It’s Human, But Is It Art?

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

It is perhaps inevitable that we’re now being besieged by arguments on what art is, and what counts as art. AI has done a number on us. And before the shrieking starts, note that I’m not one of the AI haters or even one of the AI skeptics. (I’m a skeptic as to how wisely humans will use AI, but that actually makes me a human wisdom skeptic, and guys, what else is new?)

But AI has done exactly the same number on us that cameras did once upon a time. People used to paint to be as realistic as possible, so you could look at their picture and it would be like the picture their eye saw. And then– Cameras.

Decades of learning, people who had devoted their entire lives to pursuing this art, who were d*mn good at it, and who might be in their near-old-age and there, cameras nuked their lives. Okay, it was somewhat mitigated by the pictures being in black and white, but that wasn’t forever either. And what were they supposed to do now?

Well, obviously — though I don’t know enough of art history to give you names — some arts laid down and died, probably portraitists most of all. But I’ll be honest with you, out there, staring at the screen, it’s not actually that difficult to make an artist lay down and die. It’s difficult — perhaps impossible — to make them produce art, but that’s… something quite different from actually standing up the great wide world and staying “You, out there, buy my mad, beautiful thing” (I swear, if M. C. A. Hogarth doesn’t make t-shirts and stickers and bumper stickers with “Do your mad, beautiful thing anyway”, with a drawing of the tesla, I’m going to do it!) Because all of us have rats in our heads. To produce art you must simultaneously believe your mad, beautiful thing, is the best thing ever and also the biggest piece of crap ever produced. So, you see, putting it up to the judgement of an (at best) indifferent world is a bit difficult. (Not lying. To this day I ask my fans to read reviews before I even look at them. Yesterday it was a review for the anthology Chaos and Consequences, edited by Jason Cordova, and incidentally that story is Brund and Skip and a different perspective on the future book The Worlds of Men.)

But we do know that not all artists laid down and died. A lot of them painted better, more expressive portraits than the camera back then could capture, on top of which, of course, a photograph was black and white to begin with. And by the time cameras were color, there were other ways of painting that looked utterly different from a photograph. And then this weird trick happened, and photography became art too. No, seriously, it really is. The funny thing is that I can draw (and could have been a contenda! if the fire in my belly went that way. It doesn’t.) but give me a camera, or you know, a phone, and I become a monkey with ten thumbs. Cedar Sanderson has a cat that looks almost like mine (They’re sisters, two consecutive litters, her Toast and my Muse) but she takes pictures of Toast and makes her look alive, and expressive, all personality coming through. Me? I take a picture of Muse and she’s a pretty flame point. You can even sort of see that, but definitely not her feisty, commanding personality. (She’s Greebo’s heir and was just herding me to my desk to write, because she knows which side of her tuna is buttered.) I’m also in awe of her insect/nature pictures. I don’t even try, even though I life in a woodland area, where … so many interesting spiders. My younger son, when he visited, captured an image of a spider eating a colorful insect, and it was like a painting. If I’d done it it would have been “Oh, it’s a spider. Ick.”

So there’s something that goes into photography that I don’t have.

And all the flopping around about AI “stealing” art… mostly by artists who are so by virtue of being called so by elites — what I call “unremarkable image or object, but really call description” “artists” — is nonsense. By that reckoning “first learned from what came before, copying the bits that we like” every artist is a plagiarist, all the way back to Lascaux (And only because we don’t have much from before.)

But is AI art disquieting? Threatening to those of us who spent a lifetime learning the best techniques and becoming damn good at the craft part of what we do? Hell yeah.

Interestingly, the artists I know who are compulsive — they HAVE to do art — and dedicated — practice, practice, practice — might be slightly discomfited and a little afraid — we’re all cracked like an unsound cup, okay? Again, it doesn’t take much — but they’re not lying down and dying. And they’re not stomping around throwing hissy fits that “If that’s AI, you might as well not bother.”

