What is the future of human art?

[CalebZhass]

Trigger warning:

This thread might contain discussions of "AI" and its future on creative arts. If you are absolutely infuriated by the concept of "AI" or how it related to lit, please just stop reading here. I respect your stance and even though I would love to hear your perspective, I believe your health and happiness more important than indulging my curiosity. No, I am not trying to organize a secret cabal here to overthrow the rules, I am just genuinely interested in a discussion about some of the things I saw mentioned.​

Plea:

This is a sensitive topic, let's be mindful of each other's feelings in all directions. If you feel someone steps on yours, assume it was a mistake and try not to jerk your knee in response, but if possible let's all avoid stepping on each other's toes. If any mod feels this thread is a bad idea, please feel free to close it down.​

So, with those two out of the way, the premise is really simple. We have a technology which eventually - within the foreseeable future - is going to dominate our everyday lives. It already has some profound impact on literature and graphical artistry, but that impact is likely going to become much more significant as the technology progresses.

The main question is. What do we stand to lose.
- On the very short term, with AI technology being like this, as it gets wider acceptance?
- On the longer term, when AI gets to the point, that it can mimic our creativity and work perfectly or even surpass it?

What do we stand to gain? If anything.

On a more philosophical level: what do we even bring to the table, as humans, when it comes to art?
When you read a piece of art, does it matter how much effort went into it? Do you enjoy something more, knowing that someone struggled for endless nights to find the right expression as opposed to the work of the person who just asked around to get ideas from their writer friends? (or AI buddies - as sad as that might sound)

Finally, what are your hopes for our future with regards to AI in art? How do you see AI in your future life, if it's in it at all?

To kick it off, here are my answers to those questions:
- On the short term, I believe it's mostly sleep we will lose, as the controversies surrounding the unregulated, irresponsible and/or unmitigated use of AI will create all sorts of problems for people. What we see on Lit or how others struggle to find their own footing in this new landscape are prime examples of this.
- We will also see industries turned upside down, Neo-Luddite movements cropping up, fighting against the inevitable.

- On the long term, the main loss I believe will be our ability of being surprised by art. An AI artist can give you exactly what you want, always and future AI will be able to give you what you want perfectly. Sure, you will be able to ask it to surprise you, but the thrill of discovering something will be gone. You will just be handed random things that you either like or do not like, but you will not have the active action of 'looking for it' that gets rewarded when you finally find it. Other than that, when it comes to the actual mechanical form of the art in question, I believe AI art and human art will become interchangeable sooner than most of us would like.
- We might also lose the sense of need, without which there really can be no sense of fulfillment. If I can just ask the AI to give me anything I want any time I want, then I will never need anything. All my needs have been met.

- As for gains, I think it's obvious. If you think of something, you can just have the AI make it for you. Want to have a fancy decoration, just have the AI design it and 3D print it out for you. Want to have a particularly themed song? Just ask for it. Illustration for something? Just ask for it. In a sense, it is the consumerism utopia, especially since these AIs would likely be in the hands of a few big companies due to their sheer size and the technological requirements to run them.

- on the philosophical level, I don't believe in the soul. I think that everything in the universe can be reproduced as long as we can map its composition properly and have the means of reproducing that composition. In the age of quantum computing and neural networks, that we will eventually make a computer brain that can think and feel just like us is inevitable. I think we will soon possess the capacity to create machines that can surpass us in every possible mental characteristic and this scares the hell out of me, as I do not consider our species grown up enough to start playing God and create intelligent, thinking beings. Then again, we were never good when it came to restraining ourselves to the sensible, so as I wrote above, I find that this is inevitable and might also happen a lot sooner than we would like, if it has not happened already.

 

[alohadave]

Fuck this forum software really sucks sometimes.

AI will be able to give you what you want perfectly. Sure, you will be able to ask it to surprise you, but the thrill of discovering something will be gone. You will just be handed random things that you either like or do not like, but you will not have the active action of 'looking for it' that gets rewarded when you finally find it.

That sounds exactly like art today. There are tons of curated sources that will give you exactly what you tell them you want.

Serendipity is always there and no amount of curation will eliminate it. You have the choice to seek out new and different things, or you can stay in your silo of homogeneity and see the same formula on repeat. AI doesn't change this.

