OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
2d ago
If there could be a clean split in the conversation between one component and the other, then I think things would be mostly fine. But anti-AI advocates really really want to try to convince you that AI is utterly inferior at the functional component when this is just demonstrably not true.
I have heard this a lot, but I would hold, I think, that even though you can find edge case exceptions if you stack the deck a bit, most AI 'art' has a very noticeable, identifiable style? And that style tends to be both repetitive and cheap? Maybe you can avoid that if you can spend hours slaving away over prompts, but that is quite rare.
At least part of the conversation is about status, right? AI art is perceived as cheap and nasty. Like the microwave, it might be useful, but it's also fundamentally low-class, because using it signifies that you could not afford a real human artist.
You're living in a bubble if you think even close to "everyone" hates AI art. What I've seen is that most of the political spectrum has people who DGAF along with many loud complainers that AI art is evil.
Obviously 'everyone' is hyperbole and I do not mean every single person, since there are people here who like it. There are a handful of people like Scott Alexander who defend it. Still, as far as I can tell it's genuinely unpopular? Searching for polls, well, I'll spare you all the results from artists themselves or from art galleries (both those groups passionately, overwhelmingly, hate AI art), but as far as I can tell, ordinary people feel less positive toward AI in art that they do in other fields. This seems consistent with the generally skeptical if not outright negative view of AI most people have (and the Pew poll is just Americans, who are one of the most pro-AI national groupings). Here there is apparently widespread opposition to AI music.
In general, I think my hot take on AI is that this is the most hated major technological innovation in my lifetime, and I don't think I can really overstate it. There are very enthusiastic AI boosters on the internet, but as far as I can tell in the real world, people are mostly either ignorant of AI, or they dislike it to various degrees of intensity.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
If I were arguing against myself, actually, I might have used the example of found art, or perhaps animal art, which I think people are often more generous toward?
In this case I think the sense that no skill or taste has been exercised is important. Drawing a picture seems to require some level of effort or skill, which a person has acquired over years of practice. There may be an incoherent feeling that 'resistance' is important to art.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
Real art is made by an artist, and involves creative decisions. Algorithms can't do that. People hate that sense that the image is inauthentic or 'not real', and if the AI art is curated well enough that they don't notice it's AI, then they were fooled, and people hate being fooled. If I say I hate AI art, you show me a picture, I like it, and you reveal afterwards that it was made by an AI, I don't conclude that maybe I'm wrong and AI art is fine. I conclude that you tricked me. You're a liar, and I condemn you.
Why yes, if you lie to people, you can trick them into thinking that AI art was made by humans, or that human art is made by AI. It's a complicated world and that's possible. But you shouldn't be surprised when people respond to that with extreme hostility.
People are frequently bad at understanding the reasons for their convictions. In this case, the conviction that it's important for art to be made by humans, or that the social context of art matters to how it's received, is being muddled up with the idea of abstract quality.
However, underneath that, I think people do value knowing that such-and-such picture is the result of a real human being exercising skill. Effort and creativity are things that we can and do value. It's acceptable to care about these things in themselves, for their own sake.
On a last note, in my experience there hasn't been any particular valence to opposition to AI art? I don't think it's that 'the Left' with a capital L hates AI art. I think everyone hates AI art. There are very, very few people who like this technology. Consider, briefly, that the people who like this technology are themselves the unrepresentative freaks.
For what it's worth, while I agree with you entirely in your dispute with coffee_enjoyer, I would like to nitpick that this isn't true about the criterion of embarrassment.
It's true that the CoE is not treated as absolute. This is why people who deploy it as a gotcha in apologetical contexts are being dishonest. The CoE is probabilistic. In principle, if there's no clear reason to falsify something, it seems more likely to be true, but this is an educated guess based on how well we can model the beliefs and motives of an author. That's a very fallible process, so the CoE is very rarely, in biblical studies, treated as conclusive by itself. It is used alongside half a dozen other criteria to try to build up a picture of what is likely to be true.
I would note that the CoE is not always used in ways friendly to orthodox Christianity. The CoE has sometimes been used to argue in favour of the historicity of the Crucifixion, but it is always used to defend the likely historicity of, for instance, what seemed to be false or mistaken prophecies on Jesus' part. For example, the Olivet discourse infamously contains the claim that this generation will not pass away until all these things have happened (Mark 13:30). It would be highly embarrassing for Jesus to make an incorrect prophecy, and some scholars would argue that there are places in the Bible where the authors seem to be backing off or making excuses for (e.g. the Lukan Jesus chides others for seeking to know the times, or 2 Peter 3:8). The CoE would be used to argue in favour of the mistakes being real, even though this shows a fallible Jesus and is problematic for believers.
It does get used outside of biblical studies as well. My favourite example is the satanic verses - there seems to be very little reason for early Muslims to make up a story about Muhammad being misled, so is it more plausible that the event is historical? It doesn't seem totally unthinkable to suggest that Muhammad, during his lifetime, experimented a bit with optimising his message, and tested out how different ideas went down. There could be argued to be elements of early Islam that are syncretic with re-contextualised Arabian paganism (most famously the Kaaba), and there are undisputed incidents where Muhammad seems to show sympathy toward a pagan custom - the Nakhla incident, for instance, shows Muhammad apparently wanting to observe a pagan custom not to fight in the holy months, until (supposedly) God corrected him. So it seems plausible that maybe Muhammad might have once briefly experimented with incorporating pagan divinities into Islam as something like angels, then changed his mind, and the story of a Satanic suggestion was invented to cover the gap.
However, that theory is still highly speculative - wiki describes a history of debates on its historicity, some of which challenge the idea that there could be no motive other than truth for Muslims to invent the incident. The CoE is very rarely dispositive by itself!
At any rate. I would defend the CoE as having a place in historical and textual study.
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