I thought this warrants its own discussion instead of getting burried in the other AI threads.

My question is basicly, if AI can create art (novels/movies/music/video games etc) and it is indistinguishable from human creation, does it have any value to you? Is the fact that art is made by a human an important factor for how you perceive it, and where does that leave the future art, if you can no longer distinguish what is made by a human and what is made by AI? Is art as we know it just dead?

For context:

AI is developing at a rapid pace, it is already producing a lot of dogshit that is being pumped out on social media. But it is not just poorly made garbage that is coming out anymore. This year books nominated for major awards have come out, getting accused of being written by AI, either because it is the case, or because it is indistinguishable from human writing at this point:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck7v4y45893go

Songs are topping the charts, then pulled down when it is revealed that they are “recorded” by AI:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp829jey9z7o

We all know about how easy it is to develop/mod video games with AI now. No doubt that it is getting more and more common for video game developers to use these tools. And it is impossible for the consumer to tell to which extend AI has been used in development.

When it comes to feature length films, we maybe have a bit to go yet. AI can absolutely create believable videos now, and they can write the script, actors are being brought back from the grave, but the examples of feature length films I have checked out are still of quite poor quality, I guess it is also more difficult to keep the AI use secret considering how many people are involved in making a movie. But I guess here it is also just a question of a couple of years then AI can make feature length blockbusters.

I guess sculpturing is still fine for a decade or two.

No. Mace Windu fell out of a window is art, even if it was just made with a guiding hand. Rich people used to fund art in the same way for centuries, they'd know what they wanted and where but they'd need to fund, train and develop artists and their apprentices over the long term. Some would say the art was in the patron.

Mace windu Fell out of a Window has shown me there will be great AI art. Can't get the damn song out of my head which is strange cause comedic songs rarely are ear worms.

I view art as a way to distribute emotions through a medium of sorts. The craft of creating it, what tools and techniques used are secondary to the decision on what the piece is trying to tell. But AI are not good at that and people probably cannot specify exactly what makes something tick.

There is a lot lost when people spend less time on their creations. Pinpointing the feel of a book is something that sort of comes naturally when spending hours upon hours with the text. Same with paintings. Each stroke with the pencil bears weight of the human hand guiding it and some of the emotions are directly transferred into the painting. This subtil part of the life of art is not as easy to replicate with AI. Mostly because it is so abstract that even the artist herself might not know exactly what part of the painting is vital for the emotions it produces.

No.

AI slop is not art, and will never be art, and it is completely unsustainable.

Real art will still be around thousands of years from now when GenAI no longer exists.

When you say AI-slop, you mean everything created by AI? If you cannot tell if a work of art is made solely by a human or with extensive GenAI, how do you know if it is AI slop or not?

I didn't consider the post-GenAI age, I guess that is a different scenario.

No matter how "real" it may look, AI slop is created through mass plagiarism, wastefulness, and the enshittification of society.

Most of it looks horrendous anyway, but even if it didn't, it's the method that's the problem, as much as the result.

AI made my avatar. I like my avatar.

It will be curious how AI is integrated because it isn't going anywhere. The anti-folks posting the same thing over daily and ruining good threads isn't going to stop it.

And I absolutely think AI can be art. The funny thing is we have the same discussion when tech evolves. I remember people questioning if digital media could be art....

Copy, Transform, Combine... "everything is a remix", even without AI

Movies and games are probably at higher risk because they are so expensive to produce by humans.

I think the idea that some have (also here), that you can separate art from the artistic process, is crazy. If I watch a Buster Keaton movie and he does a crazy stunt or there is a crazy shot, I get a sense of wonder of how the f... did he do that? If some made the same sequence today with AI I would feel completely indifferent. How can anyone pretend these have the same value, even if the resulting video clip is the same?

To me it is absolutely crucial that art is made by humans, it will always have to be to carry that value (I can accept art made by animals too, which I know is a thing, I feel I have more in common with them, than with AI), it is human communication, humans expressing something internal. If I read a book and thought it was incredible, and later find out it was made by AI, I would hate it and feel cheated. Because then it is not the reflection of a human, at best it is the work of thousands of actual people that has been stitched together in a way that they never intended.

I know new digital tools have emerged before, CGI for example, but even then it still required human craftmanship, it is a tool. Also you can almost always tell that it is CGI, even when made really well, so at least it is transparent. And even still, can we really say that the emergence of CGI hasn't also hurt art to some extend? Watch an action scene from a blockbuster from the 80s and compare it to an action scene in a contemporary blockbuster. I know which is more likely to wauw me.

Minimal use of AI can probably still be considered a tool, but it doesn't require much before it is the AI's voice we are hearing rather than the human's. The big tragedy to me is that from now on or very soon we can no longer tell if a piece of art is crafted by a human, and hence all new art will have to be viewed in the light that they might have been created by or with AI. There is hence art before the 2020's, which is just art, and then there is art after the 2020's, which I cannot say for sure if it is art or not.