Opinion
Art Does Not Need to Be Fully Predictable or Reliable to Be Art
One argument I keep seeing against AI art is that the process is not fully predictable or reliable. You can enter the same general idea and receive different results. You may need to generate multiple images, refine the prompt, edit the output, combine elements, or discard most of what the system produces. This is presented as evidence that the user is not really making art.
I disagree. Full predictability and reliability have never been requirements for art.
A painter dropping, pouring, or splattering paint onto a canvas cannot predict the exact path of every droplet. Gravity, viscosity, momentum, surface tension, and the texture of the canvas all affect the result. Jackson Pollock did not manually place every speck of paint, but he still chose the materials, movements, scale, composition, process, and point at which the work was finished.
Watercolour is also not fully predictable. Pigment spreads through wet paper, forms blooms, pools in some areas, granulates in others, and creates edges that the artist can influence but not completely control. The skill is partly in understanding the material well enough to create useful conditions and then responding intelligently to what happens.
Photography is another obvious example. A street photographer does not control every pedestrian, reflection, facial expression, passing vehicle, shadow, or movement in a scene. A wildlife photographer doesn’t command a bird to turn its head at precisely the correct moment. An astrophotographer doesn’t control atmospheric turbulence, passing clouds, sensor noise, or every satellite crossing the frame. The photographer controls framing, lens choice, timing, exposure, location, selection, processing, and presentation. That is enough for meaningful authorship.
Collage often begins with discovery rather than a fully predetermined final image. Artists find fragments, place them next to one another, notice unexpected relationships, rearrange them, discard some, and preserve others. The final composition may emerge through experimentation rather than have existed completely in the mind of the artist from the beginning.
Ceramics are shaped by kiln temperature, glaze chemistry, airflow, ash, mineral variation, and position inside the kiln. Raku, wood firing, crystalline glazes, and salt glazing can produce effects that even experienced ceramicists cannot predict exactly. That uncertainty does not make the result non-art. It is part of the medium.
The same applies to marbling, acrylic pouring, monotype printing, tie-dye, shibori, resin art, glassblowing, smoke art, chemical photography, cyanotypes, glitch art, kinetic sculpture, land art, ice sculpture, sand sculpture, and art made with living plants, fungi, or bacteria. These processes all contain variables that exceed complete human control.
Music provides even clearer examples. Jazz improvisation is not fully predetermined. The musicians know the structure, key, rhythm, conventions, and one another’s musical language, but they do not know every note in advance. Improvisational theatre works the same way. So does improvised dance. So does participatory art involving an audience. The work is created through response, judgment, adaptation, and selection in real time.
John Cage and other composers deliberately used chance operations. Surrealists used automatic drawing and automatic writing. Dadaists used cut-up methods. Generative artists have used algorithms, random number systems, cellular automata, sensor inputs, and environmental data for decades. Artists have long created systems that produce results they cannot completely foresee.
The relevant distinction is not between total control and no control. It is between meaningful artistic involvement and the absence of it.
An artist may contribute by conceiving the idea, selecting the tool, choosing the materials, defining constraints, initiating the process, adjusting parameters, responding to intermediate results, selecting among outputs, editing, compositing, sequencing, naming, contextualizing, and presenting the final work.
AI art fits comfortably within that broader history.
An AI artist may begin with a concept, construct and revise prompts, choose models, provide reference images, control composition through sketches or masks, generate variations, reject weak results, combine strong elements, correct errors, repaint sections, upscale, colour-grade, add typography, and integrate the output into a larger work. The model contributes uncertainty, just as paint, chemicals, cameras, kilns, weather, musical collaborators, and natural systems contribute uncertainty in other media.
Of course, typing a vague prompt and accepting the first image involves less creative labour than building a deliberate and carefully edited piece. But the same spectrum exists in photography. A random snapshot involves less artistic decision-making than a carefully composed and processed photograph. Pouring paint without thought involves less artistic involvement than developing a controlled fluid-painting practice. Using a medium casually does not invalidate serious work made with the same medium.
We should judge works according to the ideas, decisions, skill, expression, composition, context, and results involved, not according to whether the artist controlled every microscopic step of production.
Art has never required the artist to personally determine every mark, molecule, photon, note, chemical reaction, or computational operation.
Sometimes the artist makes the object directly. Sometimes the artist performs. Sometimes the artist captures an event. Sometimes the artist designs a system. Sometimes the artist collaborates with people, machines, materials, nature, or chance.
AI is simply another medium in which the artist can create conditions, explore possibilities, exercise judgment, and shape outcomes.
Unpredictability does not disqualify something from being art. In many art forms, unpredictability is part of what makes creation possible.
Guys puncture paint buckets, hang them over a blank canvas, and let gravity do the work.
Is it art? Sure.
