Can AI Make Art? notesonattentionpaid.com
@mbkriegh A very thoughtful post. I'm reminded of this explicit, but perceptive, interview question posed to Aaron Draplin about cheap, 2D printed signs slowly replacing all of the hand-crafted, 3D signage across America. Whether it’s sign designers using Adobe Illustrator defaults or photographers processing their images with apps, the artistic value isn’t decided by nostalgia. It is, as you pointed out, the “similarities between observable fact and inner experience” that causes people to pause. If your photographs attract more engagement when you apply Hipstamatic filters to them, is that because of the filters themselves or is it because you used the right one with the right photo to captured a shared experience of seeing a mundane view when the sun is just right? To criticize my own question, does engagement even equate to artistic value? We live in an interesting time.
@gregmoore thanks! I struggled with this one a bit because there were a lot of side channels I could dive down. Hard to keep it focused. I will watch the video you linked tomorrow. Thanks for sharing.
@mbkriegh It’s a very thoughtful post on a difficult subject. I don’t mean my questions to be critical of your thinking. Photo processing is a very good thread to pull on this subject because it seems to have similar questions but has been with us a lot longer.
@gregmoore I don’t feel criticized at all and sorry if my reply made you think I did. I very much appreciate your thoughtful in return reply. Thank you!
@jasonekratz when I say cheating it's because it tends to be a quick and easy path to making a photograph that is likable which is a quick and easy path to getting likes in social media and that is how it is most often used. It isn't that I don't believe an artistic statement can be made with it. It's that it puts me in a direct struggle with, is this art or is it just likable? I haven't been able to resolve the Hipstamatic effects into something I consider to be art.
You talk about Adams and dodging and burning. Well, there's an artisanal skill to doing it well. It's not only about choosing the moment to deploy. The various filters of Hipstamatic require mostly the skill of choice of when and on what to use. Dodging and burning is not an "everywo/man's" tool. Hipstamatic is.
A lot depends on what your definition of art is, what you need art to do for you. I opened the post with a quote from Robert Adams that attempts to define art. Do you accept that definition? Just as Robert Adams seems to, I want photographs or sets of photographs to be shooting for something beyond likable. I wan't them to have some kind of intellectual content, not just emotional content.
Interestingly, the Hipstamatic effect, when I first encountered and used it, became the basis for an aesthetic stream that led to my Dark Matter work. I began to explore how to make the Hipstamatic effect in Lightroom, my photo editing platform of choice. It led me to push outside the boundaries of Hipstamatic and my normal editing and I arrived at an aesthetic that was quite different and suited to the artistic statement I was trying to make. Whether its art in the sense that Robert Adams speaks of is for other people to decide, but it is a satisfying body of work for me and is, for me, quite definitely about more than making something likable, although it has been the most publicly likable work I have done. It is also a contemporary example of the difference between dodge and burn and readymade filters.
This finally leads me back to can AI make art? What is clear is that AI is an everywo/man's tool. Everywo/man is able to make very artful things with it. But are those things art, or are they just pleasing? I think it's also probable art in the Robert Adam's sense will be made with it.
I appreciate your thoughtful and questioning reply. It's helped me refine my thinking a bit on the subject.
@gregmoore I watched the Aaron Draplin video and agree with the sentiment. Thanks for sharing! It's become quite easy to make bad art/design and charge a bunch of money for it.
@jasonekratz I love VSCO’s presets and how they can become a familiar starting place for what you want the finished photo to look like. I just wish they had a way to use them in iOS that wasn’t their social app. Pixelmator Photo has taken its place for me.
Whether it’s simple color filters or ML processing, I personally draw the line at the point where applying it leads to a sort of mindless uniformity I didn’t really intend. It’s something I noticed back in the old Instagram days where the grid of my photos became ugly blocks of whatever filter I was favoring at the time. I had fallen into a rut where I wasn’t communicating my photo’s subjects as much as visual trends. I was poisoning my well so I made a personal rule not to use any filter I couldn’t immediately start changing.