this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2024
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Why would real meaning and messages be harder to find, does AI generated art inherently have less meaning?
Let's say I wanted to convey the message that oil companies are destroying the environment so , throwing subtlety out the window, come up with an idea of "a vampiric oil baron draining mother nature of oil", does the picture that is generated from me putting that prompt into an AI generator have any less meaning then if I actually drew it myself?
For all the advances in AI it still lacks intentionality, and always will under these current models, that has to be supplied by the person in the form of a prompt. I'd say that intention is the source of messages and meaning in art. AI just allows people without technical abilities in art to express those intentions, feelings and messages.
I can't speak for everyone, but for me personally, yes I feel like art is less interesting now. Over the past couple years or so I've found that I'm less impressed by art that I see online.
I'm not an artist, and I'm not someone who seeks out art to appreciate it. I'm just talking about art that I scroll past on the internet. I find it less interesting now. I assume that it's all AI generated, and if it's not, I figure it might as well be. It's just not interesting to me anymore. The image generated by a prompt is no more interesting or thought provoking than the prompt itself.
Digital art maybe, but real art you can touch, hold and feel? No AI will ever replace that.
Now imagine that 100 oil employees make good looking ai art to show mother nature either sharing the oil with someone to help them in some way, or even make it look like oil is helping remove a cancer or something from herself. 100 different variations of this. How impactful is your message compared to theirs? Will people even see yours?
If anything this was worse under the old system. Making art previously costed a lot of money, you had to pay the artists for their time and money, and better artists cost more. So in the past that oil company could commission 100 top quality artists to make corporate propaganda while a person who cares for the environment but has no money could only make a drawing limited by their own personal technical artistic ability, which could be just stick figures.
This is why "high quality" consumerist and capitalist "art" and branding in the form of advertising is so abundant meanwhile anti-consumerist, anti-capitalist art is rarer, no one's paying to get it made.
Now any cause, regardless of money, can create at least mid art to get there message across. Those causes can also have way more people behind them then an oil company can reasonably hire
It's sort of like how the gun changed how power worked. Previously a king could use there resources to pay for a smaller army of well equipped highly trained knights to subjugate a group of people. Then when the gun came training and equipment didn't matter nearly as much and it became more of a numbers game, and to get those numbers rulers needed to give more power to the masses in order to be able to marshall them for their cause. Those rulers who didn't got overthrown in revolutions.
So AIs are force multipliers. Got it.
You are correct and it drives people crazy. Just consider, though, that people were saying that the web allowing anyone to publish their views as fact would undermine the averages person's ability to know what is true. It kind of did.
I don't have a hot take. I agree with you. But I also think this will change things in ways we don't fully understand yet.