Certainly, but those human artists were also trained on a data set their whole lives. Raise a baby with no training data set and they might produce a handprint on a wall or a rectangle of facepaint. There's a reason indigenous tribesmen don't spontaneously invent hyperrealism.
However, there's a major misconception about training of humans and AI.
Image generating AIs are trained with massive amounts of images and text, however image generating humans train with much broader spectrum of experience.
Also, feeding a model tons of images created by humans (directly or by proxy) and claiming that AI is generating something completely new is a bit naive IMHO. Humans mix a much more broader and deeper experience pool to create things without prompts.
An AI model blurts out something derived from a corpus of images and text created by humans, that's all.
The technology is impressive for sure, and it marks a new era in terms of possibilities, but it doesn't take my breath away, sorry.
Further to your point, comparing humans to AI is not just misunderstanding AI, but also looks past how humans create and choose the styles which this AI is now reproducing through a statical approach. Without the human guidance the AI would be bland, AI is limited to the walls of whatever it has been exposed to - humans are not.
The AI emulates. Humans create. - The significance here is not trivial.
Humans emulate as well, and produce bland art as well.
I've seen lots of human-made art (especially on Artstation) that failed to elicit any emotional response in me.
The reason people are having this discussion is a fear of AI creating aesthetically pleasing and deep emotionally through statistical approach.
And the deeper fear that AI can potentially "hack" our senses by providing us with exactly what we want to see, read or hear (statistically).
i.e. if some subset of art is pushing our biological buttons more than all other art, and the effect is generalizable over human population, what would that say about us?
Well put. AI is an evolutionary death, in a sense. True Intelligence is not, at the point at which it is not, it is no longer artificial, and then ethical concerns must apply (rights for so-called AI citizens, etc.)
Humans mix a much more broader and deeper experience pool to create things without prompts.
That wide variety of experience changes the decision of what to create, but I think it has less influence on the actual output than one might expect. A person can have enormous life experience but if they have never seen a logo, a photo, a painting, a drawing, or any other kind of rendered image they will be no more sophisticated in their artistic output than a caveman. Modern artists stand atop a mountain that their ancestors had to climb inch by inch.
Actually, I don't agree. I take photographs and design logos for my pet projects sometimes, and I optimize for feeling most of the time.
I want my photos to make the viewer feel a particular way when viewing what I took. This affects colors, style, and everything.
Arguably, as long as the medium carries the message the creator intended, it's equal in my view. It can be a photo, a drawing, a digital painting or a physical painting with oils. They can create the same feeling if the artist aims for it.
This "optimization for feelings" is a result of my own non-photographic experiences. Sometimes a song, sometimes an event I went through, sometimes an art piece I saw on a medium I don't work.
From my understanding and observation, I saw that many artists work that way. They reflect their emotions in one domain (generally personal life) to another domain (the art they create). Also, there was a video which I fail to find over and over which shows how three designers got affected by the things they saw (and deliberately planted into their minds slowly) during a 20 minute car trip.
Yes, we're building upon this great mountain of experience and knowledge, yet our output is affected by what we experience in other parts of life, unrelated to the art we create.
Consider the following experiment: The music you listen changes your mood, your working speed, and what you feel; effectively changing how you operate and what you create. Exclude work from this, which is by definition something you have to do, unless you're literally dying.
"yet our output is affected by what we experience in other parts of life, unrelated to the art we create."
Right, and what happens when you let that loop feedback to itself?
An asphalt road on every corner, so we build more asphalt roads, we design only what has been designed before. Amplify this thousands of time through computer generated design, the feedback loop is closed and unchanging. Unless your goal is actually to create an independent organism (different moral issue), you are creating sophisiticated feedback loops, not worthwhile content generation. Unless by content generation you mean endless remixing...which is not the same.
Sort of like changing the color of a 3d model and claiming it is a new race with new attributes, as is often done on the cheap e.g. in videogames.
> claiming that AI is generating something completely new is a bit naive IMHO.
I don't see how AI art is less new than the vast majority of human art. Both can create unique compositions that are still deeply rooted in patterns and principles thousands of years old.
> Humans mix a much more broader and deeper experience pool to create things without prompts.
AI does not have understanding, but it's stealing the underlying patterns that are the end result of that human experience.
Absolutely. Though I think that speaks to one of the ways we tend to discount the difficulty of developing human artistry, rather than a defense of AI gen being "not hard".
