alt Hacker NewsI did some logical jumps, but stepping through it holds up.
> "Art" as a term becomes meaningless with this definition. Once you disconnect art from its creation, everything becomes art.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, not in the beholden.
> A sunset can be beautiful, but it's not art if a human doesn't capture it in some way
If it is not 'captured in some way', agreed. I disagree with the human label being needed.
> The decisions of an artist are central to the whole endeavor and that is what is communicated.
This is the crux, what I disagree strongly with.
If the intention by the artist truly mattered, then a hypothetical double blind experiment can confirm this. If we have two works of art, one created by a human, and one created by a machine, (they just so happen to be byte for byte identical), and you have people one at a time decide which one is 'art' and which one is 'meaningless'.
We don't need to actually do this experiment because we all know how it would go. Because we can not measure 'intention' at all, we can not actually perceive intention. which is why we have things like the watchmaker fallacy. we are extraordinarily bad at assuming we can perceive things we we actually can't...
So if this is your position, then it is nonsense, if I have missed your position, correct me.
>> The decisions of an artist are central to the whole endeavor and that is what is communicated.
>This is the crux, what I disagree strongly with.
>If the intention by the artist truly mattered...
That is also the crux of your misinterpretation and it shows the flaws in this type of line by line communication that we're all guilty of doing because your point is refuted by the very next sentence of my original comment: "That communication doesn't have to be unambiguous, intentional, or conscious, but it has to be there to make something 'art'."
"Intentions" are motivations while "decisions" are actions. The decision by the photographer to frame a photo of a sunset in a specific way is what turns it from merely something beautiful into art. The specific motivation behind that decision is often unknowable even sometimes to the artist themselves, but a decision is knowable and communicates something. AI doesn't make decisions it just generates something based off statistics.
An artist can certainly use AI as a tool, but that doesn't make the AI output art, it makes the curation of AI output a form of art. But to mix in my other thread of comments, engaging with the AI output as its own art would be like primarily judging Duchamp's Fountain on the aesthetic qualities of the curves of the porcelain when the actual art is his decision to present that porcelain as "art".