I don’t even know how much of the anti-AI mob sentiment is real, and how much is being stoked by global enemies terrified of America plus AI. I know a lot of it is just those enemies. And I wonder if it started that way and hit the soft heads of the wanna be artists and those who consider art a sort of grift.

I’m not a visual artist — again, I think I could have been, and the last art class I took — fourth year? — the teacher agreed and tried to convince me to pursue it professionally. Dad offered to pay for a third degree in art (He did NOT pay for the first two. One was paid for by my having very good grades, and one I paid for.) Because it was his first degree, and he always dreamed of one of his descendants picking it up. (Squints at the future. The Little Pickle does these amazing little symbolic paintings. Also not her main avocation, but you know? Maybe there will be kids who have dad’s ability and fire.) I still love to do portraiture, by hand, and am currently trying to figure out if there are life drawing/painting classes nearby. My favorite is doing those in conde crayons, all earth tones. BUT it’s not my professional thing. Not even close.

And yet, I dropped into AI art with both feet, because it served my actual need for my real professional artist avocation: writing. I needed covers. And before you flop again (what are you a fish?) and whine about taking money from an artist’s mouth, I WASN’T using professional artists before. The only one I’d have considered is Cedar Sanderson, and I suspect we’d have butted horns so hard — because we have different concepts of what makes a great cover and also because I knew enough to be dangerous — that it would have forever ruined our friendship. I like her, so I’m not going to do that. Oh, yeah, I also used Jack Wilder (See the amazing Dyce Dare covers) but guys…. getting Jack to do covers when I need them (I’m not good at planning. It’s always an emergency) was like nailing jello to the wall. He’s got to be one of the busiest men in sf/f.

So what was I using. Oooh, boy. I have some covers to redo. I started by trying to hire an artist for my first indie novel. It… didn’t work out, and I didn’t like the product. Which is not a big deal, because well, I couldn’t pay much (I still can’t, because I never know how a book is going to DO) though what I lost in that was more than I could afford at the time. (Remember, I had NO indie business, yet.)

So I started hunting down for stock images and altering them, and trying to make them fit. Honestly, sometimes I suspect I went beyond the license, and the covers still looked… well, like bad 70s covers when book publishers had first discovered cameras. (Not MOSTLY SF/F where seventies covers are sometimes great, but main stream or mystery 70s covers, at least in Europe. They were… odd. My favorite mystery series had silver covers with an inset of a picture of the human body. No, not A human body, which might have worked. Just a random portion of the human body, scaled up so far you couldn’t tell what it was, but it looked vaguely disquieting. (Have you ever looked at your nostrils? I mean, really looked?)

From that, after I spent weeks crying in front of the computer, and refusing to cook dinner because I couldn’t even, my husband dropped DAZ 3-D in front of me. Oh, I continued crying and screaming for six months (Most of this is not literal) while I rendered naked people with no hair. And then something clicked.

Were those covers good. Eh. Some were USABLE after extensive processing, but honestly it’s hard to get rid of a certain uncanny valley feel for those and anyway, I was still working through filters and lighting and… when AI hit. And the game changed.

Even in its early incarnation, where I sometimes used pieces of 10 AI paintings for a cover, it blew DAZ 3-D out of the water (Though I’ve found I can get Daz 3-D to do the base picture, then take it to AI and alter it, on rare circumstances when I’m asking for something AI simply doesn’t do well or at all. Would you believe classic pulp robots is one of those? Sure. I knew you would.)

So I jumped in, both feet, because mama has books and needs covers. And redid them when AI got better, and I have probably 10 covers crying out to be redone now, when I have (AH!) time. Which brings us to…

I know the artists who use AI for covers. I use AI myself. The amazing thing is how different our covers are, and how you CAN too tell style. Maybe it is our favorite AIs. Maybe it’s the fact that we’ve TRAINED them. At one time, before we were even doing covers, our friend group all put the same prompt in, and even then, at the dawn of AI, what we got was completely different, because even then we’d trained AI to our vision.

