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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.
I don't think it shows that at all. You asked for repetition, not novelty; you wanted a rework of a specific artist's specific painting. How does this support a claim that AIs can't deliver works of novel quality?
The AI is going to have a hard time reproducing one specific, highly idiosyncratic style, when handicapped by denial of references. That doesn't show that it can't reproduce that style with the references, and it certainly doesn't show that it can't produce other specific, highly idiosyncratic styles de novo, which it in fact excels at. I've gotten good results feeding the AIs selected portions of my favorite poetry, for instance.
None of this implies railroading of any kind, and in fact I think you have it completely backwards. Actual artists have preferences of what they want to make, and these preferences are often heavily impacted by the market as a whole. The AI does not have preferences, and it does not care about the market. It will make whatever you want, as much as you want, fine-tuned exactly how you want. It will drive more variety, not less, because it makes true novelty significantly easier, if that is actually what you desire.
But is that what you desire? Did you pick that Klee painting because it truly spoke to you on a transcendental level, irrespective of who made it or what other people thought about it? Did you come across the picture naked on a wall somewhere, devoid of relevant context, and stood transfixed at its simplicity and direct, focused purpose? Or did you see it in a book or in a museum, couched in the appropriate status signals, pomp and ceremony to tell you that this was a Serious Work of Art by a Serious Artist, hence important and valuable?
There's two very different social games that one can play with art. One involves exploration, the delight of novel recombinations of the familiar transcending into the sublime, of subtle webs of discovery and recognition. the other is naked status games. AI can probably do either about equally well. The latter, though, at least in my view, is a complete waste of everything valuable that we have.
I'm sorry if this somehow wasn't clear. The point of the experiment wasn't to think about ways the AI can reproduce a known painting that already exists. The point of the experiment was to think about how to get the AI to produce a specific image in your head that doesn't exist at all yet. You have the temporal order of events mixed up.
Suppose I am sitting down to paint the Angelus Novus, and I have an image (and I use that term very loosely - it is half an image as is commonly understood, half just an intuition that it has to be "like that", where that is not really expressible in any concrete form) in my head of what the painting is supposed to look like, but, the painting does not actually exist yet. It does not exist anywhere, no one except me knows what it should look like. I have dreamed up this painting I want to bring into existence.
Obviously I'm going to have a hard time getting the AI to produce anything that's anywhere close to what I'm actually after. If I simply ignore the AI then and draw it myself, or if I just end up giving up entirely and don't create anything, then there's no real harm done. But if I insist on using the AI anyway, and I settle for something less than I originally intended, settle for something the AI produced because it's "good enough", that's where things start to go very wrong. I may even be tricked into thinking I have genuinely created something, that I have genuinely satisfied my original vision when in fact all I have done is abandon it. That's where the real dangers lie.
I have already acknowledged in the comments here that there's a lot of nuance to unpack in this process - the original starting vision can be very indistinct, little more than phantasms, and it is subject to contingency and chance and revision in the concrete unfolding of artistic production. But I also don't doubt that people really do set out to create specific things, and that at the end they can evaluate how close they were to hitting the mark. The AI will never hit the mark in the way you could if you were capable of drawing yourself. Not even another human will.
We have already established that this is false. I gave you a specific image and asked you to produce it using the AI and you acknowledged that it could not be done.
In fact it would be easy to pull any number of images from danbooru or a random manga or whatever that could not be satisfactorily be reproduced by currently available models.
I place no value whatsoever on variety for variety's sake. It is worse to have 100 failed works of various types than to have one failed work of one type. It is of no comfort to point out that, in the 100 bad works, there is great variety.
It is one of my favorite paintings, and I find it to be very beautiful and captivating (although I picked it specifically for its unusual qualities, not merely because I find it to be beautiful).
I can't run a perfectly controlled experiment where I could show you what I would think of the painting even if it wasn't produced by a canonical artist, but I like to think of myself as being relatively unbiased. There are canonical paintings that I find to be wholly uninteresting (much of what was produced in the Renaissance), and there are non-mainstream works that I think are of exceptional quality (vaporwave is probably the most profound artistic development so far of the 21st century).
Here's the thing: every artist has probably gone through this exact dilemma, and it hasn't exactly destroyed their souls. There's that quote about making four movies: the one you conceive, the one you write, the one you shoot, the one you edit. Probably every major published writer has had the experience of butting heads with their editors. Let's not even get into video games, where literal pages upon pages of digital ink have been spilled documenting the disconnect between conception and final product.
There are probably very few people in history who could claim that they made something that conforms 100% to the visions in their mind palace. Humanity seems to get by pretty okay with imperfection. Perfection is amazing, but it has too high a price to pay, in many instances.
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