Today I read Cory Doctorows latest post, Why I Don’t Like AI Art, and really appreciated his approach to defining art and how the use of AI tools diluted the meaning within works of art.
…the prompt given to an AI to produce creative writing or an image is the sum total of the communicative intent infused into the work. The prompter has a big, numinous, irreducible feeling and they want to infuse it into a work in order to materialize versions of that feeling in your mind and mine. When they deliver a single line’s worth of description into the prompt box, then – by definition – that’s the only part that carries any communicative freight. The AI has taken one sentence’s worth of actual communication intended to convey the big, numinous, irreducible feeling and diluted it amongst a thousand brushtrokes or 10,000 words. I think this is what we mean when we say AI art is soul-less and sterile. … the AI is padding out the part that makes this art – the microdecisions intended to convey the big, numinous, irreducible feeling – with a bunch of stuff that has no communicative intent and therefore can’t be art.
Cory Doctorow, Why I Don’t Like AI Art
I think this resonated with me since it aligns with what I learnt from Suzy, that art is intended to communicate and to convey. When the means by which you are creating art is a prompt of only a few sentences it really limits the amount of meaning that which can be conveyed in the work.
Leave a Reply