A paint brush is a tool used by artists to create paintings. But is a magic paint brush that draws an impressionist version of a landscape?
I’m not visual at all. Is an AI tool that creates a picture far beyond what I could do (even if not very good by normal standards) not creating something? How about AI code generation used by a non-programmer. I’m not sure if that is possible now, but it will be.
Well, more importantly, the law would say that you don’t own the copyright unless you did some portion of assembling the work after the AI does its thing.
It kind of is an analogue to a Spirograph, I think. The Spirograph only really does its thing. I decide where to start and stop it, what colors to use, etc. More importantly, I discard what I think of as failures, and keep what I think of as successes. Fitting in with what Duchamp discovered more than 100 years ago, it’s the act of selection by the artist that makes it art. The law decides it, but I pretty firmly think the law is wrong.
A poor example, since The Fountain remained non-art even after Duchamp selected it.
But yeah, there is some sense in which all creation is merely selection. Every work of Shakespeare was somewhere in the Library of Borges before Shakespeare existed; the Bard’s great genius was in that he was able to find them among all the dross.
Ehhh, you’ve said similar things before. I think Duchamp made a pretty good case for Fountain being art, and it’s been pretty damn influential. Even if you could back that statement up somehow, it’s been generally regarded as art since before you were born. You’ve got a tough row to hoe, there.
And I’m not meaning that selection is important in some surrealist Library of Babel that contains everything that ever could be written sense. Even in school when submitting anything before a review deadline was important, I’d discard 90% of what I started, and probably at least 10% of what I’ve gotten to a “completed” state. I still do it today. The act of selecting the final product to present to the world is was genuinely makes it art. You can’t decide whether it’s art after that point, you can only decide whether you like it or not.
Wait… you can still sell them online (and at County Fairs) , and “make fabulous amounts of money”, without copyrighting anything.
The only problem would be if I came along and sold the exact same shirts. A lack of © means you couldn’t sue me.
But that’d be a moot point, given that I’d be creeped out by “giant upright lizards attending to odd-looking but happy infants at a sort of medieval day care”…
Some people have said that it’s art, since long before either of us were born. Some people have said that that’s ridiculous and of course it’s not art, since long before either of us were born. The latter group of people is correct. If there is such a thing as art, then The Fountain isn’t it.
And the people who say it’s not art are engaging in the most boring conversation that could be had. I’ll just leave it that the folks you claim are “correct” are in the minority among persons educated in modern visual art.
It’s a highly influential work of art in exactly the same way that John Wilkes Booth was a highly influential President. The influence of either cannot be denied. Except that Duchamp has not yet completely succeeded in his goal of killing the concept of art.
So, still nothing to back up your claim. Ok. Enjoy yourself.
“Is not!” isn’t really an argument.
Are there any working art critics or academics still in this latter group today? Certainly they weren’t in evidence when Fountain was voted the most influential modern art work ever, 20 years ago. Or is this more “My kid could do a Pollock”-type not-even-wrongness?
As a teacher who’s led field trips to art museums, I love to counter “My kindergartner could do that!” with “But he didn’t.”
From Mad Magazine:
“My kid could paint that!”
“Yeah, and he could probably say something more original than that old cliche, too.”
Use enough inpainting/outpainting and you may get a copyright.
Yeah. Just look up the “red flags” section in the Wiki article on Ponzi schemes; it reads like a description of crypto, NFTs and (as presently being marketed) “AI”.
Which actually seems defensible to me: it’s really about making choices and creating novelty, which is something the AI inherently can’t do. As Ted Chiang notes, the output of an AI is a deterministic function of its input (training data, prompts, etc.) with some pseudorandomness sprinkled on top, so contains at most that information which it has previously assimilated, albeit in a highly ‘mixed’ form.
But if there’s something unique to creativity, it’s that there is something genuinely novel in any work of art, encapsulated in the choices the artist makes in its creation—some new information not reducible to the input data. But this is what’s being supplied through prompting, inpainting, selecting areas to rework, and so on—a sequence of choices. So perhaps, one should view such artworks more like works of collage, even if the original elements are ‘remixed’ beyond recognition: the choices are in how to combine them.
Inventing novel computer algorithms is itself a creative act involving many choices. I know one person who, for some projects, might do something like come up with a type of neural network, decide what data to train it on and how, code and test different ways of rendering the output, go back to the beginning and modify everything because he does not like how it looks, etc.
That seems like an incredible claim to make.
I highly doubt that any artist in history created something that didn’t stem entirely from the input data that came into their brain transformed by a deterministic process, perhaps with some pseudorandomness thrown in. But that’s because I didn’t believe that brains break the laws of physics.
The only claim I’m making there is a conditional one—you may well hold that there’s nothing unique about creativity. (But the idea you seem to have that the only way for human action to introduce something genuinely novel is to break the laws of physics is ill conceived; but as this is hardly the place to hash this out, here’s a paper providing a model of how something like that could work.)
That’s not what I said at all.
That said, something “genuinely novel” still depends on the inputs that are put in. Those inputs can be mixed up to the point that they are “genuinely novel”, but the inputs still exist, and must exist.
You said:
I never said that “there is nothing unique about human creativity”. But the choices an artist makes in the creation of art are reducible to the input data his brain takes in, plus the processing his brain does, which is deterministic (although it may involve pseudorandomness)