is AI Art “good art” or “technically art”?

[sco]

The art is not just the visual thing we are seeing. It is also the intent of the artist and the context in which the piece is placed. "AI" is not the artist.

[Packbat]

I almost feel like the question is less "is it art" and more "whose art is it". With the kind of generative art you're responding to, there was a lot of work that went into making the machine make the effect that the people making the machine wanted. I'm much more comfortable crediting people who did this kind of novel and transformative work than people who typed a prompr into a GAN, or GANs which were trained by scraping the internet without asking.

[EnzoDraws]

I think "what is art?/is THIS art?" is such a boring question whose answer relies entirely on 1) the fact that we made up a word and have known that word for all of our lives without ever rigorously defining it, 2) that after being asked such a question we now have to come up with our own strict definition for that made-up word in order to decide if X is ot isn't art, and 3) that it really, truly, honestly DOES NOT MATTER. Classifying something as art is about as useful as deciding if my door is giving male or female (it's totally female btw)

The better discussions to be had about an art piece is what it evokes, what ut wants to say, what it says about who made it and what it says about our human taste.

And the better discussion to be had about AI art is the fact that the technology is built on top of the life works of countless artists and that there's people out there profiting out of it while said artists gain nothing out of it. (And no Jimmy the machine isn't """inspired""" by artists like artists are)

[teagannam]

As a visual artist, I think AI art can work as art in a *decorative* or *aesthetic* sense, but not in the (far more important, imo) way that human art can interrogate ideas and instill emotion. It’s basically the equivalent of those canvas prints of random waves and splatters of color you can get at home decor stores. Two pieces can look very similar, but if one is trying to communicate something and the other is just randomly generated, the first provides us much more, because it becomes a connection between human beings.
(On the other hand, there’s a lot of meta significance you can draw from certain AI artworks, but that’s a whole other conversation, and I wouldn’t consider it “art” so much as seeing art in circumstance, like in a sunset or a poetically ironic series of events).

[humphreyspellingbee]

It's worth noting that pretty much every time a similar question has come up in the past (like, "Are photographs art? Are films art? Are video games art?"), the answer has almost invariably been "yes, " but it took a long time to develop a framework for understanding and producing it in an artistic context. I think we're starting to see the beginnings of that with AI art.

[xenontesla]

I think "the eye of the beholder" applies here. Some people may like an art piece for it's aesthetic, or the message it communicates, or history of how it was made/who made it. I personally don't really like the aesthetic of the piece, but I do like other types of generative art.

[bigsarge]

My own conclusion is that it is a form of art (I'm not informed enough to categorize it more specifically than that). A person or multiple people programmed the AI to created a changing visual aesthetic, which is artful, and now we're reaping the benefit of their effort, such as it is. It's all very interesting as both an initial stepping stone on the journey that AI will take as it changes our collective lives, and as a curiosity of our time.

[doomsdayman]

So I'm a performer who only does visual art in an amateur capacity, but after playong around with stable diffusion a bit, I would say if we consider directors to be artists, than people who use generative AI to make their art must also be artists.

[oliver-violet]

i always really appreciate your perspectives <3

[Lexsed]

I feel it’s still art, since the generative AI itself was created by someone, and thus is a tool of delivering art.
Same as that one guy I keep seeing shorts of that pokes a hole in a bucket, and lets it swing across “painting” a fascinating picture just through physics, sure he controls where and how he lets go of the bucket and stop it, but the process itself is “automated” basically.

[gaijintendo]

I used to stare into my open top washing machine mid cycle and it has shades of that

[jakeholmes]

I think it can be art, almost anything can be. My issue is the way a lot of the platforms like midjourney have been made super unethically by training on the work of living artists without their permission.

[psikeyhackr]

Personally, I would not regard that as Art. That is merely an interesting phenomenon to watch for a couple of minutes, like high waves crashing into a rocky shoreline.

[mike_wake]

AI itself cannot create art. There should be an intention behind it, an attempt to convey some feeling or thought. The kind of AI we have is nowhere near capable of doing that.
AI creations by themselves are not that different from when you google some words and open the Images tab. Sure, ai-results will be remixed and mutated by the machine. It's a very different kind of search on a technical level, but what we actually do is pretty similar.

I do believe that in theory it can be used as a tool for creating art. But most of the “ai-art” I’ve seen feels more like when a kid first discovers photoshop. They’ll have fun with the smudge tool and content-aware fill, but would you consider the results of that an “art”?
That's subjective of course.

[BrianGlaze]

I think the main issue that I have with this is that AI us using someone else's art to create. And sometimes they basically just rip-off with the other person does without giving any credit to the artist. That is a real problem that needs to be addressed before we can call anything from AI art.

[TheSyborgue]

It's very poor unevoquative art- not touching at all to me. One can craft amazingly profund generative art pieces- this isnt one of them.
It could be in any phone ad 😅

[Bonaboo]

I think it’s not “art” but still looks cool— it can be both. We consider natural formations beautiful without calling them art.

[perrymanso]

All people here answering with their wanna be profound thoughts, which end being a vacuous word salad.
The only and measurable answer is, how easily the piece can be reproduced.
THAT and only that, should be the answer, the rest is just pompous rhetoric.