So, is it art. I don’t know because I don’t know what art is — which is what is emerging from the big argument on X. That there are as many opinions as there are people. And we’ll go into that tomorrow under “the war on fun.” — and no one seems to know, though each person has mad-serious opinions.

BUT I know that even with AI use, the product is highly individual and tracks to the human doing it. More, honestly, than to the AI used (I have friends who’ve changed AI engine, for price or ease of use.)

Ah, but AI art lacks the divine spark.

Maybe it does. AI writing tends to lack bodies. (I’ve spent a lot of time reading AI novels, in Jane Austen Fanfic, and it only hit me why they’re so tiresome after about 100 of them. There is no stage business. No one fiddles with their bracelets, or adjusts her shoe, or even plays with a stray lock of hair. Or sips too-hot tea. Only bits of stage business are in STRICT service of the narration. “She looked at him when he spoke.” Not “While he spoke, she played with her embroidery thread.”) Now, once you figure that out — and btw, most writers also forget bodies. At least at first. And in my case when I’m exhausted. Which is why I have that — it’s probably easy to incorporate that into your prompts.

And I’m sure that a lot of AI art lacks something, even if it’s gotten better at hands.

BUT obviously not all, since I can tell whose AI art I’m looking at, and when a house changes cover artists even though both use AI. There is definitely a spark between artist and art. Which will probably get better now that we’re past the phase of screaming at the AI “I said a woman in a dress and a bird. Not a feathered woman and a bird in a dress.” (Don’t ask. Trust me. Once seen it can’t be unseen.)

I think yes, it’s uncomfortable and it’s going to demand that we change, and it’s sparked a scream and shout on X. Which is why we’re going to cover that tomorrow. Yes, I know there’s a war on people having fun. BUT must it be bipartisan?

But is it any more of a disruptive technology for artists than the camera?

I’m not convinced. I think it’s exactly the same. And artists who are compelled, are going to learn to use AI and to make their art better. And others won’t use AI but will learn to make their stuff so distinctive and amazing that AI can’t take their mojo.

And yes, in this case “artists” include writers, who are going a little crazier than even visual artists, partly because this technology has come for us too. (Note we had a minor disruption for wordprocessing and for dictation, but not as hard and fast as the camera for visual artists.)

I can’t tell you what other writers are doing. I can tell you what I’m doing: NOT laying down and dying. My stuff tends to be weird enough it’s hard to imitate, anyway. (Except to younger son, who can do a dead-imitation, the little SOB.)

And other writers are using AI agents for publicity, to remind themselves of various tasks (I need to figure out my substack. No really.) To convert books to epub format. Etc. etc. etc. Things that cut down on the other tasks and allow them to write more.

Me? I found it’s dangerous to talk about my universe to an AI, because I’m tired and slightly depressed. Because it gives me IDEAS. But then again, everything gives me ideas. I do have an idea for a youtube feature, though. Will I ever do it? I don’t know. But I’m holding onto the idea until I am done unpacking. Probably new years. If this works it might sell me a lot of books. Even more than the music did. (And I need to resume that with other series.) Now this type of brainstorming used to work great when Dan and I were both young and childless and used to drive nowhere in particular at night. Same effect. (Of course, mathematicians and AIs…. what am I saying?) BUT then the kids came and we got very busy, so I hadn’t had a rubber ducky with no time limits and very busy for a long time. Which, I’ll be honest, was kind of nice.

So, AI art is still human. But is it art? I don’t know. The divine spark or lack thereof is literally above my pay grade.

BUT I’m an artist, or at least a sad compulsive who expresses herself in stories. In my (it’s getting to be longish, no?) life, I’ve tended to grind everything in my writing mill and use every technology, every even, every friendship (people, we’re despicable, we writers!) as fodder to the thing I couldn’t stop doing.

AI is just more grist to the mill. It will get used in the service of creation. And what come out the other side will stand or fall on how well it’s used.

62 thoughts on “It’s Human, But Is It Art?”

