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You're really grasping at straws here.
You're evading a simple question, likely because the answer would indicate you are broadly aligned with the leftist hegemon.
I literally, unironically support the establishment of white ethnostates. Is that sufficiently opposed to the hegemon for you?
It is, though your initial evasiveness now leads to my being unavoidably skeptical of your assertions. Assuming you are telling the truth, and you would indeed rather see the right flourish above the left (rather than the left above the more-left), then you are evidence against my theory. I do not have an explanation for you; you could be evidence of my being wrong, or there could be an explanation I'm simply not seeing at the moment, given my inability to holistically examine you.
So let's proceed from the position you're sincere, and I am wrong. You see before you something that is going to transform the creative landscape - by empowering people who don't yield to the progressive hegemon to create things they like. You see an evolution of expression that will offer infinitely more creative freedoms to people.
You loathe this. Why?
That is one thing it certainly does not do. It does not expand creative freedom - it can only offer a kind of pseudo-creativity that further alienates people from authentic creativity and distorts the meaning of what creativity can and should be.
If what you want to create can be packaged into a convenient verbal "prompt", then it's probably not very creative. There are images in my head that I wouldn't even know how to describe to a human artist, because they're barely even images - more like indistinct nexuses of concepts, emotions, and desires, that also include some visual elements. Things like that can only be realized as what they are in the concrete working out of the thing, with all of the surprising contingencies that that process includes. You can't just say to another agent "make it so", regardless of whether that agent's intelligence is artificial or organic.
I'm a professional artist, and I think this statement is flatly false. What the AI is doing is exactly what I do every time I pick up a pencil: synthesize novel output from a broad collection of previous data.
Again, flatly false. Ideas can be encapsulated and compressed, and executions of those ideas contain details which exist in a hierarchy of relevance, following something like an exponential curve. Prompts work because this hierarchy is an emergent property of the human mind.
To the extent that such ideas are coherent enough to actually execute, you can in fact tell another agent to "make it so"; artistic collaboration between artists and, say, writers or directors or producers or developers happen all the time. To the extent that this is difficult, it's because really nailing down the specifics of the prompt is a fairly unwieldy process... but it absolutely can be done, and it is done every day.
Well, most of what professional commercial artists do on a day-to-day basis isn't exactly creative either.
The paradigmatic examples of creativity are novel ideas that register on a world-historical scale, such as Cantor's development of set theory and the hierarchy of infinite cardinals. Such ideas are necessarily rare. If a work doesn't fit into this elite class, then I question if it can be called genuinely creative. At times I have wondered (but never seriously believed) if any work of art could ever be novel enough to qualify as genuinely creativity. As Hilbert once quipped, "for a mathematician, he did not have enough imagination, but now he has become a poet, and everything is fine."
I don't want to position myself as the god-emperor of creativity, or pretend that I have a set of hard and fast rules to apply. I just want us to have standards for ourselves, is all. As we descend further down the scale towards ordinariness, from world-historical successes, to works that are widely considered to be of exceptional quality, down to the average things that average professionals produce in their average careers, it becomes less and less clear whether the adjective "creative" continues to apply. I am not proclaiming anything with certainty one way or the other. There is just less clarity.
AI art obscures these questions and pushes them away from the central place that they should occupy in our thought.
"Wheee yippee, now we can all be creative! Thanks, AI!"
I find this to be offensive nonsense.
How would you compress this into a prompt? Without using explicit identifying terms like "Paul Klee" or "Angelus Novus".
I encourage you to run your prompt by the AI and see how close it can get.
This seems like an extremely unusual definition of creativity, one that, by your own admission, excludes most and perhaps all artists, and one that neither I nor most others share.
I don't really know or care whether current AI has this level of "Ur-Creativity". It is sufficient for my purposes to note that to the extent that human artists engage in creativity, the AI does as well. If you feel that the AI moves us further away from "Ur-Creativity", you should feel the same about the pursuit of art by humans as well. What you don't have, I argue, is reasonable grounds for treating one different from the other.
Standards that, by your own admission, ~0% artists are now or have ever met. Why should I value such standards? What if I don't believe that art can "register on a world-historical scale", or particularly care if it does? Compare this to a definition like "the ability to produce novel constructs that please and satisfy other humans".
I don't think there is, actually. You're noticing that, as the sage says, there's nothing new under the sun. And that's true! but it doesn't actually matter, because things can be new to you, and humans care about the details. By one accounting, creativity is impossible, because everything we make, boiled down far enough, is just a rehash of a remix of basic themes depicted a million times before. By another accounting, every 5-cent American flag postage stamp is perfectly unique. The truth is somewhere in the middle, and it's somewhere in the middle because our brains actually adjust the degree of novelty they're searching for, based on other inputs. At the end of the day, you haven't presented an argument for why normal creativity is a bad thing; you've just asserted that you can sort of imagine something better, in the abstract, maybe.
It doesn't, any more than existing artists and existing art tools have. The only new thing it does is be fast, tireless, and free. To the extent that you have a problem with this, I think you have a problem with art itself.
