And the Reason I Don’t Like AI Art Is…

And the reason I don’t like AI art is because I think art is, it starts with someone who has a big irreducible numinous complex emotion, and they try to infuse it into some intermediary medium like a sculpture or dance or a book or a song or an image in the hopes that it causes a facsimile of that emotion to materialize in someone else’s mind when they experience it. AI doesn’t have any of those things. And your prompt is, if you prompt an AI to do something, the prompt, assuming it’s quite short, it could be quite long, you could write a whole book as a prompt that might be very communicative. But if you’re writing two sentences, then those two sentences are diluted across a million pixels or 100,000 words. And basically the communicative intent of the work becomes undetectable. And this is why I think we call it inhuman or eeriness. Mark Fisher says it’s the seeming of intent without an intenter. In some ways, when you look at AI and you see a picture, it’s as though a very realistic image is formed in the clouds. It can be aesthetically striking, but the clouds have nothing to say to you. Cory Doctorow