On a more philosophical level: what do we even bring to the table, as humans, when it comes to art?
When you read a piece of art, does it matter how much effort went into it? Do you enjoy something more, knowing that someone struggled for endless nights to find the right expression as opposed to the work of the person who just asked around to get ideas from their writer friends? (or AI buddies - as sad as that might sound)

AI is not intelligent. It is not self-aware. What humans bring is the creativity. ChatGPT can string words together, but it is not creating anything. It's putting words in order based on statistical probabilities.

AI can respond to prompts, but humans are the ones coming up with the prompts. Humans are selecting what works, what doesn't. Humans decide which avenues to explore based on their actual intelligence. Humans are directing the process.

If AI became self-aware and had true consciousness, then I'd treat them like a human as far as creativity is concerned. But even with AI, I'd still write, because they are my stories. You might ask the question now, with 8 billion people, what makes my work worth anything? It has worth to me, because it's mine. This doesn't change if there is self-aware AI, it just adds more entities who are writing and creating. It doesn't make what I write worth less.

As an example, I used to make wooden spoons. I can buy metal spoons for short money that are better in every respect than what I can carve. But the things I carved are unique and made by me. Both the process and output are important for that.

One last thing, before I close this out. I think that many people are afraid of not being able to tell the difference between human created and AI. And my question is: If you can't tell the difference, does the difference matter?

 

[ElectricBlue]

They said the same about photography nearly two hundred years ago.

Charcoal, graphite pencils, pastels and paint. Paper surfaces, the texture of timber and stone. Eat your "heart" out, AI art. It might mimic, but it will never have a human heart.

I wonder if the OP wrote his piece all by himself. Just curious.

 

[CalebZhass]

They said the same about photography nearly two hundred years ago.

Charcoal, graphite pencils, pastels and paint. Paper surfaces, the texture of timber and stone. Eat your "heart" out, AI art. It might mimic, but it will never have a human heart.

I wonder if the OP wrote his piece all by himself. Just curious.

You are comparing a technological improvement in a tool to something that has the potential to surpass us, humans. The ones using the tools and in more ways than one.

You are right of course, it will never have a human heart. But then what we call "human heart" in the art context is really the capacity to feel and create / feel and reflect upon our feelings in our art and actions. Both of those come from the brain.
So the real question is this: will we be able to make machines that can feel? Because if we do, then that you are saying, while still true in the strict meaning of the words, would not be correct as far as the deeper implied meaning is concerned.

As for whether or not I wrote the OP myself, this is not the first time this was asked of me in various posts. To satisfy your curiosity, yes. I wrote it myself. If you have any idea how I can satisfy your curiosity any better than this, I am happy to oblige.

 

[M_K_Babalon]

AI ART‽

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

As advanced as it may get, I don’t see AI ever capturing the creativity and nuanced emotions a human can experience. The art it creates may be technically perfect, but will always lack souls.

 

[mrs_mackenzie]

Media, artistic or otherwise, created by AI has to be derivative because the AI itself is "trained" on existing material. When it comes to media which is already trivial or derivative, like advertising copy or blurbs for books, then AI really excels because it knows exactly what it's trying to create. And I think this is what unnerves people.

But if you spend twenty minutes in a modern art gallery you can see instantly that AI simply can't create 'art', because it can't explore anything new or topical or challenging. It can't write 'literature' because although it can sound literary, it can't generate those truly original and unique elements that make storytelling so compelling.

 

[CalebZhass]

As advanced as it may get, I don’t see AI ever capturing the creativity and nuanced emotions a human can experience. The art it creates may be technically perfect, but will always lack souls.

I have probably spent one too many hours thinking about this topic in recent months, but I always came down to the same question. Why? What makes our creativity so special. I mean if we exclude the esoteric, like souls or divine aspects of existence and consider life as purely a biological function, we are little more than very complex biochemical machines that can think for themselves.

We are slowly reaching the point where we can recreate these same complexities in our own designs.

What is to say, that if we mimic our brains completely (or even surpass it in its complexity), then what we create would not have the same, or even bigger capacity to have emotions, be creative.. to have a soul of their own.

