Can AI be used to produce art?

[MattKing]

Walks like an old man.

We live near a seniors' care facility.
When I see some of the near centenarians who live there, it amazes me how well they walk. Purposefully, and with both clear intention and an awareness of their surroundings.
Way better than the way nearby teenagers walk when they are crossing the street and texting or doom scrolling at the same time!

It occurs to me that much of the discussion here about "creativity" assumes the sort of creativity that human thought has been known to bring into being.
In the spirit of "Mike" of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" fame, will we be able to recognize, and how will we deal with the sort of creativity that AI brings into being?

 

[MattKing]

Roomba company has gone bankrupt. AI might be next.

Someone will pick up the pieces

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Since AI seems to be programmed to learn from what it is fed or finds on the internet, I find it difficult to believe it can really be creative. After all, much creative work is reactionary rather than evolutionary. In art and photography, many movements came about as artists wanted to distance themselves from the status quo, Impressionism, f64, New Topographics, all breaking from tradition at the time. Can AI do that? Even prompted to, where would it turn for source material or even inspiration (if that is even possible).

Human prompts are the creative part of AI. Without them, AI just sits there doing nothing.

 

[Cholentpot]

Human prompts are the creative part of AI. Without them, AI just sits there doing nothing.

Bingo

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

I think part of it is the lack of our own imagination that also resounds in your response; you "find it difficult to believe" - well, there's a lot of stuff that happens in the cosmos that's difficult to believe. It doesn't stop DNA from replicating - one of those things that's so fragile and at the same time so robust that many people just downright refuse to believe that it wasn't purposefully designed by some entity (now that I personally find difficult to believe).

Another part is what I addressed above; what you point towards with the 'breaking tradition' is the discontinuous nature of social (and economic) developments involved in the emergence of something seemingly new. But the actual developments need not be so discontinuous at all. If you look at the movements you mention, the seminal works and artists didn't just drop out of thin air. They are deeply rooted in traditions that can be recognized. But we like to think that they were radical, or perhaps we dislike doing the legwork of figuring out where they took inspiration from. I think it's a bit of both.

I will grant you this: the movements you mention were indeed reactionary in the sense that they had an agenda to push. So far, we don't see AI behaving as a truly sentient entity in the sense that it starts to define its own interest and then attempt to serve it. I'm not sure how likely that's to happen, and whether we'll allow it, if push comes to shove. Neither am I convinced that it's crucial in answering all questions about the relationship between AI and art. Personally, I view that argument (which I might haphazardly summarize as "AI can't push its own agenda and therefore it can't produce art") as one more variant of the "AI can't do X, so it's bunk" line of argumentation. We see plenty of variants of it and I think they are much more about people pushing their own agendas than about trying to truly understand what is going on and what might happen next.

Now, one thing is blatantly obvious to me - there will be a reactionary arts movement that will use AI as part of its toolkit to try and push their agenda and make their mark upon society. Because...why the heck not? With 8 billion of us running around, every tool will be used for every imaginable purpose sooner or later, and given enough brute force and stubbornness, it succeeds in a surprisingly large number of instances.

I think we all agree that AI is a tool. But my wood saw can't think either. I have to prompt it to do it's work.

 

[Pieter12]

I think we all agree that AI is a tool. But my wood saw can't think either. I have to prompt it to do it's work.

Maybe now. But AI is certainly capable of producing its own prompts.

 

[koraks]

I think we all agree that AI is a tool. But my wood saw can't think either. I have to prompt it to do it's work.

"Think" is a problematic term. We haven't defined it. If we were to try, we probably wouldn't agree on a definition.
As to prompting, the question is how direct the prompt needs to be for it to still be human. If I directly generate an image using a prompt, then sure - that's direct enough. How about an agent that runs more or less autonomously on triggers in the outside environment that aren't human? At some point, a human decided on the general pattern of triggers, but they no longer push the actual buttons. Then how about an agent that runs agents in turn? A human may still have conceptualized the agents. But at what point do we start to regard the emergent patterns of behavior among those agents as machine-made instead of man-made? It's a grey area. Some pretty dark shades of grey, though, that are very difficult to distinguish from pitch black.

 

[MattKing]

Human prompts are the creative part of AI. Without them, AI just sits there doing nothing.

The cruise control on your car is rudimentary AI.
The thermostat in your home is rudimentary AI.
And the complex valve timing system in our 16 12 year old car - which uses oil pressure variable valve timing in conjunction with electrical systems - is a somewhat more complex version of AI.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

This is very wrong. The new generation is recursively fed, so they learn from their errors.
Think of as if they produce a lot of answers (along wrong ones) which are then becoming part of their knowledge.
This process have shown much more creativity than original ones.
And is close to evolution-self learn

My calculator never makes errors. Does that mean it thinks?

 

[Sean]

Human prompts are the creative part of AI. Without them, AI just sits there doing nothing.

