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I've a though experiment about AI and art.
We have 2 black boxes in front of us. One houses a great digital painter, whom can create any art upon request. He is so good that he is the pinnacle of art. Another is an AI that does it's AI thing to generate images. However, both have improved so much that their results have converged a "peak art" and is identical to each other. Now, as a human. You can ask the black boxes to paint. How do you tell the AI box apart from the human?
By definition you can't. From some POV. Humans are wet computers. And there's no way to tell them apart besides invoking magic like soul or asserting humans are special. Which I think is counter productive.
6 days ago
fwiw, I've found that skepticism about the human soul/metaphysics is an (often unexamined), unhelpful pre-judgment. Lots of important parts of our experience go unanswered if we're simply wet computers. Who says there's no soul? If there's no soul, what justification do you personally have for getting depressed? imo this is an example of GIGO... reductive assumptions about human nature produce a reduced vision of human purpose and happiness. · 1 day ago
Technique at the mechanisms of producing images is only a *part* of the artist's task. Works of art are also rich with symbol, meaning, message, context, purpose, etc. I haven't yet seen an AI model that understands symbolism, but supposing that one could produce symbolic elements: it's still responding to the prompt from the initial artist, making the image generation model nothing more than an excellent paintbrush. · 1 day ago
Art is a means of communicating something from a fragile, complex human to a set of other fragile, complex humans. It's very specifically a means of communicating some emotional complexity that is otherwise difficult to put to words. I've no need for an interpretation of emotion from a machine, even if the image is identical. Art is not the end-product, it is the process. · 5 days ago
Peak art does not exist. Art quality does not have a loss function for humans and computers to optimize. Therefore, I think your thought experiment has an important issue. · 5 days ago
Art, in its highest form, requires context outside itself. It's necessarily part of a cultural conversation. Part of our assessment of art is then necessarily a question of whether we want to be in conversation with the artist behind the art, IMO. · 5 days ago