On AI and art 🎨
The following is a snippet of a conversation I had about 《AI artists》, translated to english.
To know if someone using AI to create an image is an "artist" you have to consider what the word artist means. The definition of artist according to the dictionary is "A person who cultivates any of the fine arts." And it has two concepts, cultivating and fine arts, so there are two problems in defining the AI user as an artist: whether the individual is creating (cultivating), and whether what he or she creates is art.
The first problem can be thought of logically, the individual without the AI cannot generate the images and the AI alone cannot generate them without the individual's input, so both are creating. It can be said that it is a relationship of user and tool.
The second problem is more complicated, because it requires the definition of art, which is obviously a complicated subject. The common definition of artist uses the phrase fine arts, "The set of arts whose purpose is to express beauty, and especially painting, sculpture and music", whose concept of beauty goes back to philosophy and ancient Greece, not just visual appeal, but I digress.
I am going to use my own definition, with which a portion of people in the debate agree, although it is highly contested. Art is an object whose purpose is to express a message. The object can be a drawing, sculpture, painting, music, literature, theater, installation, performance, etc. It encompasses a large number of disciplines and does not always replicate an image of the real world, but it always, always, communicates something or has a reason for being. A critique, a story, a revolution, a feeling, etc.
This definition leaves out many works, of course, but it also includes many others. But with this definition a problem arises, or rather a present problem is illuminated, which raises: in a work of art what should be considered, the intentions of the artist or the interpretations of the public?
If we go with the former, if someone creates a work with the intention of communicating it is art. If we go with the second, if someone creates something just for the sake of creating and a person sees it, interprets it and finds a meaning or a message, it is art. I'm inclined to the second.
So if we apply this to images created with AI, we can see that what is prioritized is attractiveness, visual impact, detail, style. They rarely communicate anything more than "how nice" or "how cool". This is not a bad thing, there are lots of disciplines and creative processes that are merely ornamental and that does not mean they lack merit. It is not art, just as many drawings, many songs, and many other things are not art.
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