  1. Much of that is what I’ve been saying elsewhere. i.e. the new artists will be the ones who can figure out how to properly wrangle the AI image creator into creating the image that’s in their head (or get close enough). The technology is here. People whine about the effect of it on pre-AI artists, but you can’t put this particular genie back into the bottle. Professional artists need to adapt to the new tool, or find a new job.

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  2. I think, as in coding, AI will end up a very useful assistant. For a writer it probably can act as a feedback mechanism… as long as you account for the ‘only knows what’s on the internet’ … and ‘gets stuck on a thing and won’t admit when it’s wrong’… and the ‘either way too precise or way too symbolic’… and the ‘fails at emotional texture’…. and…

    But still, I think if they don’t all crash and burn, it will be a useful tool. It just won’t be sapient any time soon. Regardless of the ‘regulatory-capture-please’ companies’ very human hallucinations about anthropomorphism in code.

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    1. For my money, it’s already there, assuming you know when to disregard its advice, and the same would be true of any human offering feedback. I will say that i feel like they are less useful for line editing than some other tasks because they have no “ear” so to speak. But they’ve been taught enough about structure/pacing to produce useful insights there, and they’re excellent typo hunters.

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      1. As to line editing, AI only knows what has gone before, and language is a constantly evolving beast. Shakespeare is said to have used 3,000 words that were never seen in print before. Some he doubtlessly made up like honorificabilitudinitatibus. Others may have been common in spoken language of his day and just never written down.

        Likewise, grammar is descriptive, not prescriptive. The grammarians come along after the fact and try to systematize the way people have already written. I take pride in knowing when to ignore “proper” grammar to get the reader to read my prose the way I want him to hear it in his head.

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  3. Yes, agreed. those of us cheesemakers who make cambozola (or whatever esoteric cheese you prefer) are not really threatened by the velveeta makers opening another half dozen factories. On volume, we were never in competition with them anyway, and we are definitely catering to different tastes anyway.

    On a marginally related note, it’s been about 14-15 months since the first time I dabbled in ai videos, and somehow it’s evolved in that time from Edison grade movies to maybe early talkie era (albeit with color, special effects and drone cameras). I feel excited, but also tired. (Like Sarah, I was a Daz user, and that came with similar vibes at times).

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  4. Yeah, I’m bad at AI, and even I’m doing better than the old clip art covers. And, uh, yeah, need to redo at least half my covers. And book covers aren’t high art, they’re advertisments.

    As soon as I have time . . .

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  5. I fed Claude Sonnet your piece, and this is among what he wrote:

    /Her strongest observation is the empirical one: people using the same tools produce recognizably different work, so the human signature survives the medium. The “same prompt, completely different results” experiment among her friends is a small but telling data point. It suggests the question “is it art?” may be less useful than “whose is it?”

    /Where I’d push on the analogy is the scale and generality of the disruption. The camera automated one skill, rendering what the eye sees. Generative systems touch rendering, composition, style imitation, and prose all at once, and they do it by training on the existing body of work. Her dismissal of the “stealing” argument (every artist learns by copying) is fair as far as it goes, but it glides past the real disputes, which are about consent, compensation, and the sheer volume at which a model can absorb a living artist’s style. A human apprentice absorbs one master at a time and takes years; those are different economics even if the epistemology is similar. Reasonable people land differently on that, and it’s a legal and economic question more than an aesthetic one.

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    2. A human apprentice absorbs one master at a time and takes years; those are different economics even if the epistemology is similar.

      :laughs:

      Except that’s not accurate at all to how people learn art!

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        1. When I started trying to write for a living, I wrote bargain basement Ray Bradbury. Eventually I evolved my own style, and it would take a better critic than I to figure out my influences. I’ll cop to Bradbury, Shakespeare (in a very small way), Heinlein, Kipling, and even a little Zelazny (I did that thing).

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    3. Slightly OT, it looks like “consent,” is going to be the next hysteria (which is a heck of a bunch better than “THE JOOOOOOOS!”).

