I fully get the objections, but still I think this is a great art project.
Note, of course, that the artist was the human who conceived of this thing, and put it together. No one is going to claim that ChatGPT is the artist, we’ve all seen enough examples of trite AI poems. What the audience is impressed by in that second video is not the dumb poem, but the spark of imagination in the artist who created the idea of the camera.
This is a mostly wonderful thing.
A poet friend of mine said everyone is a poet who writes some poetry. I scratch out the odd verse now and then, when I’m in the mood. I do it for myself, not to impress other people.
I’d like a camera which turns poems into pictures, but I suppose it would be a sort of projector. Perhaps you can already do something like that by using one of the picture AIs and putting a poem in as a prompt.
I agree with others here that this art project isn’t an enemy of human-written poetry, but I do also sympathize with your angst about AI’s threat to human creativity. It does plagiarize, it’s already depriving creatives of work left and right these days, and while much of what it produces now is shit, what it can produce is getting harder and harder to discern from human-made work.
The threat of AI (really, Large Language Models) harming the labor movement of the creative class is very real! There are plenty of vampiric private equity fucks who would love nothing more than to take every non-managerial job that requires any skill not covered by their MBAs and replace them with “AI” to cut costs.
But 5 years ago, if someone made a Poetry camera using available LLM algorithms, it would have been a non-controversial art project. I think that sadly speaks to the Marketing Success of the AI-obsessed Finance Bros. (Who are also NFT- and Crypto-obsessed because they possess no actual creativity beyond “what if things of value, but I don’t have to deal with the people who create the value and still get to reap all the wealth”)
This is the kind of project I would have been breathlessly working on in school and feeling so smart and special and cool to get to be a part of this exiting new movement and challenge and!
I’m not sure AI isn’t just making it clear how necrotic some things are when it comes to what people value about the humanities and how they engage with it all. But who knows maybe it could help people reconcile that somehow too? AFAIK human creativity is always going to be both a blessing and a curse to us.
I think really the only thing that scares me as any type of “artist” is this:
The only way to become an artist as a human is to make art, to survive off of making art you have to make art that is good enough other people will pay you for it and that takes time and a lot of different skills. Even the privileged and rich nepo babies often work hard to get those skills and leverage them. That’s a lot of investment into something that is heavily discouraged in the young because it already isn’t that profitable. And it can become unpleasant work fast when your heart isn’t in it just like anything. Creativity can be draining with or without a performance aspect.
What happens to art when it’s just not worth it for anyone to even try to learn how to make it with their bodies anymore? Will they just look back and think it’s weird how people used to manually operate strings and things like that? It’s not like a calculator doing math and replacing paper and pencil. There’s a skill that comes with practice, a body skill that is most definitely something one has to improve upon in some way… and it changes a person to do that sometimes in a beautiful way. Can be a really enlightening social experience too. What happens when nobody remembers anything about music but whatever combinations of ancient memes are available to stream from Google or Amazon or Apple etc.
So long as football exists I guess there will always be marching bands, but will anyone write trumpet solos with the thought of real humans playing them anymore?
The most important part about music to me, for instance, is the fact that I can use my body to make music!
Sometimes even music that some one or another likes some times. Pretty amazing. After doing that for some time I sometimes have some ideas about a song of my own and I apply that knowledge there, learning from it each time. This isn’t just “labor” this is how you learn to make music?
I can’t see people ever really abandoning that on some level but maybe it’s because I just don’t want to. Just a horrible fantasy.
Could you please expand on that? Not sure especially what you mean by necrotic there.
And I agree, if this is part of what you’re saying, that it’s sad and scary to see even more human creative withering away these days.
So Frosty. 
Maybe… but probably not tonight!
Editing to add @milliefink because I think I’ve taken up a lot of space on this thread already:
Maybe what I mean is also more like zombified? Like I feel like more and more people are losing touch with the idea that the arts are a human practice at all or that there is real humanistic value in them or that the value of art is connected to human lives and bodies at all. It’s weird too because look at how they had to shove the “A” back into steam because there’s actually so much money in art… actually. Once it’s owned by a megacorp it’s suddenly VERY valuable regardless of the wages of employees (gonna want to minimize those of course).
Labor shit happens everywhere after all. Many years ago I knew some one who ran a pretty good art business making ab-ex pieces for hotels. Now that is a harder to get into market because there are whole factories of real living humans making this kind of art for a couple US dollars a day in China. Those artist’s bodies, time, and lives are just not that valuable globally so they can be traded at an economic advantage, but I don’t know their circumstances it may be an awesome job that pays well in their country. That didn’t require AI, but it’s the values that get us there that get us here with AI too.
