When I did posters and flyers for our art shows, I tried my best to make it both.
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Yeah, me too.
But in my case the primary function was definitely designed.
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I put so much effort into the pieces I do to make them more accessible to others (colorblindness) that I can’t rightly say that they’re not designed first.
(This is outside of considerations like color/composition, which are maybe design considerations, too.)
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There’s still a distinction made between “hard” ai (let’s duplicate a human mind to the point of zero distinction) and “soft” ai (let’s find out whatever we can about human cognition from the imperfect mirror of a computer algorithm).
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I wrote code in dialects of COBOL and c, code that worked. That was craft. I typically formatted and commented my code so it was readable and (to me) esthetically pleasing. That was art. If my code looked good but didn’t work, would it still be art?
Art is what artists do?
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And artists are people who do art.
There, I think we’re done.
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When I write, I’m a writer, and when I sing or cook, I’m a singer or stove-wrangler – but only then, not at other times. Therefore an entity is only an artist when doing something artistic. The rest of the time, they’re something else.
Okay, that defines ‘artist’ but not ‘art’. I vaguely recall an ancient SF story about aliens whose ‘art’ was cutting up humans and arranging the chunks in (to them) aesthetically pleasing patterns. Sort of like taxidermy, or the art of this nation’s ICE.
Art probably does not actually exist. People come and go. Ideas come and go. Things come and go. Changing all the while. I’m not saying never call something art. Go right on ahead. Knock yourself out. Just keep in mind that all of this is temporary and the calling of art may not be all that important. The making of it, and the appreciation of it are worthwhile. But the act of turning it into a specimen pinned inside a box is likely pointless.
It’s a little like trying to make gourmet comfort food, in a way: sure, the artisanal stuff may be amazing, but all you want at the moment is to revisit a familiar mental place. Exploring is risky when looking for a diversion.
Me, I feel “art” is basically anything that is made. Artifice. Artisans. Basically, anything that falls into the uncanny valley of “someone did this on purpose”, be it a flourish of a dance step, or the shape of a screw. We merely are used to talking about “art” to mean things where the thing, the movement, the sound is what we are supposed to be paying attention to instead of simply using the artifice.
We have acquired many pieces of fine craftwork by tribal artisans across the Americas. We have seen many nearly identical pieces, by the very same artisans, stacked floor-to-ceiling in craftwork warehouses. I can think of performers who repeat the same sounds and moves in every show. Is mass-production ‘art’?
I think the intent of many makers is more to earn a living than to create ‘art’. I’ll concede that those sensing the product or performance may consider it ‘artsy’. The printers who churned-out scenic postcards likely sensed less ‘art’ than I do when I frame and hang a favorite.
So I’ll take an easy out. Art is what someone thinks it is.
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Art is in the eye of the beholder, the ear of the listener, really. I approach art much like John Cage approached musical arts: anything can be art, and in the end we are only arguing about what is good art, and trying too hard to draw sharp borders around a fog.
Well, if you rented a space, sent out flyers detailing the event, and had a willing audience watch you take the dump, then that might in some quarters be considered art (of the performance type). Just showing a bowl already filled with crap would be less artsy… in my opinion, anyway. 
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I kind of like Nietzsche’s take on each art being the isolation of one sense (as in, dance is the isolation of our sense of balance, painting is the isolation of our sense of sight). As much as ‘art can be anything’ is fun, it isn’t super useful for me anymore when I want to make art.
The 2nd one has better composition. The first one has a better message.
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Quite true on both counts.
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Eh… I think art is in the intent of the creator. but agree art can be anything. What’s good is in the eye of the beholder but not what is art. IMO.
Is the terminology usually not “strong” and “weak” “AI”? I heard the witticism that when you call a machine learning algorithm “weak AI”, then with the same right you can call a paper plane “weak interstellar spaceflight”. Thing is, there is nothing, zero, that points into the direction that something like “strong AI” is feasible in the foreseeable future. May I also point to the excellent talk by Maciej Cegłowski on this topic.
You’re probably right, it’s been a long time since I was involved in those kinds of debates.
I’m definitely more interested in the soft/weak side of the research, seems to me we need to reform the way work is extracted from human minds, before attempting to extract the same quality of work from artificial minds.
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