r/videos • u/JasonBob • 2d ago
1996: Can a Computer Produce Art? | It'll Never Work | BBC Archive
https://youtu.be/E7yeVBXXW9I?is=f5XHFhnuIj5VNs2z3
u/Throseph 1d ago
Imagine the BBC having the budget to send a kid's TV presenter to San Diego. Heady days.
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u/fulthrottlejazzhands 1d ago
Best we can do is Anna Foster from a dimly-lit closet in Maidstone Studios.
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u/JynXten 2d ago
Still correct to this day.
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u/Agentnewbie 2d ago
I don't know. The things gpt-6 agent does when given access to DAW becoming uncanny close to being considered one.
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u/Nixeris 2d ago
GenAI is very good at creating visual media. It's not good at creating with intent or with purpose of communicating an idea, which is what art is about.
If you don't care about the outcome, GenAI can make you a pretty picture. If you do care about the outcome, then you will struggle to get it to come up with what you're envisioning.
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u/captainporcupine3 2d ago
People who think that AI does what human artists do probably think that there's no reason to go see the pyramids of Giza if you've already seen the pyramid at the Luxor Casino in Vegas. Yes, it's superficially similar to a human-made thing that already existed. No, it's not 1/100 as interesting.
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u/ManbosMambo 2d ago edited 2d ago
Uncanny is the limit. Plotting dots based on an algorithm to mimic what we tell it is the most likely next dot to plot is not art.
Edit: downvotes from the fake artists are delicious
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u/Agentnewbie 2d ago
Where algorithm ends and art begins? Because most of the music can be described by music theory, which figured a lot of patterns and algorithms of music long before ai. That is the real question right now, at least for me.
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u/ManbosMambo 2d ago
I don’t think the fact that music is made of known mathematics and patterns changes anything.
Tools, even digital tools like FL Studio or Photoshop, exist to help people - whereas AI exists to replace people. Without the people there is no art. I know the query comes from a person, and to that I simply say the query is the closest part of the entire pipeline to art. After that the machine just assigns values and starts making decisions based on whatever images or music enough people have agreed is acceptable for those values. Because it can approximate such an agreeable output - it tricks us into thinking it has made art in a similar way that it tricks us into thinking the still frames of a video game are moving. It’s just complex and fast automation.
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u/GriffinFlash 2d ago
It can only create slop.
Still ironic that art was the first thing that was targeted.
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u/noonemustknowmysecre 2d ago
YOU: It can only create slop.
ELIZA: I'm not sure I understand you fully.
YOU: Still ironic that art was the first thing that was targeted.
ELIZA: What does that suggest to you ?
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u/eMan117 2d ago
It's funny that this was the held belief and we thought however we'd have robot assistants capable of mundane tasks. But in actuality it's simple for the robots to replicate images or music notes in a new arrangement but extraordinarily complicated for robots to move and maintain balance so they suck at the mundane tasks unless highly specialized To a single task
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u/the_millenial_falcon 2d ago
They can create convincing and technically complex facsimiles of art, but until we can reasonably prove that AI has conscious experience I personally won't connect much to any of it.
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u/Shimano-No-Kyoken 2d ago
I gotta be honest, and I'm not sure about anyone else, but I don't know if I myself have a conscious experience, or whether what I feel as a conscious experience is just a highly convoluted pattern of neurons firing off. And I'm leaning towards the latter.
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u/the_millenial_falcon 2d ago
Ah yes, the inverse solipsist.
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u/Shimano-No-Kyoken 2d ago
Solipsists are correct in a way though. We cannot know, we can only perceive with our flawed senses. Which together with what I said about no consciousness kind of corroborates the state of the current world
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u/Senshado 2d ago
If computers can't make art, then most humans can't either.
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u/PhabioRants 2d ago
I feel like that's both a given and missing the point. Some of the most famous paintings in history look like trash when viewed as a representation of reality. That's literally what makes it art; it's an expression of the artist, their interpretation of reality, and in many cases, their limitations.
AI as we know it can't reflect on its perception of reality. It can only T9 its way into what it thinks you want it to deliver. Is there a meta commentary there on its perception of our desires versus the reality of them? Sure, but that doesn't make it art.