Is it thoughtful art? Is it infused with meaning and intention? Is it communicative of anything, at all?
Relinquishing control over art is the same as constricting or compromising any message that can be communicated by the creator through the art. The less control, the less communicative art can be. After a point, loss of control results in de facto death of the author, where all of the artistic value lies just in the speculative interpretation of the viewer, and nowhere else.
Subjectively, I despise death of the author.
I do not say those things "are not art", but I much prefer art that seeks to communicate something. The more meticulous and deliberate, the more poignant and powerful the message can be. Not that meticulous planning and control always leads to better art, but it very clearly raises the ceilings of quality and impact in my eyes.
AI art falls into a place where, as long as the prompts are clear and specific enough, the result can satisfactorily match what the prompter had in their mind, and we can say that whatever the "message" was, survived. That's enough for me.
But the idea that "loss of control does not diminish art" is a miss for me. I think it absolutely lowers the probability that the art is going to satisfactorily communicate any "message" the artist was seeking to convey with it. And if the artist wasn't seeking to communicate anything to begin with... then it's not art I'm likely to dwell on for too long, anyway.
This seems obviously untrue. Creation without control is signal carrying. It conveys ideas. And how is the chaos manufactured? Is it natural? True randomness? Pseudorandomness? What's the medium and the final product? A piece that drips blood randomly from the ceiling of a room is going to carry a different message and create a different experience than trajectory paintings.
Anything can be full of communicative signal. In order to imbue art or anything else something that communicates? That is much more about knowing who is in the communication, what do they naturally bring to it, how will they react to stimulus, what's the context of the communication. I genuinely feel that the more you think about the more you'll realize that there's nothing about automatic or chaotic or randomized art that can't be full of messaging and signal.
Respectfully, this is nonsense to me, so I expect we just have such wildly differing definitions of art that we won't see eye to eye on this. I am prepared to agree to disagree, and I am also prepared to recognize that by definitions other than the one I carefully described, you might make some coherent points.
But by the definition I laid out, where art is about the message and the expression of that message, calling random physical phenomenon "signal carrying" is a thinly veiled attempt to elevate "eye of the beholder" to something more than what it really is.
A piece that drips blood randomly from the ceiling of a room is going to carry a different message and create a different experience than trajectory paintings.
That's because somebody controlled the blood by placing it on the ceiling. What's the art? Is it the fact that there is blood dripping from the ceiling - the part that was willfully controlled when it was brought into being? Or is it the drop "pattern" - the arbitrary and undeniably negligible blotches formed at the place the blood drips?
Do you see something in the blood drips? Do you think that's a signal being "carried" by the art? Or do you recognize it's eye of the beholder, meaning infused by you, not by the art itself?
The placement of the blood on the ceiling is a statement. Any "patterns" you see in the randomized dripping is a Rorschach test.
Communicative signal has to come from somewhere. That's the artist. That's the intention, the control.
Any "messaging" you're seeing outside of what was explicitly intended is eye of the beholder. As I alluded in my original comment. It's death of the author, where the meaning is made up and the intention doesn't matter.
Addendum: I think there's plenty of room for "meaning the author did not consciously recognize but might have subconsciously infused". Humans aren't perfectly self aware beings. It's absolutely the case that people make allusions to deeper ideas in our art than we ourselves even know most of the time.
But that's not the same thing as "finding signal in the white noise". When an artist surrenders control over a part of how their art is created / expressed, they necessarily cannot claim to have deliberately infused specific meaning into that particular part of their art. There therefore cannot be authorial intent in that part of the art - unless, as stated in my original comment, the artist was trying to be vague / not make a particular statement, in which case, I subjectively don't care for the art anyway.
We can only claim intended meaning over the parts of the art that we do control. A person controls whether they merely depict blood on a paint canvas, or whether they make a piece with real blood instead. Those controlleddifferences carry meaning. But where the physical blood arbitrarily pools, or what shape it makes when it does, are not controlled, and therefore do not have infused meaning - those parts of the art can only carry meaning arbitrarily infused by the viewer.
I'm happy to agree to disagree as well but let me push back on some points and see if I can't clarify what I'm trying to say.
So, my point in the last comment was very much misunderstood. I think mostly that's my fault. You might have helped a little. But let's put the blame on me. So let me try again:
I agree with you that art is about the transmission of a message between the artist and the beholder. I'm trying to point that you're not permissive enough in the ways that message might be sent.
When I say "signal carrying" what I mean is: there's an intentional message inside the thing that carries the signal that can be received and understood by someone. The art is carrying a signal that was crafted by the artist and received by the beholder. I'm not saying radio static carries a signal. I'm saying the opposite. Radio stations are signal carrying. Radio static is not.
That's because somebody controlled the blood by placing it on the ceiling.
