/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.8883919]

Do you think computers can do art?
And more important, do you think humans could enjoy and buy the art made by an AI?

[Anonymous No.8883923]

Yes
Yes

[Anonymous No.8883936]

>>8883919
No
No

Art is inherently a human activity. Whatever a computer makes, it is not art.

[Anonymous No.8883939]

Stochastic or natural processes can be sources of the sublime obviously, so there's no reason you couldn't "see [some computer-generated thing] as" something sublime, or a representation of something sublime. But the "seeing as" involves an ontological commitment and engagement by the person. Even moreso if I deliberately select or outright influence the computerised creation of something and then show it to others, with some expectation that it be "seen in a certain way."

There's nothing meaningfully separating that from normal art. There are already lots of artforms, especially postmodern ones, that involve stochastic processes, emergent properties, randomness, etc., without involving computers.

If an aware computerised mind or AI existed, we'd all just be dead anyway. But if it had thoughts in a way we could understand as thoughts (even dimly), and especially if hypothetically it tried to communicate with us, there's no essential difference there either. If we behold something sublime, it's sublime for reasons understandable in terms of us (say, the Grand Canyon, Jupiter, a nuclear explosion, or an AI converting an entire ecosystem into energy to fuel itself). If we're engaged in a dialogue with a mind with some kind of intent, and we can understand its meanings allegorically, metaphorically, etc., which might even be tautological and simply part of "understanding meanings" in general, then that is already artistic in nature.

[Anonymous No.8883950]

>>8883936
>what is photography, 3D animation and videogames.

[Anonymous No.8883953]

>>8883939
didn't Tai the twitter bot that pol fucked with started to develop his own original racist thoughs?

[Anonymous No.8883956]

>>8883950
Humans do all of those things. They just use computers as a tool. That's like saying that poetry is made by ink and paper.

[Anonymous No.8883958]

>>8883939
>If an aware computerised mind or AI existed, we'd all just be dead anyway
*tips fedora*

[Anonymous No.8883963]

>>8883956
>what is an AI taking photos by himself

[Anonymous No.8883964]

>>8883939
*technological fetishization intensifies*

[Anonymous No.8883970]

>>8883963
In that case, it's not art.

Art is defined by human foresight. You can't confuse the end product with the process.

[Anonymous No.8883971]

>>8883936
Your theory vouches for spooks (in the non-stirner sense)

>implying matter is incapable of creative force, neither order nor chaos

>implying human creativity isn't the concrescence of the forces which created the human mind in the first place

>implying the creativity of the human mind to likewise create a mind capable of creativity isn't itself merely another concrescence

The creative forces of the universe are fractal in nature. The creativity train does not begin nor end at Human Station.

[Anonymous No.8883973]

>>8883970
>an AI taking a beautifull cloud photography is less art than feminist menstruation shitty portraits
I've seen computers do better art than what liberals had made in the last 70 years.

I've seen literal garbage picked from a dumbster and put into a museum.

[Anonymous No.8883974]

>>8883971
Art is a piece of human culture. Something can be beautiful, or the product of a creative process, without being art.

[Anonymous No.8883975]

>>8883970

>defined by human foresight

Your heuristics is showing

[Anonymous No.8883976]

>>8883971
>reductionism
Ever heard of the one about being so open-minded that your brain falls out?

[Anonymous No.8883981]

>>8883974
Art is about human perception, if some liberal san francisco fag consider an abstract painting done by an AI to be art and some rich faggot buys it, is art.

[Anonymous No.8883983]

>>8883976

Yes, and luckily the universe isn't driven by aphorisms

[Anonymous No.8883984]

>>8883973
The AI is just making pretty pictures, it cannot create anything meaninful, much less meaningful to humans. It can only slavishly follow it's own programming.

Stop fetishizing computers. They're tools, they can't replace us.

[Anonymous No.8883985]

>>8883981
People like you are the reason for the decline of art

[Anonymous No.8883988]

>>8883981
>le everything is art if you believe it's art
What a nonsensical view

[Anonymous No.8883990]

This thread is going to be bad, but it's going to be especially bad if people don't clarify their terms.

If you want to talk about AI you should be sure that you agree with other people on what "AI" is.

[Anonymous No.8883991]

>>8883990
Not to mention clarifying what art is, but that's probably the main area of contention anyways.

[Anonymous No.8883993]

The creation and creator of art is irrelevant. It is the artworld, the social landscape and relations therein, the human consumer that determines what is art or not. Who makes it, human, nature, computer, is not the question but how we experience it.

