A.I. and Art ⇥ newyorker.com

Ted Chiang, the New Yorker:

It’s harder to imagine a program that, over many sessions, helps you write a good novel. This hypothetical writing program might require you to enter a hundred thousand words of prompts in order for it to generate an entirely different hundred thousand words that make up the novel you’re envisioning. It’s not clear to me what such a program would look like. Theoretically, if such a program existed, the user could perhaps deserve to be called the author. But, again, I don’t think companies like OpenAI want to create versions of ChatGPT that require just as much effort from users as writing a novel from scratch. The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists.

Matt Muir, writer of the excellent Web Curios newsletter:

[…] Broadly speaking I agree with some of the points he makes, specifically about the requirement for art to have an element of intentionality which is necessarily absent from anything made by (current generative) AI being as all it is is maths, and maths cannot have intent. Equally, though, Chiang concedes that artists have made, are making, and will continue to make, work *in conjunction with* non-intentional systems, and that these works are perfectly capable of being considered as ‘art’. […]

Adi Robertson on Bluesky:

I can hazard lots of guesses why, but it’s striking that virtually none of the “can AI do art” conversation focuses on the most interesting examples I’ve seen, in which the interactive conversation between user and machine — rather than the end output — *is* the art.

Robertson points to the Are You the Asshole bot and the Hey Robot game as two examples, both of which are creative explorations of human–A.I. interaction. Whether those conversations are considered “art” is something I will leave others to decide because I spent a bachelor’s degree hearing hundreds of people asking that question and I lost my patience for it.

Robertson’s observation is a spiritual successor to my issue with Instagram bait art installations: neither are necessarily cheapening art, but I wish artists treated social media and, now, A.I. with less formalism and more conceptualism. Artists can eke compelling works out of any medium. In fact, the very suspicion of A.I.’s involvement in art seems likely to lend itself to surprising and moving works, with suitably talented artists.