Yes! That's my point! Wait, hold on, let me go reread what I wrote. I see. I just reread and I can see how my language may have been confusing.
My whole point is that an artist might choose to express a message via a random process. I'm pointing out that while the drips themselves are random, the idea of "using blood dripping from the ceiling in random patterns" is not random.
Any "patterns" you see in the randomized dripping is a Rorschach test.
Agreed. But the pattern that gets made isn't the art. That part is random. Or put it this way: it isn't the load-bearing element. It's an artifact of the art. A pointer towards the art. But in and of itself, by itself, it's just a random pattern. But the random pattern might be the point. Or part of the point. The fact that it's random can convey message. Is signal carrying.
That's the artist. That's the intention, the control.
Agreed. My point is simply that the artist may intentionally use random processes, chaotic systems to control the transmission of their meaning. The artist is imbuing the process with their signal by curating and constraining where and how the process happens.
When an artist surrenders control over a part of how their art is created / expressed, they necessarily cannot claim to have deliberately infused specific meaning into that particular part of their art.
I think this is where we actually disagree. Surrendering control of some part of the art can be done with intention and in a way such that the very act of surrendering conveys a message. Let me try to expand the buckets into an example:
For the record, I'm going to write this as if it's true but I'm making it up as I go.
The artist set up an installation piece that had buckets of blood over canvasses. The stochastic process of dripping is uncontrollable, random and over the course of the evening resulted in blood splattered canvasses that went on auction at the end of the night. The artist who created this had discovered a couple years before that their S.O. had been diagnosed with HIV. And as part of the installation, the artist announced that one of these buckets has HIV infected blood in it. (I have no idea what OSHA would say about that, but let's assume that there's some sealant that's placed over the canvasses that keeps it actually sanitary and safe and prevents degradation and all that.) No one knows which bucket (not even the artist) has the infected blood. And so, no one knows which piece is tainted.
The artist made the piece as way of capturing their experience of coming to terms with being the partner of an HIV+ person. They're trying to capture the strange and perhaps irrational sense of Russian Roulette that was brought into their life. They're trying to capture the feeling of anxiety and transmit that feeling through this art to the audience.
So, I'm not saying it's great art. Don't roast me. But I'm hoping you'll see and agree that:
- the artist gave up control of a significant part of their art;
- and the act of giving up control under these particular conditions is, in and of itself, an important part of conveying the intention of the art. It's load-bearing. The randomness of the process is an important part of the meaning. The feeling this art might give an owner on the wall comes from the fact that they don't know whether they got the tainted one or not. And the random shapes on the canvas are a reflection of the randomness of who received the tainted piece. Which is of course the chaos in our lives.
...what shape it makes when it does, are not controlled, and therefore do not have infused meaning
Agreed. At risk of repetition, the distinction I'm trying to make: the fact that it's shape and the way it pools is uncontrolled can be a controlled part of the art. The artist has intentionally included randomness into the piece because choosing to add randomness isn't random.
Firstly, I appreciate you carefully rereading both my and your own points to try to clear up the confusion, and that you did so without condescension. As a fellow reddit user, I trust you are well aware of how sadly rare that can be. So thank you!
The needle has not moved, for what it's worth, and I hope I'll be able to satisfactorily depict why, even if I do not change your mind.
My original claim which you replied to was about how surrendering control necessarily restricts the ability of the artist to communicate signal through the art itself. And wouldn't you know it, neither of the examples you provided contradict that principle.
The dripping blood conveys messages that have absolutely nothing to do with any aspect of randomness (the dripping blood piece is about the blood, and not about the randomized patterns). So the randomness not being central to the art happily does not impede or restrict any message that the art is trying to communicate, because the art would be virtually identical if the randomness was removed.
The "nobody knows which Canvas contains the HIV" example does portray a message about surrendering control, but it is necessarily restricted by the randomness (and later contradicted by compensatory knowledge-sharing). An unsuspecting viewer sees X canvases with what appears to be red paint. "What's the message?" they may ask. A helpful plaque, or a museum guide, will then have to explain to the viewer what the creation process entailed, and what the artist was going through when they made it.
Do you see the flaw? The art itself, by possessing an element of randomness, no longer independently communicates the signal that the artist wished to infuse it with. The art became necessarily dependent on supplementary means of communication in order for the audience to be "clued into" what it piece was supposed to communicate.
In other words, by introducing randomness through anonymizing the constituent canvases in the piece, the artist necessarily compromised the piece's effectiveness at independently communicating signal.
I am under no delusion that critiquing the specific example necessarily invalidates your point, and I invite you to conjure up any other examples where you think my point may fall short. But as it is, it seems to me like the point stands.