They can prompt themselves:

my prompt to the ai: write a prompt for a fine art photo

response:

Here's an example of a well-crafted prompt for generating a fine art photograph using an AI image generator (like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, or DALL-E). This one is designed for a surreal, conceptual black-and-white fine art portrait, inspired by classic fine art photography styles:

Prompt:"A haunting surreal fine art portrait of a solitary ethereal woman emerging from dense fog in an abandoned Victorian greenhouse, her face partially obscured by delicate floating feathers, eyes closed in quiet contemplation, dramatic chiaroscuro lighting with deep shadows and high contrast, monochrome black and white, intricate details in textures of glass and foliage, emotional depth conveying isolation and mystery, shot on large format film with shallow depth of field, in the style of Francesca Woodman and Sally Mann, hyper-detailed, 8k resolution, masterpiece fine art photography"

Tips for customizing or creating your own:

• Subject: Describe the main element clearly (e.g., person, landscape, object).
• Style/Mood: Add "fine art photography," "surreal," "conceptual," or reference photographers (e.g., Cindy Sherman, Gregory Crewdson).
• Technical details: Include lighting (e.g., golden hour, low key), camera/film (e.g., Hasselblad, Kodak Portra), depth of field, composition.
• Quality boosters: End with "highly detailed, masterpiece, 8k, sharp focus."

I fed the above prompt into nanobanana:

My only action was to ask for a prompt and to submit the prompt it wrote. This was a very crude example but not hard to imagine this being 100x more capable a year from now.

 

[nikos79]

My calculator never makes errors. Does that mean it thinks?

The comparison to the human brain is not fair.
We have billions of neurons and our intelligence emerged as an evolutionary mechanism.
While human intelligence evolved through biology, AI develops its own kind of intelligence, a very different one.
Today it may not be conscious, but it’s already showing the ability to "think" in ways distinct from humans.
Who knows what will happen in the future.
Maybe sentience will emerge

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Who or what prompted Einstein to consider new theories?

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

The comparison to the human brain is not fair.
We have billions of neurons and our intelligence emerged as an evolutionary mechanism.
While human intelligence evolved through biology, AI develops its own kind of intelligence, a very different one.
Today it may not be conscious, but it’s already showing the ability to "think" in ways distinct from humans.
Who knows what will happen in the future.
Maybe sentience will emerge

But the argument being made by some is that AI will learn how to think and perform and be creative like humans. So you argue that AI won't think like a human because you redefined the word think. Well, changing the definition of the word "think" entirely disposes of the original argument that AI will think like a human. Now what?

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

The cruise control on your car is rudimentary AI.
The thermostat in your home is rudimentary AI.
And the complex valve timing system in our 16 year old car - which uses oil pressure variable valve timing in conjunction with electrical systems - is a somewhat more complex version of AI.

There is no creativity or humanity in any of those actions. They don;t even know I'm alive. I define what cruise and temperature settings I want. A program in these units executes them. Oil pressure settings controling the engine were determined by the auto designer, a human, and preset into the machine. This has been going on long before AI by computers and really dumb machines. The same argument you're hearing today about how smart AI is, happened when computers first came out in the 1950s and 60s. People claimed then that computers will be smarter than humans. I worked on third generation computers for Univac in the late 1960's. They're really all high-speed idiots moving ones and zeroes around. That's it. That's all they do. Computers today have just reduced the size of transistors and speed of operation. However, without human intervention with programming, they're as bright as a 50 watt light bulb. They just look smart due to their speed and the way information is displayed and the way they interact with us. There's an appearance of humanity and intelligence, even creativity. But like the Wizard of Oz, real humans are pulling the cords behind the curtain.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

They can prompt themselves:

my prompt to the ai: write a prompt for a fine art photo

response:

Here's an example of a well-crafted prompt for generating a fine art photograph using an AI image generator (like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, or DALL-E). This one is designed for a surreal, conceptual black-and-white fine art portrait, inspired by classic fine art photography styles:

Prompt:"A haunting surreal fine art portrait of a solitary ethereal woman emerging from dense fog in an abandoned Victorian greenhouse, her face partially obscured by delicate floating feathers, eyes closed in quiet contemplation, dramatic chiaroscuro lighting with deep shadows and high contrast, monochrome black and white, intricate details in textures of glass and foliage, emotional depth conveying isolation and mystery, shot on large format film with shallow depth of field, in the style of Francesca Woodman and Sally Mann, hyper-detailed, 8k resolution, masterpiece fine art photography"

Tips for customizing or creating your own:

• Subject: Describe the main element clearly (e.g., person, landscape, object).
• Style/Mood: Add "fine art photography," "surreal," "conceptual," or reference photographers (e.g., Cindy Sherman, Gregory Crewdson).
• Technical details: Include lighting (e.g., golden hour, low key), camera/film (e.g., Hasselblad, Kodak Portra), depth of field, composition.
• Quality boosters: End with "highly detailed, masterpiece, 8k, sharp focus."