It's said that there's two points in the timeline of any AI project: the time when it's better than a human for the first time, and the point at which any human is better than it for the last time. We've crossed the first of these points, and the second will likely be reached within our lifetimes. Art is not magical. It is a thing we do with our brains, it's a thing we can learn and teach, and that means it's a thing we can automate. Everything valuable you derive from the visual data of a given piece of artwork can be described, analyzed, reduced to a formula, and reproduced via other humans or by an AI tool. There is no secret sauce, no higher mysteries. We are already starting to do the art version of the Turing test, people are frequently losing that test, and you will not do better.
By analyzing the elements used in the piece, which are actually not terribly complicated. line weight and quality, the abstract treatment and the heuristics used to describe the figure's form and the various surfaces it contains, the figure/ground inversion games... It uses a technique similar to one of my favorite artists, a sort of forced contour simplicity that trades off distortion of form for a sort of internal balance of composition. All that on top of the specifics of texture and color. I'm speaking in generalities here because the piece is idiosyncratic enough that common vocabulary hasn't been developed and disseminated sufficiently to do otherwise, and for good reason: it looks maybe 10% interesting, and 90% like shit. I don't want to draw things like this, or particularly to look at them, but if you payed me fifty grand I could spend two weeks figuring out how to crank them out more or less on command. I'm distantly aware of Paul Klee, and I've never heard anything to make me dislike the man, but his work is not valuable to me in any significant way, and I doubt the work itself is valuable to most other people either.
I agree that it would probably be pretty difficult to get a current-gen AI to produce an analogue to that painting without using the prompts you excluded. What do you think this proves, and why?
It shows that people who outsource their artistic production to the AI will be railroaded into established patterns of thought and will be encouraged to produce things that can be expressed in familiar terms, rather than things that can't be.
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How would I paint that? How would I describe it to another person such that they could accurately see it in their head? I can't do either of those things as it is. Why is it more authentic to imagine I had the painting skills than to imagine I had the prompt-making skills? I can't tell you what prompt will work, but you know, I also can't tell you step-by-step biomechanical instructions to make a real painting.
You seem to very much value the idea of art as a journey, whereas I -- and I think most people cool with this -- see art as a destination. So long as I can get pleasing outputs aligned with what I want, I can express myself artistically. It's no more art if I spend 30 years perfecting brush strokes, and it's no less art if a genie plucks the picture from my head and materializes it on a canvas.
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This is obviously, objectively false. AI will not beat you up and take your crayons, so at absolute worst it does nothing; but we know it does something, it gives people who have no artistic skills the ability to translate their thoughts into images. Even if it does so in a terrible, boring fashion that you hate, you have to admit it is expanding creative freedoms. I will not allow you to redefine the meaning of those words to complain about it. There is no "pseudo-creativity" and there is no "authentic creativity".
This sounds like a seething resentment for people with higher verbal IQs than you and the ability to more effectively communicate with AI generators. How is other people being able to succeed an obstacle in your way? What is the cost you see in letting people who can't make cool pictures make cool pictures?
No, that's exactly my point. It literally does not do that. It might trick you into thinking it does that, but it doesn't.
If you imagine a sexy large-breasted woman and do a google image search for "sexy large-breasted woman" then it might return images that satisfy your requirements, but none of them will be "your thoughts translated into image form" because none of them will match the exact woman you were imagining. Obviously the problem becomes more pronounced the more unique and complex the request is.
The AI is essentially doing the same thing as a google image search (in terms of how it presents results to you, not at the level of technical implementation). Of course, through the use of Photoshop and img2img you can take the output from multiple AI prompts and start fashioning them into something closer to your original vision, but the more you involve yourself in the process, the more you would just need to rely on traditional artistic skills anyway, rather than the AI.
Would you plug yourself into the Matrix and live in a pleasant simulated world, assuming we could alter your memory so you wouldn't be aware it was a simulation? If not, then you recognize a difference in value between authentic experience and pseudo-experience, and it shouldn't be too hard to apply the same concepts to creativity. If you would plug yourself in, then our worldviews are fundamentally irreconcilable and there's probably not much we'll agree on.
The development of brain-computer interfacing would eliminate even this hurdle. From one perspective, we are simply in a transitional period.
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It does, though.
This is also true for every drawing done by hand. If you define art as only absolute perfection of thought into the material, there's quite possibly no art in the entire world. I cannot bring my exact thoughts to life, nor express them with all-encompassing breadth and detail to other people. What we can at best do is approximate, and AI will be an immense facilitator of that.
You wouldn't even need to alter my memory. I have no moral or philosophical qualms with being a lotus eater. My sympathies lie firmly with the Merovingian.
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The Matrix has a common counterargument that you're not taking into account: its simulation is quite literally in someone else's hands. You become vulnerable and helpless to the reality above the Matrix, and unlike any hypothetical superrealities above ours, you do know this one exists, and would continue to exist after you plug in, filled with all sorts of people who can do whatever they want to your simulation.
I would certainly find it just as repugnant to be plugged into a simulation I control as one I do not.
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