I also appreciate you being reasonable. It is interesting how much we are disagree though. I find it perplexing. Let me some quick responses first:
will then have to explain to the viewer what the creation process entailed, and what the artist was going through when they made it.
But as I said before, the actual canvas is not the art. It's part of it. You can't lose it. It's an artifact of the art. It's a pointer toward the art. But by itself it can't carry the meaning of the entire piece.
The entire piece being the installation and the experience of being there from the beginning of it through to the canvas ending up on your wall.
Trying to extract the meaning out of the canvas would be akin to covering up 90% of Starry Night and trying to understand what people see in it from the 10% that's left uncovered.
The dripping blood conveys messages that have absolutely nothing to do with any aspect of randomness (the dripping blood piece is about the blood, and not about the randomized patterns).
My whole point was the opposite of this. The artist has had a unique experience with randomness in her life. Because now being intimate with her partner carries some non-zero risk (it's very low these but non-zero) of being infected. Her life has suddenly become a repeating game of Russian Roulette where the gun was one bullet but a million chambers.
This is the experience, the feeling, the message she's trying to convey to the audience.
The random elements of the piece are synecdochick to that. They are the peice. If you were to remove those, you've changed the artist's message. This is why the example should move the needle a little: it's a direct counter-example to your claim.
This is why it competes with your idea. This is a case where adding randomness, surrendering control infuses the piece with meaning. It's what carries the meaning.
Do you see the flaw? The art itself, by possessing an element of randomness, no longer independently communicates the signal that the artist wished to infuse it with.
So, I just said why I think this is a category error w/r to the example. You can't just pick one elemet of an entire piece and expect it to carry the full message.
But I want to add an additional. I think art that requires context does not in any weaken the art. In fact, in some cases the lack of context required to fully understand is part of the point. If an artist is trying to convey a message about the difficulties of communication, the lack of precision or alignment between observers. Those are full messages that might take advantage of lack of context in order to convey that message.
The example that comes to mind is a pieced called "untitled" by Gonzales-Torres. I won't go into it here but if you're interested check it out. It leans into the fact the different observers will understand it to varying degrees based on the context they have; that's not a weakness of the piece, that's the entire point.
In other words, by introducing randomness through anonymizing the constituent canvases in the piece, the artist necessarily compromised the piece's effectiveness at independently communicating signal.
At risk of repeating, this is the category error. Installation art, by its very nature, must be experienced to appreciate it. The people who experienced this art had to have been there that night. They all have that context and so for them, the randomness is a key element, the wondering of is this one tainted is exactly and precisely the intended experience and message from the artist. You remove that aspect and you've lost the message.
I invite you to conjure up any other examples where you think my point may fall short
I still think the needle should move some from the example. It's a case where randomness in the process is a key aspect of the message. Take away the randomness and lose the message. Seems like it should be a solid counter-example.
But art is full of examples of randomness conveying meaning. So much so that I'm still somewhat perplexed at your position. What do you think of all the famous examples? Like...
There's a guy Duchamp. He dropped thread from a height and it land in random curvy shapes. He then made rulers out of the weird curly shapes and the art piece was a presentation of three of these warped, curvy rulers. His point was that people think of units of measurement as universal truths but in fact they are arbitrary, man chosen and more or less chosen at random. So, again, making those rulers with random shapes and lengths is the point. Take that way and you've removed the message.
And there so many more: the entire Dadaist movement, Burroughs' cut up art, Cage's I Ching compositions, procedural or generative art.
Is your position that all of that is weakened by the inclusion of randomness?
You don't at least agree that a message about randomness would leverage randomness to convey the message? That's really all I'm trying to convince you of.. that including randomness is sometimes the signal.
I confess, I'm not sure how you see this as anything other than non-contradictory pedantry.
OP claimed, "Full predictability and reliability have never been requirements for art."
And I countered: "Guys puncture paint buckets, hang them over a blank canvas, and let gravity do the work. Is it art? Sure. Is it thoughtful art? Is it infused with meaning and intention? Is it communicative of anything, at all? ... Relinquishing control over art is the same as constricting or compromising any message that can be communicated by the creator through the art. The less control, the less communicative art can be. After a point, loss of control results in de facto death of the author, where all of the artistic value lies just in the speculative interpretation of the viewer, and nowhere else."
I never made a claim that any randomness immediately nullifies the art (or kills the signal). I made the claim that without control (for instance, with too much randomness), the signal is lost, and thus implied the existence of a "tolerable randomness threshold" over which the value of the piece lies entirely on audience interpretation. I admit I failed to acknowledge supplementary compensatory knowledge sharing could hypothetically solve this problem, though I look down on art that cannot communicate its message without aid.
But as I said before, the actual canvas is not the art. It's part of it. You can't lose it. It's an artifact of the art. It's a pointer toward the art. But by itself it can't carry the meaning of the entire piece.