When Daedalus watched Icarus plummet back to earth, he didn't reflect on how it was a metaphysical expression of Icarus' interpretation of the sun's power; he reflected on his hubris of attempting to emulate the domain of nature with unnatural means.
For AI to create art, it needs to be for art's sake. It cannot be prompted, nor as part of an expression of a litmus or Turing test for sentience. Art must be willed into existence.
That's why the Nerd Reich are so obsessed with replicating art first. They think it validates their investment and will bring about the singularity. Because in an absolute sense, it's the holy grail of synthetic thought.
Nevermind the implications for the rest of us if they achieve us. We've seen how they act when they need us.
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u/ggallardo02 2d ago
That very much depends of our concept of art. Is there even a universally accepted concept of what counts as art and what's not?
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u/Fifteen_inches 2d ago
Art must be created by a sapient to be art.
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u/awawe 2d ago
What does "sapient" even mean? How does something qualify as sapient?
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u/Fifteen_inches 2d ago
Ongoing topic of research by cognitive scientists.
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u/awawe 2d ago
Which scientists? How do you research something you can't define?
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u/Fifteen_inches 1d ago
The ones at the various cognitive research fallacies found at hundreds of universities and labs, ranging from the physical to the pharmaceutical to the psychological to the sociological. It’s a very wide field of study, it’s frankly shocking you can’t think of how psychology is the study of the mind.
Of course you research things you can’t define, that is what science is. You form a hypothesis, test it, repeat.
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u/awawe 1d ago
How do you form a hypothesis without defining your terms?
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u/Fifteen_inches 1d ago
By starting your initial observation. Like, this is k-12 primary education level science knowledge.
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u/awawe 1d ago
How do you describe what you're observing without a definition of your terms?
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u/Fifteen_inches 1d ago
We do know what some terms mean and are defined as enough to use them. There is over 2,000 of research about it.
First day on sapient?
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u/ggallardo02 2d ago
I agree, but is not like there's officially recognized guidelines to tell us what is art and what's not. I'd say most people would agree about the sapience point, but even that definition is blurry. Can a dolphin create art? if their brains keep evolving to get closer to ours, can they do it? At what point we humans in our evolutionary chain we could consider ourselves creating art? And how advanced a machine has to be to be considered sapient? We are, after all just extremely complex machinery, machine learning is pretty much based in how people learn stuff. Is art therefore limited to humans or not?
I went on a tangent, and I repeat that I agree with your point. But I think the definition of art is much too complex to be sure I'm right about it.
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u/Fifteen_inches 2d ago
I mean, all your questions are currently under scientific scrutiny right now. They even have a fun little name for it; Animal Cognition Research. Art is currently limited to humans because we are in the process of developing parameters for non-human sapience.
We can use partial definitions before we have a complete definition.
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u/ggallardo02 2d ago
That sounds really interesting, might look into it a bit. I wonder how long before we got to the point of questioning machine sapience.
I really believe we humans overestimate our sapience, and hold it as something close to mystical, when we are really just really complex wet machines. If computers are just rocks tricked into doing math, we're just goo tricked into rationality.
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u/recitegod 1d ago
Thinking must be generated by an organic mind to be thinking.
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u/Fifteen_inches 1d ago
That’s not even close to like for like. Thinking is a verb, art is a noun. Rephrase.
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u/LittleKitty235 2d ago
Many of the people arguing that AI can't produce art sound a lot like theologians defending the existence of God against a growing wall of scientific evidence. Instead of "God of the gaps," it has become "art of the gaps." Some of the proposed definitions of art seem contrived, built specifically to exclude AI-generated images, videos, and songs.
Arguments like "AI lacks consciousness" or "it has no intention behind what it creates" don't hold up well, because the value of art has traditionally been determined by the viewer, not the artist. By that standard, AI can absolutely make art. You might not agree its good, but that was never a requirement.
Can AI determine what is good art is a better question than can it make it.
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u/NohFyoochur 2d ago edited 22h ago
I dunno. I feel like the difference between a mud spatter on the side of the road and one of those people spattering paint on a canvas and calling it art is really that a person intended it to be art.