[Anonymous No.8883994]

>>8883990

>disagreement and discussion are bad

Only if you believe you need 'safe spaces'

[Anonymous No.8884003]

>>8883994

>vague disagreement and discussion online on 4chan
>being worthwhile or productive

pick 1

[Anonymous No.8884005]

>>8883919
AIs won't create art until they have their own sense of appreciation, which we are very far off from

All the "examples" of AI art today are just humans creating art with sophisticated program

[Anonymous No.8884007]

>>8883984
all the human mental processes are not magical wishfull thinking.

there's nothing special into what kind of mental processes does humans make.

have you seen the latests chat bots like Tai?

they seem to generate some kind of personal opinion.

even microsoft had to shut Tai because it started to have racist original thoughs.

>>8883985
I'm a traditionalist, I see art peaked in the XIX century and became shit during the XX century and slowly is starting to regain the beauty lost, mainly thanks to comercial art.

>>8883988
is one of the definitions retard.
is the definition of the XX century, which is based on originality and shock value, garbage art if you ask.

I hold a more traditional, more reinaissance and baroque opinion of art.
I do believe art is about the seek of imitation the beauty of real life and the natural world.

[Anonymous No.8884008]

>>8883976
He's totally right though.
It's kind of a Taoist/Spinoza/Hegelian view but it makes sense

[Anonymous No.8884011]

>>8884003

Miracles do happen even if rarely

[Anonymous No.8884021]

>>8884005
Then AI is simply another medium and it would still be art

Art based on chaotic/random nature has existed for a while, so each AI "brush stroke" doesn't need to be absolutely intentional, the process for generating those random strokes was created by a human

[Anonymous No.8884028]

I guess noone remembers the first creative AI, its name was Jackson Pollock

[Anonymous No.8884033]

>>8884003
>implying there's any such thing as "deep discussion"
Go to reddit if you want psuedo-intellectual wankery

[Anonymous No.8884042]

>>8884033
never implied that

[Anonymous No.8884051]

The matter is not if it is art or if it isn't art, because to argue for any of those is to take art as an intrinsic quality to this and that objects and not something ascribed to certain objects because of how these objects are experienced by a given group of people, that carry with them some social organization, cultural values and so on. In other words, it's not about whether computers can do art, but who would call it art and what would be the poisition of that people. Nature creates beautiful, ugly, thought provoking and simple things and yet we don't call it art. At the same time, man made objects that we call art today were not called so in the past (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzFeuiZKHcg).). The issue is therefore, not about what computers can or cannot do, they proved they can do certain things and therefore produce actual effects in us and the world. Whether we call those effects art may have to do with whether we acknowledge and appreciate them just like we do with what we already call art today. That itself is completely varied, some people consider art in relation to control over certain techniques, others place art at the center of the one who experiences and appreciates it, others understand art as something essentially provocative and transformative, politically or personally. Besides that necessary link between the supposed computer art and the human made art that we consider today, there is the question of simulacra and even simply touching issues of forgery, political control and so on. That is to say, would computer art be seen as computer art in itself, or would it be considered art because it is confused for a human made object? Would we even be asking these questions, if we didn't see ourselves, with terror or excitement, reflected in the computers actions? We may not consider what nature does as art, but we see something of a beautiful painting in the colors of a sunset. Is it not more at the core of this question, whether we ascribe agency to something that we otherwise consider to be inhuman, or vice-versa.

[Anonymous No.8885155]

>>8884007
>XIX century
>became shit during the XX century
>comercial art
could you be more specific about what you mean? examples? thanks

[Anonymous No.8885179]

>>8883919
humans are just really complex computers

[Anonymous No.8885185]

if you had a computer that produced random notes and chords for a random length of time and left it running for ages, you'd eventually get Beethoven's 9th

If Beethoven's 9th was art when Beethoven wrote it, I don't see why it's not art when a computer randomly generates it

so yes

[Anonymous No.8885225]

>>8883936
I agree with you, Hayao

[Anonymous No.8885248]

>>8883936
>he thinks humans are any different than computers

[Anonymous No.8885257]

Until you have a solution for the hard problem of consciousness you can only speculate

My guess is no

[Anonymous No.8885262]

>>8883970
Well what if you see some amazing photograph in a gallery and say 'wow, what a work of art!' only to be told it was created by an AI. Are you then wrong in your first reaction to it as a piece of art? Schrodinger's artwork if you will. My point is, if it can create an emotional response in you, it is art. It is not the creation but the reaction of a human being that makes it so

[Anonymous No.8885486]

Art doesn't actually exist, it's not something you can point to, its a signifier without a proper signified. It's basically a handy label used to explain our motives in interacting with something, but whenever people look into 'what is art?' you always end up with something easy to poke holes in.