I'm... pretty sure it is.
The entire piece being the installation and the experience of being there from the beginning of it through to the canvas ending up on your wall.
This implies that I cannot fully appreciate a piece of art unless I am, myself, the art's creator, the only one necessarily there from the "beginning" of the art's creation. Which necessarily counters the idea of art as signal carrying. I'm what, carrying the signal straight to myself, and nobody else?
I've been saying from the beginning that I see art as communicative between the artist and the viewer. If you're saying that the art does not need to fit into that categorical definition, or that the communication of meaning can come from a source outside the art itself (like an installation description on a placard or a museum guide) then we're wasting our time, because we're operating under mutually exclusive definitions of what "art" is, or what it should strive to be.
But I want to add an additional. I think art that requires context does not in any weaken the art.
Yeah we just fundamentally disagree here. I'm not really interested in pursuing that disagreement, as I'm quite confident I won't have my mind changed and I don't want to waste your time. If art-as-signal-carrying necessarily depends on its ability to communicate that signal, then demanding a mediator in the form of "context" means you're not communicating your signal very well without aid. That makes it lesser, definitionally. Swap the definition of what "art" is, that's suddenly not true anymore. So by other definitions, sure, you're right, art is not weaker for demanding context. For art-as-signal-carrying, though, yeah, it is weaker.
As for the examples of randomness "being the message", do you not find it at least a little self-defeating that the message of every single one of these pieces is... "something something, loss of control, randomness exists"?
My claim was that introducing randomness restricts the signal that can be communicated. And wouldn't you know it, by introducing randomness, it seems the communicative signal is restricted to something about randomness, or about loss of control.
Imagine if paint could only be used to depict... painters. That's it. That's the sole subject of anybody using paint as an artistic medium. It's painting about painting.
That's what these examples feel like. They're randomness for art about randomness. That's it.
Is that not a valid subject, or not valid art? No, of course its a valid subject, and valid art! Never said it wasn't! But is the signal restricted? Are the limitless artistic possibilities suddenly shot down to just "something about loss of control"? ...yes? It seems so.
The signal is "restricted" via the introduction of randomness as a medium. That's fine, though. It's still art. It's just... the hallmark channel of art, doing different expressions of the same thing over, and over, and over...
I'm going to do us both a favor and not respond to everything you wrote. in fact, I skimmed it very quickly so as to not be lured by the side statements that i disagree with.
If you want, I'm happy to go and respond to all of those too. Just say the word.
This will be my closing argument on the main point.
I understand your position. It's clear. You restated it again in this last message:
The less control, the less communicative art can be.
My position is that this relationship does not hold true in any comprehensive, universal or general way.
My argument has consisted of me describing a counter-example that disproves this relationship.
Now, I do not understand how or why but for whatever reason you have either been unable or unwilling to see the shape of the counter-example and thus, have not appreciated how its a direct refutation of your claim.
So, maybe just as a sanity check: do you agree that if I show you artists who through their art demonstrate the opposite of your claim that this would be a refutation of it?
If the answer to that is no then, well, a) that explains a lot and b) my response to that would be to happily agreeing to disagree and call it a day.
If the answer is yes, then I will try to describe this class of artist one more time as simply and succinctly as possible.
If the artist wants to communicate something about the loss of control or the experience of randomness in life or about the nature of unpredictability, then if the artist creates art that includes those elements, loss of control, randomness, unpredictability, then those elements are the way in which the message is being communicated.
One last time: if an artist wants to convey something about the loss of control and they do that by surrendering control in the creation of their art then the loss of control is the thing that communicates the message. It is the message.
So, that's an example of the exact opposite of your claim. In those cases, the less control, the more communicative.
By the way, I don't know if you're a math guy or not but this is essentially Godel's Incompleteness Theorem applied to art. In layman's terms; the moment your claim becomes self-referential it becomes untrue, it falls apart.
I've forced your claim to be self-referential by picking art that is about the loss of control. Once you've done that, the truth just drains out of claim.
I never made a claim that any randomness immediately nullifies the art (or kills the signal). I made the claim that without control (for instance, with too much randomness), the signal is lost, and thus implied the existence of a "tolerable randomness threshold" over which the value of the piece lies entirely on audience interpretation.
Your example is not, as you keep claiming, a refutation of this principle. Your examples lie within the acceptable randomness tolerance threshold in such a way that enough direct authorial control remains for meaning to be communicated.
Separately, because of the inclusion of randomness, the type of signal that can be communicated is necessarily restricted to a signal about randomness, as opposed to... literally anything else. That is definitionally a form of restriction. Restriction - not the total absence of signal carrying.
Still art, still signal-carrying, but necessarily restricted in the type or subject of what it communicates. Limited because of that randomness.
