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I'm in the fourth camp of "I used to think I had zero artistic talent, and so I was really hyped for AI art to get good, but then I actually got half decent at art myself, and now I don't want people to fall into this hole like I did because they think they're too technical minded or it's too late for them to learn art", which may or may not just be the second camp.

I acknowledge there are people who genuinely enjoy doing AI art, and I have seen some good creative stuff done with it. But I think there's not enough focus on learning that art for yourself, and I side with the "soul creativity" camp on the argument that there is some aspect of human-made art that won't ever be replicated by AI.

I'm pro AI because of this to a large extent. Artbros and their soul shit it's like a cult fr. Nobody's advocating against workers' rights or for capitalism, tech is value neutral, it's how it's used that gives it value, and FOSS models in the hands of the working class everyday folks does more good than bad.

The term “divine spark of creativity” is meaningless if it’s used to describe something created by a non-human entity. Why? Let me explain, but note that I am not biased against machine learning systems or whatever we’re calling “AI”.

From what I can remember from my studies, the act of creation (in topics as broad as art, engineering, policy making) is inherently biased towards some kind of exploration and examination of how groups of humans can function together. Humans started creating to facilitate and ensure their propagation by communicating and sharing ideas in different ways. Ultimately, if we look at how things came to be in human history (of society, culture, religion, science etc) the goal of this organization around how we think and do things is to ensure our own development as a species.

Specifically, regarding a piece of “art”, whatever it may be: I disagree with anyone who says that “just because it makes me feel it’s art”. Your drug-induced hallucinations can also make you feel, but they’re not art because they’re not an experience that anyone else but you can accommodate.

Similarly, I think that if a creator cannot understand or communicate with some sense of the human condition, their act of creation is devoid of meaning for human intellectual development, and is simply an exercise in mimicry of human creation—it gets the job done, but it’s not moving anything forward for the human collective. For any number of cynical reasons we may “hate” people, but humans are really the only living organism that we know of which is capable of reasoning about the nature of reality and existence. It doesn’t mean anything to “AI” that you or I or anything exists. Or that itself exists. So what’s the point of its creation?

This is one of those places where a technology might be beneficial to a communal societies but are dangerous in capitalist ones, since any technology that replaces workers, or substitutes high-paying professional jobs with menial jobs impact survival of the workforce.

I think AI will get better at simulating human creativity, or allowing less-skilled workers produce high-quality results to the point that it will change art much the way desktop publishing revolutionized graphic design (with much resistence from the X-acto generation.

The challenge, IMNSHO is navigating the new technology so it serves society and not just the bunch of capitalists at the top who'd gladly replace us all with robots and let us starve.

The working class shall tremble and all that.

I have seen AI apologists talk about how "AI" is already sentient and we shouldn't restrict it because it's immoral.

That straight up killed my desire to interact in ~~that space~~ the community with that person

This week, I spent a few hours listening to Dadabot's Pho Queue stream.

I read the little prose they left in the stream description. And I found myself wanting to go back to it several times. Something about the screams of "FA KYUU" sounds morphing into saxophones, being garbled, sometimes screamed, sometimes sung, the transitions that were talked about in the prose felt nice to listen to. sometimes it felt like it was coming up with genuine new ideas, for itself at least, that it didn't generate before.

Then I started thinking of the level of art discourse we have in the modern world, especially visual arts, and ideas from Cage. And the nature of the music industry.

Jackson Pollock and his CIA funded splashes of paint are only worthwhile to people who actually like them. The AI generated saxophone warblings, the screeches that come out of it, the choppy, syncopated drum beats give me feelings. It is art to me.

There is a person behind the scenes, that curated the algorithm to bring out music in a certain way. Pho Queue doesn't sound the same as a "bach faucet" , because of the human creativity and curation that went into the way the music is generated.

Brian Eno and John Cage made music with procedural generation features before the current wave of generative AIs. It's an established perspective to have on music. Some performances use radios being tuned to frequencies just to add a new source of sound.

How is this stuff any different?

On the other side of the coin, does music made by humans inherently mean anything? The crap churned out by pop musicians that are flying around with private jets, composed by commitee with the end goal of generating another product for someone else to buy, is there any expression or emotion in there? What does the zillionth love song made by a billionaire have to offer that hasn't been expressed a zillion times before?

There's some more to be written , like if I make music myself that relies heavily on timbre, or effects that I bought, who's really doing the expression, and how? If the musical theory of what I'm playing is simple, and contributes less to the aesthetic feelings of the music I'm making than my guitar's timbre, the way I set up my effects pedals; is the expression I'm doing actually more in how I turned the knobs on my pedals to get an aesthetic than the actual notes I play? So then am I expressing something, or are the people who designed and manufactured my equipment?

But then we get into this :

I thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make my own. I then thought using premade skins was cheating, so I killed a goat and skinned it. I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat. I also think that is cheating, but I’m not sure where to go from here. I haven’t made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all.

The talk about AI is stupid. It's a tool.

The talk about the IMPLICATIONS of AI, and who uses it to automate what, at the cost of who, is the actual argument to be had.

If some metal band that can barely scrape together enough money to tour uses AI to generate an album cover, it shouldn't be taken as a horrifying act of taking money out of an artist's mouth. If BMG fires everyone they have on the art dept to only use AI art, that's something to be concerned about.

Where on the internet is the anti-AI crowd at large talking about divine sparks of creativity? I am the only person I've seen saying that the only way you get an AI that can truly replace workers is by birthing a new intelligence and then it is wrong to enslave it. I didn't know there were others!