This issue exists in art and I want to push back a little. There has always been automation in art even at the most micro level.

Take for example (an extreme example) the paintbrush. Do you care where each bristle lands? No of course not. The bristles land randomly on the canvas, but it’s controlled chaos. The cumulative effect of many bristles landing on a canvas is a general feel or texture. This is an extreme example, but the more you learn about art the more you notice just how much art works via unintentional processes like this. This is why the Trickster Gods, Hermes for example, are both the Gods of art (lyre, communication, storytelling) and the Gods of randomness/fortune.

We used to assume that we could trust the creative to make their own decisions about how much randomness/automation was needed. The quality of the result was proof of the value of a process: when Max Ernst used frottage (rubbing paper over textured surfaces) to create interesting surrealist art, we retroactively re-evaluated frottage as a tool with artistic value, despite its randomness/unintentionality.

But now we’re in a time where people are doing the exact opposite: they find a creative result that they value, but they retroactively devalue it if it’s not created by a process that they consider artistic. Coincidentally, these same people think the most “artistic” process is the most intentional one. They’re rejecting any element of creativity that’s systemic, and therefore rejecting any element of creativity that has a complexity that rivals nature (nature being the most systemic and unintentional art.)

The end result is that the creative has to hide their process. They lie about how they make their art, and gatekeep the most valuable secrets. Their audiences become prey for creative predators. They idolize the art because they see it as something they can’t make, but the truth is there’s always a method by which the creative is cheating. It’s accessible to everyone.

Man this approach and philosophy about art baffles me because the greatest and most moving works of art to me couldn’t possibly be created by an LLM. For example “Electric Fan (Feel It Motherfuckers): Only Unclaimed Item from the Stephen Earabino Estate”, which is the only item remaining when the artists lover (Stephen Earabino) died of AIDS and his family threw out everything he ever owned leaving just the box fan. It’s just a box fan but there’s so much loss and pain in that installation. Same as “"Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) ", which is just a pile of colorful candy that audience members are welcome to take from, whose original weight is the ideal weight of a Ross who diminished and died of AIDS.

There’s no gatekeeping in the processes of these works, no secrecy, not even really whatever you’re talking about. These works would in fact be utterly diminished by being produced by an LLM because they’re trying to capture the stories of real, existing people who had real, painful experiences. I have no empathy with a machine but I have all the empathy of a man who loved a man whose family hated him so much when he died they wouldn’t even leave his lover with anything more than a box fan and so he decided to declare the box fan to be art.

I think IMO art is about conveying human ideas/emotions that’s beyond words. So it’s more about what the artist intentionally or unintentionally brought into the piece. With AI “art”, it’s just filling noise into the original prompt. In that case, why don’t you just show me the prompt instead of the noisy lossy “art” piece?

In my opinion, the value of art cant be the quality of the output it must be the intention of the artist.

There are plenty of times in which people will prefer the technically inferior or less aesthetically pleasing output because of the story accompanying it. Different people select different intention to value, some select for the intention to create an accurate depiction of a beautiful landscape, some select for the intention to create a blurry smudge of a landscape.

I can appreciate the art piece made my someone who only has access to a pencil and their imagination more than someone who has access to adobe CC and the internet because its not about the output to me its about the intention and the story.

Saying I made this drawing implies that you at least sat down and had the intention to draw the thing. Then revealing that you actually used AI to generate it changes the baseline assumption and forces people to re-evaluate it. So its not "finding a creative result that they value, but they retroactively devaluing it if it’s not created by a process that they consider artistic

AI bros: "You're gatekeeping because you think the result isn't art!"

Rest of the world: "No, we're gatekeeping because we think the result isn't good."

If someone can cajole their LLM to emit something worthwhile, e.g. Terence Tao's LLM generated proofs, people will be happy to acknowledge it. Most people are incapable of that and no number of protestations of gatekeeping can cover up the unoriginality and poor quality of their LLM results.

> Do you care where each bristle lands?

Sometimes you do, which is why there’s not only a single type of brush in a studio. You want something very controllable if you’re doing lineart with ink.

Even with digital painting, there’s a lot of fussing with the brush engine. There’s even a market for selling presets.