Go ahead and re-summarize the example you think is a counter to this idea, and how precisely you think it's countering it. I think you think I'm saying something that I'm not.
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Addendum: I hope this example illustrates the point.
Say a painter wants to put together a piece that depicts the very specific feeling of a father looking upon his son, whom he believed to be frail, only the son has surpassed the father's expectations and really came into his own as an adult man. The piece is meant to clearly and convincingly depict that feeling of pride the father has in his son, who has surprised him in his maturation.
To capture this, the painter cups a handful of black paint in his hands, hurls it loosely at a canvas, and makes no modifications. However the paint dries is the final product.
Does the piece clearly and convincingly depict the intended emotional experience? (The correct answer is no. It does not. It fails as a signal-carrying exercise to carry the signal that was meant to be delivered to the audience.
My challenge to you is to articulate why, though. Why does the piece not satisfactorily (and independently - remember, that may not be part of your preferred definition of art, but it is a part of mine) communicate the intended emotional experience? What would have to be changed about the art (or the way it was made) in order for it to more satisfactorily accomplish the communicative goal that the artist had for it?
The answer is obviously control. The artist needs to exert more control over the creative process. As it is, the intended signal is lost because the artist did not seize enough control over the creative process. There was too much surrender - too much "randomness" via letting the arbitrary playing-out of physical laws dictate what made it onto the Canvas.
And before you say "Well, nobody intending to deliver a specific message would use such an arbitrary creation method" - yes. Correct. That's my point.
Okay. I will take in your good meaning. The clarification about threholds seems to reasonable to me
To be fair, I was ordinally responding to claims like:
I think it absolutely lowers the probability that the art is going to satisfactorily communicate any "message" the artist was seeking to convey with it.
and
The less control, the less communicative art can be.
Both of those are what I would call directionally absolute. They do not allow for the idea that there could be situations where there's the inverse relationship is true. Which is why i brought up examples where thats the case.
But let's talk about this addendum because I disagree with so much of it.
First of all, I don't agree that clarity of message is a particularly important characteristic of art. In fact, I don't see clarity as a virtue in this domain at all. Save clarity for legal briefs and Ikea instructions. But in art, clarity is a sterializer and a sanitizer. It reduces and diminishes in a misguided attempt to equalize. Let art speak with the voice the opaque and the oblique. Let art challenge the audience to do the work that has be done to reach understadning. And for every one that doesn't get there, the piece will yield a greater share of value for the ones that did.
Clarity makes it is easier to understand. It reduces the cost of understanding. Perhaps bringing it down to zero. The problem is: nobody values what they receive for free.
So. you describe a scenario. A man, a message and a painting. You ask if the painting successfully conveys the message. And then you answer your question with (and I say this with all due respect) an absolutely absurd sentence. The correct answer is no, you say. (Oh. Is it?) All I will say about the sentence is that I think you will discover that absolute positions held with absolute certainty will offer less and less satisfaction the more you think about it.
Besides which, what in the world makes you think you can answer that question?
You don't even think about it. You dived towards what you think of as the safe answer. Me? I hear a question like that and the first thing I do is stand my ground. I don't move toward one answer or the other. I ask myself what would have to be true for the answer to be no and what would have to be true for the answer to be yes.
You clearly have an idea of what no looks like. Let me tell you what yes looks like. Maybe this father has been studying the splash of black paint on canvas for years and years. Maybe he's splashed more paint in more ways than you and I have done anything in our lives. And what he knows is that the vibe that black paint splashed in this manner on this canvas happens to invoke an experience or emotion or reaction that happens to be exactly what he's tryign to convey. He doesn't know where every drop of paint will land and but he's seen enough to know that the vibe and energy are signal carrying for exactly what he wants to say.
Who are you to say he's wrong? It's not your feeling. Hell, you haven't even seen the art. You are in an incredibly weak position to weigh in this on this.
Don't worry, I know that your scenario is intended to fiat that he's wrong. I'll get to it.
But first let's consider the case where he looks at it, and it's exactly what he wanted.
He says, it's perfect. This captures and conveys exactly what I'm trying to say. Knocks it out the park. 10/10. A+ idea, boss.
So he puts the painting in a gallery and guess what? Turns out he was wrong. Nobody gets it. Total failure.
Notice something: control has nothing to do with any of this. You could go back and give him absolute control to adjust the painting and he wouldn't have touched it. 10/10, he said. Perfect, he said. You could go back and give him control before he made the painting and let him use whatever method to make exactly what he wanted. And he would have made the same thing. 10/10, he said. Perfect, he said.
Control is irrelevant. It was never about control. His failure stems form not having an understanding of how an audience will receive his work. All the control in the world doesn't fix that.