I mean if we assume that there is something beyond our scientific grasp that we will never be able to recreate, a soul of sorts, then the equation becomes simple, the AI will never be able to become our equals in art.

Being a rational man and not having any evidence to support the existence of a soul, I am more inclined to lean towards the first scenario. I can from my part accept the second version as an explanation, even if it makes any subsequent discussion of the subject moot for obvious reasons.

In a weird way, I would love that to be the case, as that would mean there is still hope for us. That we cannot just create something better than us, making ourselves obsolete in the process.

Media, artistic or otherwise, created by AI has to be derivative because the AI itself is "trained" on existing material. When it comes to media which is already trivial or derivative, like advertising copy or blurbs for books, then AI really excels because it knows exactly what it's trying to create. And I think this is what unnerves people.

But if you spend twenty minutes in a modern art gallery you can see instantly that AI simply can't create 'art', because it can't explore anything new or topical or challenging. It can't write 'literature' because although it can sound literary, it can't generate those truly original and unique elements that make storytelling so compelling.

You are right of course, for where AI is today. What I am contemplating here is where our future lies, as the AI you see today will seem ridiculously, utterly basic in just 5 years, maybe even sooner.

As for training, yes. The AI is trained on existing material, just like you are. The difference between you and the AI is that your brain is still vastly more complex than the AI's and can form connections that the current generation AIs are simply not complex enough to mimic. What is knowledge after all, what is creativity? How do we come up with a new idea? Does it just suddenly pop into existence out of nothing, or is it maybe our brain combining a myriad of different aspects of our past life experiences? If its the latter, which I honestly believe it to be, then the AI being truly creative is just a matter of neural network complexity and the amount of data it was trained on.

Sidenote: the amount of data we are talking about is already staggering. ChatGPT is easily most knowledgable and in certain ways 'smarter', than any other human being currently or ever alive, when it comes to how much it knows. What it lacks yet is the ability to make refined enough connections between various bits and pieces of information it has digested.

 

[EroticFriction]

I wish it wasn't called AI. I don't believe any of the tools I've used and experimented with can actually be called intelligence... yet. Statistical probabilities galore, but no creative spark.

In my dayjob I use some extremely sophisticated tools to make moving images look 'finished' and or nicer. There are currently AI toolsets in several of the systems used commercially for this purpose. More realistically they are neural net engine type tools designed to take fuzzy problems and calculate/implement solutions very rapidly, like finding a face and marking that out, for example. I used to use them, the system I'm on right now doesn't have any, and frankly I miss them. But, not one of those tools labeled 'AI' can do even a remotely sufficient job of duplicating what I do. Yet... But for certain tasks, the repetitive, shitty ones, yeah I'll use them if I have access.

Some day I don't doubt cheapskate producers will try and rely on AI for color grading low and mid-grade content. And maybe some day it'll be for the bigger glossier stuff too, who knows. I hope not.

For creative projects I think it's a different story. And I do believe there is plenty of room for explicity labeled AI created or assisted creative works. But the landscape right now is too treacherous, I don't want to wade in it professionally for personal and moral reasons.

That said, I've played with a few 'AI' tools, and they are compelling to some degree. I messed around with SUDOWRITE (a hybrid of Claude 2, GPT-4, GPT-3.5) as a brainstorming device, but not a single paragraph it produced (and I used up all 65k characters alotted) would suffice as finished writing, in my opinion. I did like some of the wild tangents it went on, and could see using something like this for getting out of a stuck place. But tarot cards, dice, or index cards with random words do that quite well also

Ok, it was more coherent than most of my word-cutups I used to do when I was trying to be like William Buroughs... wonder what kind of expletives he would have used to describe ChatGPT.

My industry just spent almost the entire year striking over the very real existential crisis of AI in our midst. While I don't think it's right or feasible to try and eliminate a new tech, I do believe this one, helped along by some of the most powerful profit motivated investors and lobbying interests on the planet right now, needs to be tightly regulated, but like that's actually going to happen...

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

I have probably spent one too many hours thinking about this topic in recent months, but I always came down to the same question. Why? What makes our creativity so special. I mean if we exclude the esoteric, like souls or divine aspects of existence and consider life as purely a biological function, we are little more than very complex biochemical machines that can think for themselves.

We are slowly reaching the point where we can recreate these same complexities in our own designs.