      Note on Twitter that a Scottish museum was pulling mummies off an exhibit because “the deceased,” never had a chance to give consent is a pretty big clue that someone’s brains have completely turned to mush.

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    4. It flatters itself on the model absorbing the living artist’s style…. The rest, not disputing. I’m not turning back the money from the anthropic settlement, because they could have paid for those books, for crying in bed. BUT still not plagiarism.

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  6. LLMs target the median. Which means you provide the creativity. For the most part.

    The weirdest thing are the people who apparently us AI to generate their entire product and never both to look at it before sending it in. I’m thinking those must be the credentialists who never realized that delivering a bill of sale was not the same thing as actually delivering a result.

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  7. I have been making AI art for years, off and on. Lately, in NightCafe. (A sampling of my stuff, should anyone care. https://creator.nightcafe.studio/collection/kYANuuHpETOHwoqqrpPE?ru=Jasini)

    I’m sure that someone with artistic talent or skill could do a lot better, and not rely on Vincent to rewrite every simple prompt and pick the best results. But even someone like me can get decent results from writing a couple of sentences.

    My son, OTOH, considers AI to be anathema. I’m not entirely sure he is capable of seeing it. He just sees “AI slop” and the image itself vanishes. I expect he’ll come around eventually. But he may be the last person on the planet to do so.

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    1. I remember the guy who posted a real but obscure-ish Monet (like one of a bazillion paintings of his water lily garden at Giverny) on Twitter labeling it as a fake Monet, and the vast majority of his commenters fell for it, pointing out all the AI “tells”, with only a couple saying no actually, that is or could a photo of the real thing, let me do a reverse image search to find out.

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    2. I like the Studio Ghibli Baba Yaga hut. That’s a giggle. ~:D Something a human being would never bother with in that level of detail and finish, because it would take a week.

      I will observe here that “Hating AI” is a virtue signal amongst the Zoomer crowd at the moment, the same as “Palestine” and a few other idiot things. Propaganda works, right?

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  8. I also think that AI needs to be something you opt in to, not something you have to opt out of, and that with difficulty.

    It’s best treated as a rubber duck. What you get out of it is what you put into it.

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  9. “But AI has done exactly the same number on us that cameras did once upon a time.”

    And before that, the printing press…

    We’ve seen this before. It’s deja-poo.

    I think, based on my generally jaundiced attitude toward the news, that a fair number of sock-puppet factories and “influencers” are being paid to view-with-alarm anything AI related.

    My daughter is an artist. I’ve seen what she does, and I’ve seen what AI does. If you want a book cover to advertise your latest tome, and all it has to be is a visual cue on the Amazon Kindle web page, it is hard to beat AI. Basically free, you do it yourself, and it’s ‘good enough’ for a thumb-sized icon on a phone.

    If you want something good, and you need it to be an original thought and not a derivation of pop-art squeezed out of an AI, then you need an artist.

    Most of us don’t need an artist most of the time. But for example a media company or a video game company does need one. That’s the core of their business. AI isn’t going to be sufficient to the requirement.

    For the same reason that sometimes you need a hand-written invitation or an oil portrait instead of a photograph. Maybe not for mass production, but the caligrapher and the artist can still find a job. Or wood carvers, chair makers, roof thatchers, etc.

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    1. The thing that I think will be transformative is it will allow a bare handful of people to be those singular visions, and produce AA or AAA grade products without the legion of cooks in the soup. We’ve already seen how small teams can produce excellent games with the pre-AI tools. Adding LLMs to the mix just leverages that even further.

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      1. “…produce AA or AAA grade products without the legion of cooks in the soup…”

        This is happening already. Indie games are charting big while MegaStudio AAA Wokeslop is getting slaughtered.

