Derailing a thread?

Thinking outside the box!


Everything is math by the way.


While many members of this forum have a sophisticated perception of go, I will make the bold statement that our concept of art is probably lacking.

A picture generated by an algorithm is not art by itself at all. Art is connected to the human envolvment in all cases.

A picture generated by an algorithm can be an element of art generated by humans.

What is the difference between a game and art.

A game is pure math.

Art is transcendent.

How "good" a piece of art is is subjective, is it not?

So how can we objectively compare it to the results we've seen in go?

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be immersed

I think the only evaluation we can use is whether the piece produced matches the vision of the (human) artist. In other words, I agree with Gomoto that art is a necessarily human endeavor, though we can use computers in our work. That’s why the original piece can be considered successful art even though I don’t like it.

(I have deeper thoughts about what kind of art is worthwhile to produce, but that really would derail this thread!)

Even if the artist didn't like the art, if someone finds it moving in some way, isn't it "good" art? I've been to a couple of art museums. A number of the pieces didn't do much for me, but I liked a handful of them. To me, those ones were the good ones. That set of "good" art probably doesn't match the set of "good" art on somebody else's list. Clearly, somebody valued this particular piece at hundreds of thousands of dollars, so to them, it was "good".

But still subjective, which is different than the case with go AI. Go AI is good if it can win games. This can be measured in a very objective way that cannot be disputed - win rate against other players.

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be immersed

I think it's easier. Mozart, after all, wrote aleatory music. I.e., music written by an algorithm using the throw of dice to generate random numbers. The first major computer program that I wrote composed music using random numbers, and a composer used it to help him write a symphony. Already in the 1970s there were programs that could imitate different composers. This art program is avowedly imitative. I am not impressed.

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The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Let me add that, using chaos theory, I have written programs that generate abstract moving images that people have found fascinating.

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The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

It seems to me that aleatoric art depends on the tension between the artist giving up control, but also exercising judgment.

That sounds unbelievably pretentious (it’s post-bar time right now), but when you created your art, did you use just any algorithm, or did you choose one that created results that were a little weird, but also something you found somewhat appealing?

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Occupy Babel!

About objectivity: there’s a philosophical question about whether aesthetic values are every truly objective, but it doesn’t matter for this discussion. Maybe it’s nothing more than a fact about humans’ subjective judgment that we value Picasso above Kinkaid, but we do. By those maybe-not-perfectly-objective-standards, this painting is not so good.

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Occupy Babel!

I agree. Mozart wrote good aleatory music. Bach could have, I expect, but I don't think he did. I was not so impressed by John Cage.

The composer who used my program just gave me a couple of pages of numbers to imitate. I analyzed them using stratificational linguistics and figured out a grammar to generate a similar set of numbers. Lower levels were constrained by higher levels, but transitions at each level were random. As I told the composer, I had to make some musical decisions.



I was incredibly lucky with the abstract, moving art. I simply knocked it out as a background for people to look at while the program delivered subliminal messages. When I demoed the program, it was the motion art that people found fascinating and remarked on. I made next to no artistic decisions whatsoever. Some of the ways I translated the program's output to pixels produced fractals, some didn't. Almost every screenshot of the output was worth looking at. The program produced a good mix of repetition and variation. I was lucky.

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The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Re: subjectivity of art evaluation.

I suspect that, as internet users click on pictures or upvote ("like") them, giants of the web are building huge databases and will come up one day with an algorithm modeling human artistic preferences. Then, they will have a way to calculate which piece of art is better than which. With such an evaluation tool, they will be able to produce original art that humans will appreciate. This will certainly take time, but doesn't seem impossible to me.

already happened to music,

but I dont appreciate it.

Such an algorithm would let you produce art that the masses are likely to appreciate. But there may be eccentric folks out there with unusual tastes. If a piece of art is good or interesting to that 0.1%, it's still good art in my mind.

A lot of people like the Mona Lisa, for example. It's not objectively a good piece of art. It's good for those people that like it.

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be immersed

NN's still fail in some linear calculations that humans find straightforward. Art might give more chances for AI to flop in creating a work both original and good.

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On Go proverbs:
"A fine Gotation is a diamond in the hand of a dan of wit and a pebble in the hand of a kyu" —Joseph Raux misquoted.

NNs (artificial ones) are still in their relative infancy. Research is ongoing.

Is this a "flop"?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)

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be immersed

I would call it broken, myself.

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The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

This was more a statement about art that art itself : "Art is what artists do"

The AI painting of this thread is basically an anti-Fountain

This AI-generate art is definitely a flip, not a flop, judging by how much it sold for.

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Sorin - 361points.com

That's a definition you're choosing to use.

You could also say that the fountain was art because it put forth a new idea of beauty.

AI seems capable of doing the same.

From the wiki page:


I'm not saying I personally agree with Hicks's interpretation of what art is. But that's just the point: it's subjective.

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be immersed