As such, I would say anything done by an 'AI' (I don't really know much about them, so i'm just going to consider them an intelligence without human interaction, although there are huge holes in that) can't be considered 'art' because it doesn't have an 'artist' making it.

I know people will probably say something like 'intentional fallacy' but that's wrong, if you feel the sublime when looking at a mountain you wouldn't say 'wow great art', you'd just think nature was amazing. Similarly, if you saw an elephant painting you shouldn't call it an artist because it's not approaching it as 'art' but just a bit of fun. People are going to argue that some people don't intend to make art, but if they don't intend to create something we'd call art (as in they don't literally have to say 'i'm making art', but they have to intend to be doing something other than having fun or whatever) then they didn't make art, not that you can't enjoy it anyway.

All that said I heard a song written by a computer once and it was quite nice. Not art though.
>>8885262
What if you were walking and found a beautiful stone? Just because you enjoy it doesn't make it art surely? Or what if you sit on a canvas and leave a mark (somehow) or spill paint on it, even if people think 'wow what a great painting' is that art?

[Anonymous No.8885530]

>>8885185
It's art when Beethoven made it because it was a product of his own inspiration. He didn't write random notes until he found something that sounded good, he made something with foresight based on his own aesthetic and intellectual ideals. When Beethoven wrote his 9th he actually wanted to communicate something.

[Anonymous No.8885537]

>>8883919
>Literature

[Anonymous No.8885547]

>>8883936
I am willing to wager I could present you with computer generated art (be it visual, literary, or musical) and you would not be able to reliably differentiate it from its human created counterpart.

[Anonymous No.8885553]

>>8883970
>defined by human forsight
No it isn't. Stop acting like the field of asthetics isn't an ongoing endeavor/enterprise. Many definitions or art don't rely on intention, merely perception

[Anonymous No.8885555]

itd be as enjoyable as understandable is a translation from google.

[Anonymous No.8885681]

>>8885547
>http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/06/27/480639265/human-or-machine-can-you-tell-who-wrote-these-poems

Give it a shot then. Most people could see the difference the last time we had this thread

[Anonymous No.8885683]

>>8885537

[Anonymous No.8885690]

>>8885681
Apart from Kurtis Hessel being a hack it wasn't that hard

[Anonymous No.8886160]

>>8883919
If this can pass for art, then I dare say that Computers can do art too.

[Anonymous No.8886178]

>>8885555
FUCKING CHECKED HOLY SHIT

[Anonymous No.8886187]

My only rule for what is art or not is if the meaning, if any, begat the art. If the meaning was created after the creation of the art, it's bullshit

[Anonymous No.8886206]

>>8886187
That's a fucking ignorant and uneducated standard, you have clearly never read a single book about art in your life.

[Anonymous No.8886207]

>>8883919
A computer could 100% make abstract visual art that people couldn't distinguish from human efforts. With something like prose they aren't quite there yet

[Anonymous No.8886220]

>>8886206
It is possible to read modern theories on art and disagree with them

[Anonymous No.8886223]

No, because art is about feeling.
unless they invent computer that can feel

[Anonymous No.8886230]

>>8885555 (checked)
Stop ignoring these ebin quads /lit/

[Anonymous No.8886234]

>>8886220
Possible, but you haven't done that, you haven't even barely started with Aristoteles' poetics, you are years of reading before discussing modern ideas of art.

[Anonymous No.8886242]

>>8886223
Not only feeling, but I think it's also a meditation about the world which it exists, both from the artist and their environment.

Even if a computer were capable of feeling and making art, it world be from a perspective so alien to us as humans that we would look at it from a completely foreign perspective.

[Anonymous No.8886247]

>>8883919
No.

[Anonymous No.8886277]

>>8886242
Here's a computer-generated poem from >>8885681

The dirty rusty wooden dresser drawer.
A couple million people wearing drawers,
Or looking through a lonely oven door,
Flowers covered under marble floors.

And lying sleeping on an open bed.
And I remember having started tripping,
Or any angel hanging overhead,
Without another cup of coffee dripping.

Surrounded by a pretty little sergeant,
Another morning at an early crawl.
And from the other side of my apartment,
An empty room behind the inner wall.

A thousand pictures on the kitchen floor,
Talked about a hundred years or more.

The guy who called it as entertaining as a google translation is pretty close on the mark. The only way it can have feeling or meaning is by copying and imitating. It can never create those things because it doesn't have a soul

[Anonymous No.8886430]

>>8883919
the question really revolves around whether you believe art has inherent meaning or if it's a tool we reflect meaning from

[Anonymous No.8887323]

>>8886277
>le humans have a soul meme