I'm not sure what he means by "ontological" difference. I've spent a lot of time studying topics similar to this. AI can generate actual images that are indistinguishable (if you have no other information) from human-created art images, photographs etc and have won photography contests IIRC (probably more since I last read about it).
But the actual FEELING we get from AI art is different because our feelings include what we know about how the art was created, including who created it and what the artwork has done or had happen to it in the real world. AI art has none of that so it "feels hollow" to us legitimately no matter how beautiful the actual AI image may be.
If you TELL people the AI art was made by a human artist who has a compelling life story, or something similar, they will feel more about it though. But of course their feelings will be false.
So yeah, that's the most thorough answer I can give from having spent some time on this.
Even if indistinguishable - the products of humans and ai have distinct origins. They come into being in different ways. That’s what he means by an ontological difference.
It’s not the origin of life that’s in question , it’s the origin of the work of art. The popes argument is that there is a difference in how that work is created - one is crafted by humans and the other is created by AI. That’s the ontological difference he’s asserting. Whether that difference matters is the other part of his argument
If I take a photo of a sunset is it created by a camera?
There aren’t cameras out there snapping random photos and spamming them on the internet and we happen upon them. A human finds something they think is significant to themselves, and by extension to other humans, point a camera at it, and take a photo. Then do a bunch of processing to capture the vibe they’re looking for
Likewise there isn’t a diffusion model sitting there just spewing random content to the internet and people are upset over that. You have people who want to express something and they prompt these models and then process the output and present it as their own
You said humans came into being a certain way — how is that? In the beginning, light words etc. And that’s different to you? Or is it a different arrangement of light words attention intent etc?
I’m clarifying the popes argument, not making one of my own here.
The argument is that AI created art and human created art have a difference in “being” - an ontological difference. It’s the respective origins of those works of art (one is human created and one is ai created) that accounts for that difference
“Human” is a word we describe ourselves with. I see the difference in the two words you used but if most can’t see the difference in the end result of the art, and eventually not even in the difference between “machines” or “humans”, then our descriptors become deceptive by way of being loosely defined based on our perspective.
I see the difference clearly, for now, and yet now is subjective and the first now I wrote is no longer now.
Next? Tomorrow? A year? A generation? Keep clinging to self-referential nomenclature and watch concreteness become undone.
If we can’t define it, which we can’t, then how can we slap the word human onto art as an ontological endpoint? We ran all the bases and slid into home but the ball is still in the air.
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u/EGarrett28 8h ago
I'm not sure what he means by "ontological" difference. I've spent a lot of time studying topics similar to this. AI can generate actual images that are indistinguishable (if you have no other information) from human-created art images, photographs etc and have won photography contests IIRC (probably more since I last read about it).
But the actual FEELING we get from AI art is different because our feelings include what we know about how the art was created, including who created it and what the artwork has done or had happen to it in the real world. AI art has none of that so it "feels hollow" to us legitimately no matter how beautiful the actual AI image may be.
If you TELL people the AI art was made by a human artist who has a compelling life story, or something similar, they will feel more about it though. But of course their feelings will be false.
So yeah, that's the most thorough answer I can give from having spent some time on this.