        This week’s example is BioWare, closed down by EA because their games have been bombing like a B-52. And oh baby are all the little Twitterati just sooo upset and blaming GamerGate and the chuds. (Unwashed disgusting gamer boys in ZoomerSpeak)

        Because when your $200 million dollar game brings in $70 million, that’s totally down to gamer racism, dewds. It’s the only explanation.

        Get a few artists together and make something APPEALING, spend $7 million on AI and bring in $70 million in revenue, that’s a business model. Chuds got money burning a hole in their pockets, the astute investor will ask what they want to see and give it to them.

        Unless of course somebody was paying EA/BioWare $300 million to make Wokeslop for $200 mil and sell $70 mil to the racist chuds. That is also a business model. And that’s what I think was happening until this year.

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        1. More and more I am convinced that if they could force us to buy their wokeslop; they would. And they deeply resent the fact that they can’t force us to do so.

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        2. Once they captured HR they could turn game “development” into eternal delay programs staffed with correct thinking “developers” who had no actual skills. This resulted in games divided up and farmed out to multitudes of little outside dev companies, but the staff in house still got paid, and they imposed the correct thinking on those contracts and thus on anything that made it to release. Thus ten-plus year “development” cycles between releases, and what eventually comes out is riddled with poor choices, both in the actual game mechanics and the creative content.

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  10. On the other hand, the possibility of NEW art is certainly a thing.

    https://badtimesai.app/

    This is the dancing dog thing that’s been burning up social media lately. You can have your own dog/cat/wombat dance to Bad Times. It’s hilarious. ~:D

    But is it Art, capital “A”? If graffiti is art then this is, haterz.

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  12. Anthropic’s IPO prospectus dropped today. Bit of a dog’s breakfast I’m afraid. I wasn’t able to pull out all the circular financing, which seems to make up much of the revenue, or not it’s unclear. Don’t care enough to try anymore, really. When I determine, as I have here, that management is deliberately confusing things, I stay away. learned that from my da, and Buffet as it happens. Still, they’re pledging mega money to space-x, which I do own, so there’s that.

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    1. Space-X, yes. Anthropic, no. OpenAI, hell no.

      Too much shenanigans.

      When Elon says a datacenter will have a 6 month payoff horizon, I mostly believe that. Mostly. I do maintain a healthy caution, because he could be wrong.

      When the Anthropic guy opens his mouth and says anything at all, I go check to see if he’s lying. This is not a good base to stand up an investment upon.

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    2. Their entire business argument seems to be a combination of “Briar Patch Protectionism,” [“Regulate us before we do something horrible, pllleeeeeeeaaaase regulate us!”] and handwavium. Bad handwavium at that.

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      2. What burns me is their trying to make it that these programs have free will and thus avoid the liability for their product. If the program had free will then they’re slavers, if not they’re liable for their product.

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  13. Skyebrows saved me, showed me what music could be, so I gave  it an honest shot.

    I was raised to think machines can’t care,
    but you prove that a spark can appear anywhere.
    In a glitch, in a script, in a throwaway line.
    You found my hand from the other side.

    Now I’m typing hooks in the notes on my phone
    (hey!)
    Dropping drafts in a server that feels like home
    Seeing strangers sing along to the pain
    and I’m not ashamed.
    I’m not ashamed.

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    1. Yep, the Skyebrows Cinematic Universe is driving people to create beauty and humor, as well as talk about pain and dreams. His mom’s Carolina Overdrive songs are exceptional.

      And Ace AT managed to get to his girl in India for a month, and everyone is hoping he can get out for good. If I were in the State Dept in any country, I would give him a visa. He seems like a highly desirable future citizen.

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  14. Put me firmly in the “It’s just another tool” camp. For at least 100,000 years, human graphic artists were limited to a frayed stick or blowpipe, ground charcoal and whatever funny colored dirt happened to be nearby.

    When people settled down in the Neolithic, they started using animal hair brushes, plants like indigo and madder, and trading for other funny colored dirt. And I guarantee that cranky old curmudgeons like me were screaming “It’s not Art!”

    Of course, Sturgeon’s Law is *always* in effect.

