Counterarguments to Ted Chiang on AI

Zvi says

There was a New Yorker piece by Ted Chiang about how ‘AI will never make art.’ This style of claim will never not be absurd wishcasting, if only because a sufficiently advanced AI can do anything at all, which includes make art. You could claim ‘current image models cannot make “real art”’ if you want to, and that depends on your perspective, but it is a distinct question. As always, there are lots of arguments from authority (as an artist) not otherwise backed up, often about topics where the author knows little.

Matteo Wong in The Atlantic says “Ted Chiang Is Wrong About AI Art”, criticizing the idea that art involves lots of decision points with counter-examples of modern artists who literally throw random splotches on the canvas.

concludes:

Chiang’s essay, in a sense, frames art not just as a final object but also as a process. “The fact that you’re the one who is saying it,” he writes, “the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes [art] new.” I agree, and would go a step further: The processes through which art arises are not limited and cannot be delimited by a single artist or viewer but involve societies and industries and, yes, technologies. Surely, humans are creative enough to make and even desire a space for generative AI in that.

Contra Ted Chiang, Eric Hoel thinks AI is no less original than humans, who mostly just copy others. Hoel questions the idea that great art involves lots of small decisions by the ironic reminder that this is not an original idea—and that those “decisions” are often themselves imitations of others. “That’s a good thing!”, Hoel insists, since humans will always maintain control of the distribution and besides, human artists run on “razor-slim margins of originality, insight, or creativity to begin with”.