| A stonemason who creates pieces by hand gathers more respect than one who delegates their craft to a cnc machine. No person who respects their craft will use tools that devalue their relation to their craft. Only those who seek to maximize personal gain of wealth would use such tools. Such a person, who sees merit only in the ends produced, rather than in the means themselves, does not participate in the shared history of their craft, in artistry, or in their own personal development. For a real musician, AI is already too much. For there to be meaning and soul in their music, is must be derived from the intersection of their skills and imagination, whereby the unconscious can make itself manifest in the utilization of ones virtues. Delegating this process to a black box deprives the art of its unique individual perspective that can only arise out of the finitude of human experience and learning. For though the black box may have superficial knowledge of generalizations of many such perspectives, it smooths out all paths into bland sameness. Thus no real artist of merit has any use for AI, for it is always of a lower degree than the more powerful tool that is their mind. |
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| ▲ | hmokiguess 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | I confess I am torn by your comment. I myself wouldn't choose AI for guitar, given that's where I have perfected my craft, and I am able to relate to what you said. However, not as an artist, but as a listener, I have no trouble with a guitar composition made by a machine. John Dewey's famous book talks about shifting the focus from the maker to the experience and that the value of something is not about the artist's inner struggle but about the work's capacity to generate lasting experiences. This also ties well into Roland Barthes' essay about reading and how language is a living thing. He puts forward the notion that meaning lives in the reader, not in the writer. Audiences is what turns it into an experience. Again, this isn't to devalue the effort or that the inner struggle isn't commendable, this is to say that artistic value can exist beyond that. | | |
| ▲ | bombdailer 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | The making of art is a personal experience, and the beholding of art is another type of personal experience. If we suggest that the two can be separated such that we can behold art without knowledge of the production of it, well I would consider that wrong. There is a reason each piece in a museum is given a plaque telling its medium and brief background. This is because the meaning of a piece is derived from its context and cannot be separated from it without making art an arbitrary sensory stimuli. The issue with the reduction of art to experience is that it ignore that our knowledge shapes our experience, and so the more we know about an artist and their process, the more different our experience of their art will be. If one sees the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, they might not think much of it if all they know is that it's very popular. Another who knows why the Mona Lisa is particularly popular, because of its historic theft, has a different experience of it. And the person who knows of Da Vinci's life, who has read his journals, knows of his elaborate painting process and sophisticated details and meaning supplied in his paintings, why that person derives much more joy out of the work than one who merely sees it as a visual appearance producing merely a arbitrary liking/disliking. Perhaps you might enjoy an AI composed track, but would you not enjoy it more if instead that track were human produced, particularly if you held more knowledge of the people making it? As for meaning living in the reader, that cannot be true, for a person can find meaning in tea leaves or moving clouds. True meaning, as intentional, is not derived, but supplied, and it is the goal of every reader to behold the authors vision. That one fashions a different interpretation for themselves over the authors intentions is of necessity, for no two minds will see alike, but to look only for the reflection of oneself in art and not look beyond, why that is the death of art, for art is the revelation of the soul. | | |
| ▲ | hmokiguess 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | We don't have to agree, but the biggest problem I find with this take you're now bringing is that it leads to an infinite regress, you can forever expand your knowledge about the origin of something. Then, not to mention, that often we construct from evidence which is already an interpretation with data loss. The Mona Lisa example actually supports both our positions in my opinion: someone can have a profound experience of it knowing nothing of Leonardo, while someone else has a different profound experience knowing his biography. Neither experience is 'false', they're just different modes of engagement with the same work. Personally, I have even experienced the inverse throughout my life. Growing up not speaking English, and being flooded with American culture through radio, I was deeply moved by lots and lots of music made by foreigners that sounded like absolute gibberish to me. Later in life, after learning about the meaning of certain songs, I, unfortunately, lost some of my appreciation for it. Some may call that alienation, but to me it was a form of naivety of a child that enjoyed just sound in its pure form without it being tainted by any derived or supplied meaning from its creator that was attached to it through accompanied lyrics. | | |
| ▲ | bombdailer 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | But then do we not agree, for if your experience of the music has changed upon learning the meaning of the songs, then it was true knowledge of the meaning of the piece which in the end determined your appreciation for it. And that our experience is not a fixed thing at one moment in time, but can re-occur and is in flux and subject to change in its quality based on knowledge gained. So from this you cannot return to the naivety of a child unless you reject from your mind the notion that knowledge determines quality and that the meaning supplied from its makers influences our experience of it. Who is more correct, the child or the adult? If you suggest the child, then what do you say to the adult who objects on the grounds of the meaning of the sounds uttered? The adult would say that though the sounds are pleasant to the ear, they are not good to the mind. Thus, rather than affirming the child's vision, they would reject the pleasant sounds with poor meaning in favor of higher quality ones which are as equal in their harmonic value as with the greater quality in their meaning. As for the infinite regress, that only proves the value of knowledge all the greater, for if we can expand our knowledge on the origins of something continually, so too can our appreciate of the thing grow in proportion. This only leads to a richer and deeper appreciation for life. In this way I can reread or rewatch a show in time and see more and know more than in my first experience, and so grows my appreciation for the details that I missed the first time. And this may only occur if the subject at hand is of good quality in the first place, for else when we descend further into the details and meaning we would be dissapointed at its lack. But that which is rich in meaning lacks none and may reveal itself new with every experience. This is why knowledge of the good is required, and why AI and lackluster artists may only produce pleasant sounds. | | |
| ▲ | hmokiguess 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | "I neither know nor think that I know," as Socrates said. Perhaps that's where we must leave it. You see knowledge of origins as the path toward deeper appreciation, an asymptotic approach to the artist's soul. I see each encounter with art as its own beginning, where meaning emerges fresh in the meeting of work and listener, never fully exhausted by what came before. Maybe both are true in their way. The child and the adult don't cancel each other, they're different movements in the same ongoing piece. I lost something when I learned those lyrics, and I gained something too. Neither experience was false. There is no end to this question, for there is only beginning. The debate about where meaning lives may itself be unsolvable, which is perhaps why we've been having it for millennia. Thank you for the exchange. It's sharpened my thinking, even where we remain apart. :) |
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