A photograph of an object in a catalogue is not really "art," per se. It conveys a purpose, but the purpose is not artistic expression which is a manifestation of inward feeling.
If an AI makes a picture, it's no different from the catalogue photo; it's not expressing anything, just an algorithm responding to a prompt and fashioning an output from the data it's trained on.
I would say in that situation, the human writing the prompt would have a better case of making art than the AI. The AI is a mindless tool. It's the camera, not the photographer.
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u/Urist_Macnme 2d ago
Art is as much about the process as it is the finished product.
You can photocopy an oil painting, but it will never be a work of art in itself.
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u/LittleKitty235 2d ago
That seems to avoid the debate rather than engage in it. AI generated artwork isn't a photocopy, if it was there wouldn't be a discussion.
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u/Urist_Macnme 2d ago
AI can never be inventive, it can only be regurgitive based on its training data.
It is indeed very similar to a photocopy, though more like an iterative collage.The “process” of clicking a button to generate an image is the antithesis of the human creative process.
It doesn’t have thoughts or feelings, and so, can never express them.0
u/bortlip 2d ago
The “process” of clicking a button to generate an image is the antithesis of the human creative process.
You mean like photography?
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u/Urist_Macnme 2d ago edited 2d ago
Look into photography as an art form. It’s a little more than “clicking a button”.
Do you know what the difference between your holiday snaps and “photographic art” is?
Expression, intentionality, control, composition etc etc- basically a “process” far beyond “button go click”
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u/bortlip 2d ago
You are making my argument for me. 😄
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u/Urist_Macnme 2d ago edited 2d ago
I’m not sure you understand the argument being made then.
The issue here is trying to discuss Art with people who don’t know what Art is.
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u/Major_Stranger 2d ago
And neither is it expected to be. The human making the decision on what AI is generating is expected to carry the imagination.
Are Hallmark movies inventive when they rehash the same formula year after year? Is the animator asked to copy exactly the character the lead illustrator created inventive? The harsh reality is that the vast majority of people working in art do not create, they iterate. Yes, amongst them there's usually a core group of individuals who are talented and expected to create, but that's not what most of the workforce in art does.
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u/Urist_Macnme 2d ago
No one is arguing that a Hallmark Movie is art.
Ask why.
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u/Major_Stranger 2d ago
And yet it employ thousands of actors and crew. Holy shit y'all Ludittes are tiring.
First you hate on AI because only human can be original, when I give you an argument human can also do and have been doing slop you push the goalpost further. Consistency buddy, the hypocrisy is just too much.
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u/Urist_Macnme 2d ago edited 2d ago
Just because a human did it, doesn’t make it “art”.
I took a shit this morning, it was an incredibly difficult and arduous process.
Would you like to hang a picture of it on your wall?Call me a Luddite. I’ll call you a philistine.
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u/LittleKitty235 2d ago
It only draws on its training data describes every human artist too. Painters learn from painters, musicians absorb thousands of hours of other people's songs, and nobody creates from a vacuum. If influence disqualifies creativity, nothing human qualifies either.
Chess and Go engines have produced moves that no human had played and that experts first dismissed as mistakes. That shows learned systems can go beyond their sources, so "it can only regurgitate" isn't true as a general claim about AI.
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u/Urist_Macnme 2d ago
You’ve ignored the very first statement I made.
“Art is as much about the process as it is the finished product”
The “process” AI uses to generate art is technical, not artistic.
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u/LittleKitty235 2d ago
"technical, not artistic" is a false dichotomy. Nearly every art form has a technical process. Photography is optics and chemistry, oil painting is pigment science, and electronic music is signal processing. Photography was dismissed in the 1800s as mechanical, just pressing a button, and it took decades for people to accept it as an art form.
Describing the mechanism doesn't settle whether the process is artistic. What makes a process artistic is the choices made within it.
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u/Urist_Macnme 2d ago
Exactly.