What is to say, that if we mimic our brains completely (or even surpass it in its complexity), then what we create would not have the same, or even bigger capacity to have emotions, be creative.. to have a soul of their own.

I mean if we assume that there is something beyond our scientific grasp that we will never be able to recreate, a soul of sorts, then the equation becomes simple, the AI will never be able to become our equals in art.

Being a rational man and not having any evidence to support the existence of a soul, I am more inclined to lean towards the first scenario. I can from my part accept the second version as an explanation, even if it makes any subsequent discussion of the subject moot for obvious reasons.

In a weird way, I would love that to be the case, as that would mean there is still hope for us. That we cannot just create something better than us, making ourselves obsolete in the process.


You are right of course, for where AI is today. What I am contemplating here is where our future lies, as the AI you see today will seem ridiculously, utterly basic in just 5 years, maybe even sooner.

As for training, yes. The AI is trained on existing material, just like you are. The difference between you and the AI is that your brain is still vastly more complex than the AI's and can form connections that the current generation AIs are simply not complex enough to mimic. What is knowledge after all, what is creativity? How do we come up with a new idea? Does it just suddenly pop into existence out of nothing, or is it maybe our brain combining a myriad of different aspects of our past life experiences? If its the latter, which I honestly believe it to be, then the AI being truly creative is just a matter of neural network complexity and the amount of data it was trained on.

Sidenote: the amount of data we are talking about is already staggering. ChatGPT is easily most knowledgable and in certain ways 'smarter', than any other human being currently or ever alive, when it comes to how much it knows. What it lacks yet is the ability to make refined enough connections between various bits and pieces of information it has digested.

Simple. It’s the emotion, the passion, the feeling and intuition. At its best AI will degenerate to a series on ones and zeroes. It will be cold and clinical, exacting, too exacting. It will imitate and approximate emotion, but I don’t believe it will ever truly feel it or create it through its art.

 

[CalebZhass]

I wish it wasn't called AI. I don't believe any of the tools I've used and experimented with can actually be called intelligence... yet. Statistical probabilities galore, but no creative spark.

I am with you, brother. I started calling it AI, because frankly, some of the more complex ones are frighteningly close to it, but in reality, LLMs are at their core statistical models used to figure out the most likely next word.

 

[Sinstories]

I am with you, brother. I started calling it AI, because frankly, some of the more complex ones are frighteningly close to it, but in reality, LLMs are at their core statistical models used to figure out the most likely next word.

Took a class on AI and you are correct. What we are seeing is nothing more than predictive analysis, the same logic that is used to tell you how to get to grandma's house, applied to a different data set. Even the name machine learning is somewhat misleading, it is really just programming the model...what's really frightening to me is the way they can "teach" the model to discount information that isn't acceptable, has quite a 1984 ring to it.

 

[Bazzle]

These three images are roughly 80-100 years apart of the same location in the UK.
One is a lithograph print, the second a photo. Both are art? But technology has improved...I then put the same location into Bing create...
Three different generations of art for the same location? Probably 100 years apart. Very different view!

 

[ElectricBlue]

So the real question is this: will we be able to make machines that can feel? Because if we do, then that you are saying, while still true in the strict meaning of the words, would not be correct as far as the deeper implied meaning is concerned.

Mimicry is nothing close to intelligence - I honestly don't know why the notion of intelligence keeps getting raised.

As for feelings and emotion? In my world view, that requires a living memory that remains active, not a database that responds to a query. And the ability to see a sunset. The AI just sees a bright circle, but wouldn't have a clue about Kandinsky.

 

[EroticFriction]

Feels like graphic artists are in the greatest jeopardy right now. My guess is the courts are going to have to decide how much people give a shit wether graphic artists can still viably earn a living or not. Music, too. Writing will be next, and eventually all moving visuals. From deepfake recreations of characters and actors to ai generative movies. Someone's going to have to decide what's worth what.

For now the really creative graphic works won't have competition. But there are probably millions of human beings making a living producing fairly mid level wrote grahpics that can be out of a job tomorrow.

And eventually? I believe some kind of non-human sentience is possible for machines. Don't believe it's a good idea, and I'm not super looking forward to that. Even if it's not a skynet apocalypse, the havoc it can potentially wreak... will the benefits be worth it for anyone but the investors?