I fed the above prompt into nanobanana:

View attachment 415193


My only action was to ask for a prompt and to submit the prompt it wrote. This was a very crude example but not hard to imagine this being 100x more capable a year from now.

All it did was convert your creative prompts into an image. Without your prompts, there would be nothing even there. Comparing this to photography, it would be like the photographer telling his printer to dodge here and burn there to add contrast and character and art to his photograph. Who is the creative one, the photographer or his printer?

 

[Pieter12]

All it did was convert your creative prompts into an image. Without your prompts, there would be nothing even there. Comparing this to photography, it would be like the photographer telling his printer to dodge here and burn there to add contrast and character and art to his photograph. Who is the creative one, the photographer or his printer?

Read it carefully. The prompt was created by AI.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Read it carefully. The prompt was created by AI.

I see what you mean. But Sean's original prompt was a human prompt. Without it nothing happens. AI don't have minds of their own. They have no desires, no ego, no fear, no love, no pride, no intuition, no reason to even do anything. They just sit there waiting for a human to poke it. AI doesn't know right from wrong. It has no moral basis for action. Would you want it to decide life or death? They exercise action based on programs and right now only polling past results done by other humans or other AI machines. They're mimicking others and taking somewhat random action. But random is not creativity. There are programs already that operate like dice in a crap game. Each roll of the two dice comes up with random results. Is that creative? How are the resultant prompts Sean come up with with AI different from the dice? Next time it would be just other random prompts. Where's the creativity? AI can fake looking like it has a heart, but it doesn't.

 

[Pieter12]

I see what you mean. But Sean's original prompt was a human prompt. Without it nothing happens. AI don't have minds of their own. They have no desires, no ego, no fear, no love, no pride, no intuition, no reason to even do anything. They just sit there waiting for a human to poke it. AI doesn't know right from wrong. It has no moral basis for action. Would you want it to decide life or death? They exercise action based on programs and right now only polling past results done by other humans or other AI machines. They're mimicking others and taking somewhat random action. But random is not creativity. There are programs already that operate like dice in a crap game. Each roll of the two dice comes up with random results. Is that creative? How are the resultant prompts Sean come up with with AI different from the dice? Next time it would be just other random prompts. Where's the creativity? AI can fake looking like it has a heart, but it doesn't.

We all create from prompts. Many are nonverbal and subliminal. Seeing a scene that makes you want to photograph it is a prompt. What differentiates human creativity from AI is humans can have leaps of thinking that are not associated with outside stimuli, truly creating something new. The flip side of the coin is most people don’t want new, they want warmed-over familiar.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

We all create from prompts. Many are nonverbal and subliminal. Seeing a scene that makes you want to photograph it is a prompt. What differentiates human creativity from AI is humans can have leaps of thinking that are not associated with outside stimuli, truly creating something new. The flip side of the coin is most people don’t want new, they want warmed-over familiar.

Real creativity is rare, Pieter, I agree. That's why it's so hard to do great photography that inspires. It's easier to talk about it. Or copy it.

 

[Cholentpot]

I see what you mean. But Sean's original prompt was a human prompt. Without it nothing happens. AI don't have minds of their own. They have no desires, no ego, no fear, no love, no pride, no intuition, no reason to even do anything. They just sit there waiting for a human to poke it. AI doesn't know right from wrong. It has no moral basis for action. Would you want it to decide life or death? They exercise action based on programs and right now only polling past results done by other humans or other AI machines. They're mimicking others and taking somewhat random action. But random is not creativity. There are programs already that operate like dice in a crap game. Each roll of the two dice comes up with random results. Is that creative? How are the resultant prompts Sean come up with with AI different from the dice? Next time it would be just other random prompts. Where's the creativity? AI can fake looking like it has a heart, but it doesn't.

Ah ah! You were almost there! You said 'heart' but I'm going to mess up the whole conversation with theology. AI doesn't have soul.

Aside from my personal beliefs, as a musician and general creative and imaginative person I subscribe to the idea of a soul. And I can tell you that AI doesn't have one and never will. It's souless. It's dead. It's a puppet. It'll never be allowed in my club.

 

[Pieter12]

Ah ah! You were almost there! You said 'heart' but I'm going to mess up the whole conversation with theology. AI doesn't have soul.

Aside from my personal beliefs, as a musician and general creative and imaginative person I subscribe to the idea of a soul. And I can tell you that AI doesn't have one and never will. It's souless. It's dead. It's a puppet. It'll never be allowed in my club.

Will you require the Turing test for admission?

 

[Cholentpot]

Will you require the Turing test for admission?

No, just a pulse.

 

[Pieter12]

No, just a pulse.

Standards are low. Must be in the US.

 

[Cholentpot]

Standards are low. Must be in the US.

If it weren't for low standards we'd have none at all.

 

[MattKing]

Does this help reassure you?:
https://apnews.com/video/meet-the-r...ith-dementia-7df03b8c6b874095b20b5919194e22c2