When I was a kid people were largely reacting to a desire to remove public funding for the arts because it had been a big part of historic economic growth but people didn’t like governments spending on it. Ok private sector it is. Most of my peers, even those who were selected early on to go to arts magnet schools and had parents who could make that work out kind of or had social support to do so… even among them it’s kind of like “so what are you really going to do though, you’re smart, you can do this so surely you can do something worthwhile with your life then?”
I had a couple of goes on it and produced some results which I think show up the difference between human creativity and machine
But I may have been biased by my position as initiator and observer.
Here is a prompt I gave:
Uninvited mist
Softens the early morning
Of autumn days
Turns all the cobwebs
Into luscious necklaces
Ropes of sparkling pearls
Cars drive cautiously
Drifting through lazy cloud banks
Arrive late for work
I disagree with parts of that definition. Most artists I know have to support themselves through other means, some unconnected with the arts, but some, off the top of my head, are teaching, working in commercial arts, in theatre/film, therapy etc… If anything, I think AI is an existential threat to those jobs rather than the actual arts.
I mean me too. No shit… we all have multiple jobs and do whatever we can to make money wherever however! I’m able to do what I do because I was good or better at something people valued more, which in my case happened to be helping workplaces pay fewer humans for the same amount of work via software (ironic?).
The best guitarist I know personally works at a sandwich shop with a masters so he can play gigs and see doctors sometimes. He makes more money off of making sandwiches fwiw. Part of that is personality driven, but that’s also very normal for anyone who can’t keep a job as an associate prof. The way I see it if some one throws 50 cents in your case that one time you play a song out of the blue in a parking lot then that’s “payment received” too even if you don’t work full time in the industry.
But still the art they do show and market to others has to be good enough and interesting enough to others and I think that is still true.
If you want an audience of any type you do have to make things that an audience either wants or is so deeply challenged by that they give it a lot of attention, which involves learning your craft and cultivating it in that direction.
Yes you could do this only at a loss as some kind of lifelong solitary monastic practice and I’m sure some one some where is doing this right now.
Technically you could practice 100 years and never show anyone, never audition for a paid gig, and never enter a juried show, etc… but I didn’t want to make my post longer trying to verbalize every tiny nitpick some one could take with what constitutes work and what constitutes pay when I put a lot of time into already and kind of regret it. Likewise I’m not going to go back and edit it to differentiate the quantity of money, prizes, or human interest that matters. Generally it is true. So…
I guess…
but I stand by what I said.
Because what I literally said was meant to imply that IF (big if) you are going to survive off of only selling your work you absolutely need to make work people will pay for. And to do that you’re going to need to learn how to make that well enough.
And this is why it is so fucking tedious to talk about the arts too. It’s just so hard to articulate especially when from the outside it’s hard to understand.
You say the pay sucks some one will be like “but Kanyes a billionairre” and if you say you have to work hard to make art that people want to by if you want to sell art to people some one will say “nuh uh some one could have another job and make art on the side as a hobby and never make money” or “pollock was just a full time alcoholic and look how famous he got.” I used to get shit on a lot by bitter art students because I was attractive and female so people often assumed I had a rich husband supporting me because frankly, most attractive female artists in that environment for whatever reason were, in fact, supported by their spouse’s income which I think is totally fair and entirely wholesome (gotta love a functional supportive marriage)… I just wasn’t privileged in that particular way.
Example: GWB is independently wealthy. He uses his wealth to make art. People really do love and collect his art. He is an artist and he has put work into making art people value and selling it even if it pisses other people off that it worked for him and even if he financially does not depend on that art as his only means of income.
But it’s pretty clear that the culture industries would replace creative work if they could. Just look at one of the key elements of the recent strikes in Hollywood. The actors and writers were not being paranoid, I don’t think. They very much would replace as much creative work as possible with AIs if they could, hence the demands by the guilds.
I suspect GWB might have been happier painting little dogs than embarking on his career as politician and war criminal, and I know the world would have been a much better place.
Yep. Both he and Jerb had a big “I’m only doing this because of who my dad is” energy.
Totally!
I’ve always felt a largely ignored aspect of the Trump administration’s rise to power is just how fucked up it already was to most of us that two goddamned families could just basically dominate our political landscape for generations and there wasn’t a damned thing we could do about it.
I’m not a fan of how that manifested, but I do sympathize with the frustration.
I’m trying to torture Craiyon with William McGonagall poetry. There’s been nothing interesting yet.