 

[ElectricBlue]

Simple. It’s the emotion, the passion, the feeling and intuition. At its best AI will degenerate to a series on ones and zeroes. It will be cold and clinical, exacting, too exacting. It will imitate and approximate emotion, but I don’t believe it will ever truly feel it or create it through its art.

Yep, this. It's like digitally recorded music versus analog.

EB puts another record on the turntable, and sits back to enjoy the music. The room is illuminated by the glow of old electron tubes - no ones and zeroes there!

 

[ElectricBlue]

And eventually? I believe some kind of non-human sentience is possible for machines. Don't believe it's a good idea, and I'm not super looking forward to that. Even if it's not a skynet apocalypse, the havoc it can potentially wreak... will the benefits be worth it for anyone but the investors?

Simple. Pull the plug out of the wall. The thing don't work without electricity. Tesla and Edison have a lot to answer for .

 

[CalebZhass]

Yep, this. It's like digitally recorded music versus analog.

EB puts another record on the turntable, and sits back to enjoy the music. The room is illuminated by the glow of old electron tubes - no ones and zeroes there!

I just love your examples. So vivid, so picturesque, yet still so ... well... as with so many things, the advantages of analog audio versus digital audio in the end boil down to a religious debate, as there is no science out there that can prove, that analog is in any way better for human consumption. Even the ones with the best ears out there are virtually too deaf to hear the difference between a sufficiently high sample rate digital track and an analog one. Let's not even talk about average folks, for whom even medium sampling will be indistinguishable from the original.
Still, some people simply like analog more, because on paper it sounds better and that is important for them.

I guess since music is pretty much about the experience, that belief itself matters a lot in this context.
I have learned to accept arguments like that as being true from the perspective of the one saying them.
Personally, I'm too much of a pragmatist - maybe to my detriment - and cannot consider something 'better' or 'worse', unless I can experience that difference somehow.

edit: thinking about it, I guess this might be true for other types of art as well. As in, for some people, just the knowledge that it was made by a human instead of a machine could enhance the experience. Interesting thought.

 

[M_K_Babalon]

As advanced as it may get, I don’t see AI ever capturing the creativity and nuanced emotions a human can experience. The art it creates may be technically perfect, but will always lack souls.

It is not perfect

 

[M_K_Babalon]

I wish it wasn't called AI. I don't believe any of the tools I've used and experimented with can actually be called intelligence... yet. Statistical probabilities galore, but no creative spark.

In my dayjob I use some extremely sophisticated tools to make moving images look 'finished' and or nicer. There are currently AI toolsets in several of the systems used commercially for this purpose. More realistically they are neural net engine type tools designed to take fuzzy problems and calculate/implement solutions very rapidly, like finding a face and marking that out, for example. I used to use them, the system I'm on right now doesn't have any, and frankly I miss them. But, not one of those tools labeled 'AI' can do even a remotely sufficient job of duplicating what I do. Yet... But for certain tasks, the repetitive, shitty ones, yeah I'll use them if I have access.

Some day I don't doubt cheapskate producers will try and rely on AI for color grading low and mid-grade content. And maybe some day it'll be for the bigger glossier stuff too, who knows. I hope not.

For creative projects I think it's a different story. And I do believe there is plenty of room for explicity labeled AI created or assisted creative works. But the landscape right now is too treacherous, I don't want to wade in it professionally for personal and moral reasons.

That said, I've played with a few 'AI' tools, and they are compelling to some degree. I messed around with SUDOWRITE (a hybrid of Claude 2, GPT-4, GPT-3.5) as a brainstorming device, but not a single paragraph it produced (and I used up all 65k characters alotted) would suffice as finished writing, in my opinion. I did like some of the wild tangents it went on, and could see using something like this for getting out of a stuck place. But tarot cards, dice, or index cards with random words do that quite well also

Ok, it was more coherent than most of my word-cutups I used to do when I was trying to be like William Buroughs... wonder what kind of expletives he would have used to describe ChatGPT.

My industry just spent almost the entire year striking over the very real existential crisis of AI in our midst. While I don't think it's right or feasible to try and eliminate a new tech, I do believe this one, helped along by some of the most powerful profit motivated investors and lobbying interests on the planet right now, needs to be tightly regulated, but like that's actually going to happen...

