips of pigment, sweeping brushstrokes, giant fields of color—and the Hungarian-born artist Vera Molnar used simple algorithms to determine the placement of lines, shapes, and colors on paper. Famed Renaissance artists used mathematical principles to guide their work; computer-assisted and algorithmic art today abounds. Andy Warhol employed mass production and called his studio the “Factory.” For decades, authors and artists such as Tristan Tzara, Samuel Beckett, John Cage, and Jackson Mac Low have used chance in their textual compositions.

All of the above still involved human intent in production that goes into the details of the artwork:

“I will drop strips of paper and affix them where they land”

“I will fire ink-filled bullets to splatter lithographic stones”

“I will use sweeping brushstrokes”

…Which is completely different then using prompts, since the results of prompts basically NEVER result in what a “prompter” may intend to produce. The details won’t be what the prompter intends, and that’s been my personal experience with those tools. They HIJACK any sort of actual artistic intent there is.

For instance, this is what I got from Luma after typing in the following prompt:

A stealth fighter breaks through the clouds from below and flies toward the camera.

This wasn’t AT ALL what I had intended. For instance, I WANTED something to “breaks through the clouds“ and I didn’t even get THAT. The people Matteo Wong wrote about got basically exactly what they had in mind. I sure the heck DIDN’T.

Apparently, the system's non-understanding of the prompt was:

1. "Stealth" means "fugly down-facing jet intake"

2. "From below" means "coming in for a landing with flaps down even though it's supposed to be coming up through the clouds"... complete with visible tires from landing gears

3. Have it looking like some obese plane akin to some airliner, which is somewhat expected if most landing footages of planes "from below" in the training corpus are of jetliners. Of course, a layperson would just think it's funky-looking… In any case it wasn’t anything CLOSE to what I pictured in my MIND, let alone any details I were expecting

This, wasn’t “art” but a MESS, which on its face was a mockery of what I typed in.

The author of the article wrote that “People will always debate the definition of art” but I have this standard suggestion for people who have no idea what the heck they’re talking about: Start by flipping open a damned dictionary:

the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects

Matteo Wong, please consult a dictionary before going on about defintions. Whose imagination of exactly what, is involved in generative AI “art?” These programs don’t deal with concepts, so how are they “creative?” Again, even “I will drop strips of paper and affix them where they land” is a concept that does take a modicum of imagination. “I’ll just take whatever mess that a machine happens to toss out” certainly doesn’t, and isn’t a “conscious use of skill and creative imagination” even if the result happens to “look cool”

Get a clue, Matteo. Mindless chit isn’t art. For your argument to work you’d have to argue that those artists you mentioned in your article were doing mindless things.