#ai is not thr artist tool as of yet under capitalism it’s poison

[fatimajpeg]

Saw a video about ai art and while i agree with majority of the points made i heavily disagree with the final point about how ai art is going to force the art world to separate real ‘art’ and illustration because um, those two things are already separate things. As in nobody confuses Fine Art with (commercial) Illustration, these are already very defined categories. If we categorise ‘Retinal Art’ (as Duchamp defined it) as illustration too then we lose a huge part of what art is i.e. pretty pictures that , yes, exist to be pretty pictures. Landscapes, still life, portraits etc these are all things that can be easily defined as ‘frivolous’ and ‘vacuous’. Art started out as representations of the natural world that we saw around us. I think the video author is misunderstanding art severely if he insists that ‘real art’ be only stuff with ‘deeper meanings’; whatever that means.

Art consists of the following: the art object/artwork, the art space, the art audience, and finally, the artist. All of these together create the Art Experience. It’s through the Art Experience that you create a space for interpretation and ultimately derive ‘deeper meaning’. You don’t get deeper meaning by simply reading the artist’s statement, nor by just being at a gallery. It’s a combination of different things that with proper engagement with the artwork, creates what you would call Art. This is why social media sorta fails art because the fast paced nature of it dampens the engagement. People scroll by looking at a million posts, and don’t have the proper time or space to fully engage with a work.

This is where Ai art also fails. You can give a bot a prompt and get quick results, but you ultimately lose the connection between artwork and artist. The experience is forever incomplete. I do think however that Ai can be used to create Art. For example, my classmate Aleena Akbar Khan made a sculptural playground based on text prompts she gave to an Ai. She used Ai to explore fragmentation and what the human world translated to machine learning would look like. Why is this art? because she collected and melded materials to match the ai results, arranged them and recontextualized them to create something new. She transformed the Ai results to create an Art experience. This imo is the way Ai should be used, not to create cheap copies and steal artist’s work.

Now back to the video, retinal art or “pretty pictures” when experienced as Art, will ultimately derive meaning. There’s a reason why even today there is huge debate about what artworks (art object) should be considered art. DuChamp questioned it back in 1917 when he placed that urinal and the debate hasn’t ended since. In my opinion, if the urinal can be considered art, then so can all pretty pictures. Categories like high art, low art will always exist. They will also evolve over time. Low art or culture in one era can become the most prestigious, high art in the next.

I don’t think impermanent things should be cause for disrespecting art that has a deeply human appeal, especially if it’s not ‘deep’ enough for some.

#rant sorry i didn’t know where else to post this #feel free ro disagree btw #ofc say no to ai artbots etc you cannot give the capitalists even an inch #ai is not thr artist tool as of yet under capitalism it’s poison #ai art discussion