But it is Ai. There are different types, and sure you're basically doing a boolean search to make a picture, but it has to figure out how to create that picture. Even google maps uses an ai.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I just love your examples. So vivid, so picturesque, yet still so ... well... as with so many things, the advantages of analog audio versus digital audio in the end boil down to a religious debate, as there is no science out there that can prove, that analog is in any way better for human consumption.

There's no real debate that high sample digital (196 kHz) can match tape and vinyl for bandwidth (and digital has more dynamic range), but I'm even more old school luddite than that.

There's a definitive paper from the seventies, by Russell Hamm, that explains the difference between first order harmonics (from transistors) vs second order harmonics (from electron tubes).

If nature thought digital sound perception was superior, we'd all have one bit ears that work on pulses. Funny thing, eh, that we don't .

 

[Sinstories]

But it is Ai. There are different types, and sure you're basically doing a boolean search to make a picture, but it has to figure out how to create that picture. Even google maps uses an ai.

The point he's making, and one I agree with is, calling it AI is a bit of a misnomer. It is, just as google maps is, machine learning. The machine is fed vasts amount of information and provided with instructions on what to do with that information. It then performs those acts based on the information provided. I do not see that as intelligence, it is the same as a person memorizing a large number of facts and regurgitating them on a test. Not intelligence, just memory and recall. The intelligence is the programming that tells the machine what to do with the data.

To use your google maps example, it calculates the cost (time) of going from point A to B, B to C, C to D, etc, then adds the up, does the same for other options to get to D, then recommends the low cost route (shortest time). That's following directions, it's a really complex tool, not intelligence.

The interesting way to look at this in terms of the OP is, if the machine learning applications are viewed as tools (replacing a paint brush for example) is art created using those tools still a valid form of art. The expertise is using the tool to create the outcome (I have a crap ton of tools, but am a terrible carpenter, so just the existence of the tool doesn't take away from the value of the work it takes to achieve the outcome).

I see us in one of those deflection points. Think back to the turn of the century when the internet was exploding on the scene. How many businesses were fighting to make it go away, to stop e-commerce, etc. They were fighting a no win battle. Those that survived and prospered were the ones that learned how to leverage the new tool, not try to prevent the inevitable. AI in all it's forms is not going away, and it's not going to replace people, it will however, change what people need to do and be able to do to be successful in some things. Just like the blacksmith with the advent of the car, the world moves on, some have to adapt.

 

[Sinstories]

Mimicry is nothing close to intelligence - I honestly don't know why the notion of intelligence keeps getting raised.

As for feelings and emotion? In my world view, that requires a living memory that remains active, not a database that responds to a query. And the ability to see a sunset. The AI just sees a bright circle, but wouldn't have a clue about Kandinsky.

Actually, it doesn't see a bright circle, it sees billions of 1s and 0s and uses the term "Bright circle" to refer to it because a human told it that that combination of 1s and 0s is called a bright circle.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

One of these is "art", the other is soulless AI drivel. I know which one I'd rather look at.

As ElectricBlue mentioned, it isn't any different than the debate the painters and photographers had more than a century ago.
AI doesn't create anything on it's own. It responds to an ARTISTS prompts.

 

[Britva415]

Technology will never stop humans from making human art.

With or without the use of new technology.

I’m starting to think of AI the way we started thinking about sampling, in music. Attitudes toward the use of AI today is roughly where attitudes toward the use of samples was in, say, 1991, with a whole shitload of people insisting that it was uncreative, not art, and pure ripoff.

I mean, some of it was. Maybe still is. But I don’t think anyone today can argue in good faith that there is no place for sampling in music or that its use is automatically “not art,” whether talking about the aesthetic, creative, technical, legal or ethical angles.

This is what I expect to happen with AI. In the long run, nobody will be forced to use AI, artists will always be able to succeed without it, there will be established legal and ethical guardrails around its use, there will continue to be humans who try (and succeed at) circumventing them at the expense of artists, and there will be effects and techniques which we can’t imagine today but will become ubiquitous, well worn, recognizable, and deconstructable tropes in art and music.