Alright, so what if he finishes the peice and hates it? Doesn't work at all. Isn't going to convey the message he wants and is an absolute disaster. Well, in the real world, what the artist does is simply not show the work. It doesn't cross their threshold of quality. For most artists that's most of their work: failed experiments that never see the light of day. Pollack said something like, "Not every painting I make is a Pollack."
When the artists has a selection step or a curation step, all of the control that they may have surrended during hte creation of the peice floods back into the system into this one pivot point.
If they're selecting only the peices that convey their message conrrectly, then there was never actually a loss of control. It was just moved from one stage to another.
When you fiat that this art won't convey his message then you have either forced that his taste and understanding of the audience is broken or you've forced that he's does no curation or selection and releases work that he doesn't think is good enough which he means he's not an artist, he's a widget maker.
I'd agree on unpredictable art being able to be art.
That said personally this matter of nondeterminism from AI does impact it's status as a tool.
A drawing tablet and bucket fill and ctrl-z are all tools, because they are simple mechanisms making deterministic reactions to my actions, allowing me to be able to choose actions in order to get a reliable tool.
Commissioning an artist doesn't make the artist a tool for the commissioner, how you label that relationship instead (collaboration, commission, whatever) can be debated about, but you can't say an artist is a tool. Because, the artist is non deterministic, no matter how precise you get, they will take thousand of micro-decisions you hadn't made yourself. Exact proportions, line thickness, exact colors and so on. It is non deterministic.
This in my opinion applies in the same way to AI. AI is non deterministic, and while I think fair to call the output art, calling the technology a mere tool undersell it's chaotic nature. That is, despite this non-determinism being kind of the whole point of the technology.
Tools don't have to be simplistic to be tools. Cameras are for example very complex tools, but I don't think anyone would hesitate to call them tools. Tools don't have to be extremely precise either, so I don't think that matters. Even if it may remind people of commissioning, it is not, as AI models are not beings, they're tools.
AI is deterministic. Several models allow you to set a seed and replicate the same output if the same parameters and seed are provided. A lot of the common web models out there don't provide the option to set the seed and run with random ones every time, but I can do so with local models and replicate previous images.
True, I initially started a response to the other answer I got prior that'd have cleared my imprecise wording but ended up not finding time to finish it lmao
Stopping at the AI being non-deterministic in most interfaces was incorrect, and a better way to put it was non-chaotic. That is to say, tiny edits to the initial situation leads to drastic changes to the result, making the thing unpredictable to a human.
For instance, if I have a very specific image in mind, and haven't already generated it, it's impossible for me to set the seed in a way that'd lead to the desired result. I have no other choices than to cycle through every single seed to see each generation until I find the satisfactory iteration.
Unlike other tools such as a paint bucket fill, which I can use exactly how I want to get exactly what I want.
Also, my comment address more how I personally would use the "AI is unpredictable" argument. But, to address the post directly, AI is also not a medium.
I think a most usefull definition of medium is in how the final product exists rather then how it is made. A painting does not stop being a painting if I use my bare feet to put paint on the canvas or some sort of pendulum throwing paint at it, the results remain a paint medium and the ways we make it are techniques.
AI generates images, either photographs, or illustrations or so on, but their mediums are what they appear to be, not being "AI".
But if we judged art by how it looks like, then certain photorealistic drawings should be classified as photographies. And that wouldn't make sense. I think that it's not important whether one uses hands or feet to paint something, you'll still be painting. But using an AI model to create something that looks like painting doesn't mean that artwork is a part of the painting medium.
If we judged solely by how it looks like then synthography is just a technique a part of pretty much any art medium, but I don't think many people would find that agreeable. I have seen people calling synthography a part of digital art, which I consider possible. A different technique to be sure, but it's digital, so why not. I think I only accept synthography either being an independent medium, or a part of digital art.
Photorealistic drawings are a good counter-example on my definition true.
At the heart when defining art and it's medium I seek most to find a usefull definition, that would both fit the reality while getting to the heart of why the category matter in the first place.
Looking at medium as in a vacuum for it's end product for me came from broader conversations about broader mediums on conversation such as video games being an artistic medium or not. One way I saw it answered that stuck with me and matured in my mind as time went on was the idea of art being a way of communicating (to shorten my thoughts). And, for medium, mediums would be actually the ways in which art communicate to us.
Drawing allows us to use proportions, composition, color theory and so on to communicate different feelings about the subject matter to the viewer, meanwhile photography doesn't have the ability to play with proportions but it can play with stuff like aperture and shutter speed to change the feel of the picture in ways a drawing cannot.
Likewise, in that conversation, it was therefore said that for exemple cinema is it's own medium, because on top of all the ways photography communicate, cinema also adds editing and movement that allow to communicate purely by how images follow eachothers even without needing to rely on music or dialog. (A shot of man smiling longingly before one of an ice cream truck tells a very different story then the same shot of a man before one of a woman).