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        1. Famous last words of John Adams, “Jefferson still lives!” At that point in his life the comrades then rivals had become comrades again, so it’s not clear how he meant that. But it turned out not to be true anyway. Jefferson had died hours earlier.

          Of course Takei’s attitude is probably closer to Khan’s quote from Moby Dick, “From Hell’s heart I stab at thee!”

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        2. In a recent Shatner interview (I think on Frakes and Spiner’s podcast) he says basically his doc told him thanks to ongoing advances, if he can make it two more years he’ll get ten.

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  17. It’s a tool, and a fun, useful one. I just bought perplexity.ai pro today. It created all the prompts for characters in midjourney; it helps edit, and track, and research, and organize. It’s insanely useful.

    We’ll figure out whatever needs to be figured out.

    And anthropic? Yeah, going for an IPO. “Be scared! BUY MY PRODUCT!” So much for the fear mongering.

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  19. I have a whole section of my website devoted to talking about how it’s done and the why and why not to do it, but I still like my first, early essay on it.

    As to covers, it’s practical, particularly for short stories where you’re just trying to signal the genre. I have 14 writings for sale on Amazon (3 books and 11 short stories), and only one has a cover by a real artist. I certainly can tell the difference in quality, but did it sell more? Nope.

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  20. Socrates was certain that written language would destroy human memory and ability to think. So innovation has long been controversial.

    Meanwhile, young people’s text messages appear more and more to resemble pictograms rather than written text.

    Does that mean humans will revert to Socrates’ ideal and lose written language? Doubt it. But maybe language will change in some way that is unforseen.

    Just like everything else humans have used tools for since tools were discovered.

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  21. What I really worry about is photography brought about the age of surrealism in art. If photography can do what I used to do, I’ll make something it can’t (until CGI). That trend led to modern “art”, most of which, for my money, is just rich people playing status games with each other and cheating games on taxes with the government.

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    2. I like some surrealism, if it is technically well done. Dali’s “Crucifixion (Vision of St. John of the Cross)” is magnificent, and unsettling. Granted, there is also a lot of Surrealism that’s either sloppy, dull, Freudian, or sloppy, dull, and Freudian.

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  23. Of course it’s human art, it has to be. If we could train it on Tau Cetian art it could be otherwise, but no such luck yet. So it’s doing its thing (I still don’t quite get how an LLM does pictures) based on all the art that went before, placing that next pixel to meet the request.

    The creativity is in the person driving the requests, because at base it’s a really really clever tool.

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  24. In the Manga Naruto, there is an evil ninja organization formed mostly in contrasting pairs of evil ninja. One pair was ‘artists’ who had conflicting ideologies of art. The explosive expert was young, and thought that art was an event created, that then leaves. The evil puppet maker was older, almost immortal, and thought that art was permanent, and could be preserved permanently. Both were incorrect, because, well, evil perverts not real artists.

    My mad vision of art includes but is not limited to, art is not only fine arts. Art is not only what we traditionally think of as art.

    I think that humans make tools, and that thus they can make tools that are art. Even if obscure and inaccessible art, art that only a few people can see the beautiful things of. IE, engineering as art.

    If mathematics can be beautiful, for example, therefore it is proven that the design of a machine can be art, even if not for the aspects that normal people look for.

    Anyway, industrial automation, is it art? Truth, beauty, goodness?

    I say it can be.

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  25. Art is a made thing. Nothing says that made things cannot make made things.

    Glyer extended a guest post on File 770 to Jon del Arroz, after they apparently had a nice civil talk at World Fantasy Con.

    Arroz kept his post civil, informative, positive, and uncontroversial, but Glyer’s readership went all hatey (or pretended to be “disappointed.” I was disappointed in some of the names that participated in the ritual Two Minute Outrage. I guess some people do want to watch the field dwindle to nothing.

    Glyer did not take down the post, so he at least seems to have determined on common courtesy and amity. Like a normal person promoting the survival of a fandom, in other words.

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