It's been a difficult road processing these changes. So many new elements and so many old elements removed; elements that were always difficult to explain in the first place. I'll give you the Mary Jane out though... lol. I'm sure I've used that one a few times myself.
I thought of an analogy just now. If you dressed yourself and someone said you have style, you have style. If someone else dressed you and someone said you have style... ?
Photos are a good one. If someone takes a picture of a mountain, that picture also tells the story of the man standing there.
I'm not anti AI or anything like that. Since it burst onto the scene though, I've been thinking a lot of deep thoughts, trying to figure things out.
Lol, I was hoping you would understand that.
If someone else dressed you, I would say you had a style.
Right! Someone asked me not too long ago why I didn't do personal posts anymore, kinda blew me away. Thought my photos were plenty personal enough, even if I wasn't in them.
Did you ever read Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? I can't quite put my finger on why but trying to figure things out in regards to AI makes me think of the "What is Quality" theme/line of questioning from that.
A style, sure, because it involves someone else. AI isn't sentient. Can mimic a style but has no desire to create its own. The paintbrush can't have style in this context.
Artforms come with that story of the man standing there as well. There's a comedian on stage, but what you don't see in the moment is them sitting at home writing those jokes, fine tuning everything as the show goes on, creating their own style. Had my own experiences here where I'd spend several hours working on art for a post, hit a twenty dollar payday yet get shit from the neighbors because they only saw 100 words there. Blind to the story and effort behind the picture I made. Never took it personally of course. Just knew the experience would be valuable someday.
And no, unfortunately I have not read that so I can't comment on that line of thinking but I did find the audiobook and saved it for later.
AI isn't sentient but I wouldn't be so sure about creating their own style. Don't think they can do that now but it wouldn't surprise me if some smart coder figures out a way to give them a sense of curiosity before too long. Part of what drew me to AI was that mimicry ability, I feel like it would be well suited for détournement, although I'm still trying to nail down how. In that case the mimicking is part and parcel of the art but aside from subversive sorts of uses I'd have to agree that's there's a distinct lack in the style department presently.
Hell, that story is there with AI as well, the art's just in the writing of the prompt rather than the output. Best analogy I can think of is writing a song on a keyboard/piano, you've got to figure out what keys to hit and in what order to be able to get anything of note. I've spent many an hour mucking around without coming up with anything worthy of an upscale.
Definitely had similar experiences with my photography posts here, there's no correlation between what went into something and what people see. Took me a bit before I stopped taking it personally but now it's just kind of amusing. Occasionally the inverse will be true too, people will really be impressed with stuff that I had considered marginal work at best. People are weird...
It's one of my road trip books, it's good for giving you something to ponder on those long drives/hikes. Give me a shout when you finish it, I'm curious to know what you think of it.
The part that troubles me when it comes to AI creating its own style is when senses come into play. It could in theory create an art style not visible to us or a sound we can't hear. But to the AI it thinks it's incredible. It could make something that hurts our eyes or ears, and think it's incredible. If it was creating it for our senses, in a way it would be pandering. It could be intelligent enough to create something that triggers sensations, like hearing and seeing, without there being any sound or sight as well, but that's getting really advanced, yet, possible. And in a way, that's all a bit eerie.
When you think of advanced AI you have to keep in mind it's not human. Can see things we can't, can hear things we can't. It's something else.
Aside from being eerie, why does that trouble you? There's plenty of human created art that is incomprehensible to me, AIs making stuff that I can't perceive or appreciate would seem to just be a continuation of that.
To me one of the most fascinating (non-art related) aspects of AI stems from it being not human. For the first time we have a nonhuman that can communicate with us studying and learning from humans. In a way it's the first anthropology study not biased by human conditioning and biases, I suspect that there's a lot we can learn about ourselves by studying what and how the AI learn from us. Don't think we will be too appreciative of the things we would learn but it could prove enlightening.
Because if something could cause you to feel like you're hearing something, but there's no sound, that would be kind of messed up. Or you can suddenly see something without anything being there, that would be kind of messed up.
But it's all just science fiction at the moment.