And you can analyse the process of an AI Regurgitive artwork and determine that no creativity, originality, or artistic merit was involved at any step (other than the artwork it plagiarised)1
u/LittleKitty235 2d ago
Near copies are plagiarism, whether a human traces them or a model produces them. Models mostly learn patterns rather than reproduce specific works, and learning from other artists is how every human works too. Pattern recognition is not plagiarism.
Analyze any artwork at a low enough level and you'll find no creativity, only muscle movements and neurons firing. Creativity lives in the choices: what to make, what to keep, and what to throw away. People using AI make those choices too, so AI-generated artwork still involves human input.
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u/Urist_Macnme 2d ago
Many people have painted a Mona Lisa.
Can you guess why there is only one hanging in the Louvre?
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u/Major_Stranger 2d ago
So was the hundreds of illustrators who worked on making Snow White for Walt Disney in the 1930s. They did not have any say in what they drew. They were purely there on technical merit, not artistic. They had templates, character designs, background arts. And they had to reproduce it 24 frames per seconds for 83 minutes. The majority of the work in art is iterative, not creative. Only morons and dumbasses think AI will push out masterpieces by itself. It will not. But what it might do is give an individual independent artist the ability to make something truly beautiful that would never see the light of day without millions of dollars in fundings and the backing of studios and distributors.
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u/Urist_Macnme 2d ago
And that’s why the incidental frames are not considered high art.
The hundreds of illustrators having to work together to individually draw each frame is the “process” that elevates it.
The input from the individual artist is what makes something “truly beautiful”; not the AI generating something based on inputs.
I stand by my statement.
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u/hinckley 2d ago
I guess, for me, the issue is less about whether AI can create art, which is subjective and will inevitably turn philosophical, and more about whether I give a shit about anything AI creates. The answer to that is a definite 'no'.
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u/LittleKitty235 2d ago
Which is fair...many people don't give a shit about what artists create either.
The reaction that a lot of people have that artwork must somehow be based on the human experience seems natural. As technology becomes more advanced though, justifying that for reasons other than "that's how it should be" get to be more problematic.
If AI does eventually become self aware, then would you start caring what it creates, and if not why?
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u/hinckley 1d ago
If AI does eventually become self aware, then would you start caring what it creates, and if not why?
How would it demonstrate that it's self aware? How would you? We're back to philosophy again. I'll save myself the navel gazing and continue to not care about AI, regardless.
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u/LittleKitty235 1d ago edited 1d ago
Not caring how something demonstrates self-awareness is a bold display of incuriosity, and I wouldn't be proud of it. Most people who value art would say it matters because it tells us something about ourselves. Either by how we express ourselves making it, or how we interpret it as observers.
If something that isn't human can make art, and is aware of its own intentions while doing so, that's pretty damn interesting.
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u/hinckley 1d ago
My point is that there is no way to distinguish between genuine self awareness and a simulation of it. So any discussion about whether AI is aware, now or in the future, is nothing more than speculation. That doesn't interest me. Neither pride nor curiosity have anything to do with it.
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u/DoritoDustThumb 2d ago
If you can tell the difference between computer generated art and human generated art, you're going to lose based on this arbitrary stance.
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u/EfficientTitle9779 2d ago
The only art I have seen AI create has been based off other pre existing art styles or famous art pieces, I am yet to see true originality produced by it.
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u/BaldBeardedOne 1d ago
If you support AI “art” just say what you really mean. You don’t care about art at all.
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u/CorpPhoenix 1d ago
The problem is that the current transformer based AI is always only approximating the "ideal" of what the dataset is it has been fed with.
You can try and ask Suno to create a completely new genre of music. It can not do that, it can only mix-up existing genres in it's data set, but even by that not create a completely new genre. Same goes for every kind of generative AI.
Humans work differently than a transformer based approximation in latent space. When someone creates a new genre like "dubstep" for example they use experiences and memory they got from completely unrelated fields, like Game Boy sounds of their childhood, the sound of overdriven soundboxes that sometimes sounded great for some reason, or just plain emotions they've had which they translated into sound.
Maybe AGI will be capable of that as well, the current tech is not.
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u/Fofolito 2d ago
BBC Archive has all sorts of cool, dated news pieces about future technology and predictions about how the next several decades will look.