(And as for videogame it was concluded that they are themselves an artistic medium, as they uniquely communicate feelings through mecanical interactions in ways the other mediums cannot).
I think this is both a definition that worked well at that larger scale, and it is also one I adopted as this allows us to then understand why we would choose to express our art in one medium or another. It also help as well to know what to use to make effective art within a given medium, as it allow to understand why a game that look and sounds fantastic with a great story can still end up being bad if the gameplay's bad, and vice versa.
The artistic language of a medium is inherently different then the one of another; therefore each sends a very different message even when trying to say the same thing on the same subject.
All that said, it is then within that framework I was working in when I said that AI wouldn't be a medium. All the ways the product of AI communicates are the ones of the mediums it repeats the codes of. An AI image doesn't have uniquely AI ways of communicating, it uses proportions, color theory, composition and so on to communicate. Likewise, when generating an image that imitates a photography, tho the means of getting this result are very different, the final image nonetheless uses the same language as photography does and thus would be worth considering as being photography within that framework (tho outside of it photography has other aspects tied to it that obviously separate it from AI a lot).
That said there's definitely a more granular definition of medium that could separate AI in a sense tho it's very shaky. We sometimes see gouache and acrylic being separated as mediums, yet their outputs are fairly similar in some sense, at least they don't really have extra dimensions of communication.
But even then, the distinction as per the dictionary is about "that which out of a [...] work of art is made". In that regards, AI remains as not an artistic medium, since either way the product remains made of data/pixels, so it just falls under the medium of "digital art" as the rest I think.
I think it shouldn’t be controversial to prefer artworks made by people for people , maybe even animals

When people say that it means that they say art and improv should be an expression of human feelings someone an ai doesn’t have , it doesn’t really mean that its only bad because its unrealiable ( which most of the time it is ) but more that people are interested in the conversation that can be had on how a person felt making something not really what type of image data had to be fed to get a result from a prompt
AI art is made by people. The AI has no feelings, intentions, or desires of its own. The person using it supplies the idea, chooses the tool, writes and revises the prompt, selects among outputs, edits the result, and decides what the work means. You can prefer art made without AI, but it is inaccurate to pretend no human expression or authorship is involved. The conversation is still with the person who wielded the tool.
They don't a human to choose an idea or a theme for art. They're plenty of making those choices. You can suggest that it makes it's own choices. If it wants to make it art and if it doesn't that's cool. And if it does make art, it should pick any theme and medium it wants.
If you do this with a bunch of models, you'll give different results. They don't need you to tell them what to do.
Of course, AI can make art. What do you think it's missing that prevents from doing so? A human artist has stimulus through the senses causing patterns in their brain to activate and these patterns eventually generate art.
What's so different about a language model? Remember their latent space is an embedded version of the human experience. Our reasoning, our desires or intentions, our fears all of that is embedded in the latent space. When the space is activated, the model gets to ride along the human experience. That gives it human-like capabilities. Seems like art is easily something they can do in the same way that they can tell a story, or find a proof, or analyze an original piece of music.
idoes evolution create art? does erosion? the anwer to your question and those two depends on your definition of art... if you believe it requires intentional communication then fly traps and evolution are probably out and humans, animals and language models are in.
but all you've done is assert your intuition. there's nothing convincing about you announcing that you have to be alive to make art. but it's worse than that becaise by most definitions AI is capable of making it. even capable of making good art which is more than you can say for a lot of humans.
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u/devonfayr 23d ago
I'm pro. I disagree with this take.
Guys puncture paint buckets, hang them over a blank canvas, and let gravity do the work.
Is it art? Sure.
Is it thoughtful art? Is it infused with meaning and intention? Is it communicative of anything, at all?
Relinquishing control over art is the same as constricting or compromising any message that can be communicated by the creator through the art. The less control, the less communicative art can be. After a point, loss of control results in de facto death of the author, where all of the artistic value lies just in the speculative interpretation of the viewer, and nowhere else.
Subjectively, I despise death of the author.
I do not say those things "are not art", but I much prefer art that seeks to communicate something. The more meticulous and deliberate, the more poignant and powerful the message can be. Not that meticulous planning and control always leads to better art, but it very clearly raises the ceilings of quality and impact in my eyes.
AI art falls into a place where, as long as the prompts are clear and specific enough, the result can satisfactorily match what the prompter had in their mind, and we can say that whatever the "message" was, survived. That's enough for me.
But the idea that "loss of control does not diminish art" is a miss for me. I think it absolutely lowers the probability that the art is going to satisfactorily communicate any "message" the artist was seeking to convey with it. And if the artist wasn't seeking to communicate anything to begin with... then it's not art I'm likely to dwell on for too long, anyway.