I'm blown away by these results, but one caveat here: the AI is great at creating illustrations, not art.
Creating great _art_ that Grayson Perry (for example) would recognise as such is probably AGI-complete, because it requires a deep understanding of the human condition, society, and a lot of reasoning skills.
A great artist could certainly use Dall-E 2 as part of their method, though.
If I showed you a generated piece, and don't tell you what prompt generated it, you will find it just as meaningful as any other piece of art made by hand.
This is why we are blown away by some pieces of text generated by GPT-3 as if it has its own mind. Even most abstract art has meaning for anyone who is looking for it.
What I am saying is if a generated artwork is indistinguishable from what a human can make than that's all that was needed.
Conceptual art is not about the artefact that comprises the work, but the conversation that artefact creates with the viewer.
If you put both in front of someone with no idea about conceptual art, there’s a real chance you might be right. If they happen not to “get” the work or understand the context or just know enough about conceptual art, then a viewer might easily miss the point.
But a computer could not have conceived Duchamp’s urinal, not with our current technology. You’re probably going to need AGI for that (which I’m certain will arrive eventually).
Well I suppose a machine could accidentally create good art, just like a human could. But it would only appear to be good art, the same way that randomly enumerating all possible HD images would at some point produce a Picasso.
But deliberately, no, it couldn’t, not yet, and human conceptual artists could make far far superior art than a machine. Because great art requires understanding the human condition and deep reasoning about the world.
Models are not in a vacuum, their outputs are selected and guided by humans (here captions). The human can have the deeper understand while the model has specific understanding on styles for example.
I definitely think a human could use an AI to assist in the creation of great art (and to be clear, that is synonymous with conceptual art to me and also most people with a modern degree in fine art).
A comparison can be made with Damien Hurst’s or Anthony Gormley’s use of assistants to create the pieces as instructed by the artists.
Duchamp’s urinal isn’t brilliant because the urinal was difficult to acquire or to make, but because it expresses so much and asks so many questions.
Creating great _art_ that Grayson Perry (for example) would recognise as such is probably AGI-complete, because it requires a deep understanding of the human condition, society, and a lot of reasoning skills.
A great artist could certainly use Dall-E 2 as part of their method, though.