It’s a devilish question that raises various related—and equally existential—questions about art’s purpose and identity. After all, if we can’t even agree on what art is, how on earth are we supposed to judge if the art made by AI is any good?
For those who haven’t heard the apocalyptic warnings about the algorithmic assault on human creativity, or read about the lawsuits and scandals surrounding the new breed of generative AI models, they are sophisticated tools for turning words into visual images. Written instructions (called “prompts”) are fed through a multi-layered architecture of neural networks, ground into a kind of statistical powder, and matched via probabilistic correspondences to shades in individual pixels. The resulting image is the neural network’s interpretation of the words in the prompt, informed by its familiarity with hundreds of millions of other JPEG files.
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