Ngl, Marge’s current voice fills me with a dread I can’t fully convey.
I Know What You Did Last Year At Marienbad
@montresaurusrex.bsky.social
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I don’t think you can be convinced that a picture of a poster of a silk print of a replica of the Mona Lisa is the same as the Mona Lisa, even though they’re the same picture. I don’t think you would try to make someone mad by ripping up a picture of the Shroud of Turin.
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And of course you know this, you’re just being obtuse. I don’t think you’d pay a million dollars for a poster of a Rembrandt, and if an original somehow wound up legally in your possession, I very much doubt you’d sell it for the same price as a well-made replica.
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What I said was “art is a conversation between the artist and the audience”; meaning can only be created between two parties. The viewer of course has a say, but is not, ultimately, the arbiter of meaning in an artistic work.
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Tl;dr:
AI would need to do what other art forms intrinsically can’t, and have the ability for artists to confer meaning by accident skill and circumstance. It hasn’t done the first and probably can’t do the second.
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However beautiful those pictures may or may not be, I’m not involved in the shooting of them, outside of describing what I want the picture to look like. Why would I describe myself as a photographer?
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To reinforce my point, let’s say I told my camera to get a specific picture of a cardinal, and it sprouted legs and ran into the woods, only returning when if thought it had fulfilled whatever criteria I described. Am I still the photographer? I wouldn’t say so, I didn’t line up the shot.
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What I’m trying to say is there is nothing of you in the image, save whatever you told the machine to make. The artist is absent. You are, at best, a commissioner of machine-made images. And I just don’t think there’s artistic value in that.
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My painting of a cardinal can have the sun anywhere in the sky, that’s inherently a question of intent. My photo can only have the sun where it is. With AI, I can put the sun wherever I want, or barring that, simply trust the machine to put it somewhere. My audience doesn’t know either way.
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A cardinal painted in watercolor says something different than one in acrylic, one shot on film stock conveys something different than one shot on an iPhone. An AI generated cardinal cannot have that nuance, because whatever detail might be there wasn’t put there by you.