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I don't think people are "waiting to be woken" -- I'm just surprised the technology is so quickly dismissed.

The people commenting on this article are a wide range of people, as wide a range as I'm likely to be able to access in one place. They are not a monolithic block. And judging by the quality of some of the language people have used in the comments, many of them are clearly highly educated and intelligent.

The people who say these „no soul“ thing are just afraid of the unknown, or the new. And when people are afraid they start defending themselves and their old reality.

Changes need a little bit of time. Don’t worry, they will calm down. As long as politicians don’t destroy the whole thing, it will all be ok!

The thing about the "soul" behind a painting is that the art piece is never created in a vacuum People are fundamentally interested in stories and narratives and, as such, are interested in who painted things, why, where, when, or even the mystery around it. That's why most museums have information cards about paintings.

While a first viewing of an AI painting might create an initial emotional response, most people will seek something more from it unless they suffer from stuff like lack of empathy, psychopathy, autism, etc.

Upon learning the art piece is created by AI, it kills nearly all possibilities for a narrative or relatability. The whole pattern construction process was done by a machine, which, fundamentally, lacks what we refer as "soul". It's the brain pattern recognition process without any of the environmental factors that influence artists. That's what people relate to.

If you kill the story, you effectively kill a very large part of the interest in art. Thinking people enjoy art just because they like looking at pretty things is... pretty socially inept

Very interesting comment, thanks for your time. I do “get” that a masterpiece has a whole story and context behind it — I’m not disputing that Van Gogh, Shakespeare, and Beethoven will still be revered for centuries to come.

I think this AI poses a much more direct threat to people lower in the art world’s pyramid than world-class geniuses — jobbing creative designers, for example, should be concerned and should take the challenges posed by AI more seriously than I think many of them do. A lot of art is absolutely created to have generic pretty things to put in your house.

I dispute the assumption many of the commentators made that they could easily distinguish AI and human art.

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I think we’re done here. I wish you well — I’m going to move on and talk to other people. Bye.

>I dispute the assumption many of the commentators made that they could easily distinguish AI and human art.

Well, for now, it is often VERY easy to distinguish. The tech isn't all there yet, but I think the biggest factor is who is posting AI art. It has a lot of potential in the hands of professional artists with technical skills, but the reason so much of the AI art is easily recognizable right now is that most people that post it are layman's that don't have the technical skills to either spot the irregularities nor the technical skills to fix them.

And it's also why I do have a little bit of an issue with the attempt from some to say AI art is equal to manual digital art and that it doesn't need identification. It's a scale problem.

At a quick glance from an untrained eye, a photograph of Mount Fuji might not seem far apart in quality, but upon closer examination or looked at by people interested in photography, one will be able to distinguish the photo taken during a family vacation in Japan vs the photo take as an art piece.

Despite both being photographs, most art or photo sites will usually prohibit someone from uploading his whole family vacation photo file of unfiltered snapshots. That's the scale problem.

>that a masterpiece has a whole story

You also don't need to go to masterpieces to see that phenomenon. People naturally gravitate towards artists' production because of a variety of factors, most of them unrelated to just the pretty pictures. Branding, story, style, etc.

AI art will indeed most likely disrupt the artistic production of mass market where the story isn't as important (graphic t shirt, consumer furniture design, toys, etc). But (hopefully) an artist will stay in the creative loop to fix, choose, guide what goes to market. It will simply take fewer artists for that hence the job loss.

But as soon as you are talking about books, movies, music, "high" art, etc, only AI creations will probably face a lot of natural push back. Not because they just hate the future. But because the public will have a hard time relate to it.

Now, if the AI is simply used as a tool to create an artist vision, then it might pass better.

Lots of great content in that comment, thank you! I appreciate your perspective — the art world isn’t something I know as much about as you clearly do.

My job involves text production — and that’s a world that absolutely is just starting to become aware of the tsunami that’s coming. The speed that the AI is improving is absolutely incredible — and, perhaps because I’m not an expert, I see no reason why the artistic AIs can’t also rapidly improve.

ChatGPT can write a poem and then describe the creative process and what influenced it in a similar way that a human would. Character.AI does a pretty good job interpreting paintings as well.

In reality it's just analyzing what it generated and creating a convincing narrative, but the "story" aspect will be on par with humans soon enough. The only difference being one is simulated. It'll be interesting to see if in the future, when multimodal AIs can be trained on images and form a unique interpretation, people become fans of a specific AI character's art style.

People want to feel special. The same argument was made about African Americans in the U.S., other races in other countries (nearly every country enslaved outsider groups), and at one point even about women.

Many people believe animals are soulless because of their religious beliefs which also evolved to make humans feel special.

Not sure I understand what you're saying. The "story" is fiction, right?

You understand the interesting thing isn't the story as an end, but as a mean?

The exception might be what would be considered consumer art, the bottom common denominator type?

>then describe the creative process and what influenced it in a similar way that a human would.

You mean invent, right? What "influenced" it isn't based on anything lived. So its basically just a lie.

>The only difference being one is simulated

I feel like that's a pretty big difference lmao 🤣 Again, unless you're incapable to relate to others experiences. In that case, you probably don't care. But that's a minority of abnormal humans

To me, art is just pretty things to look at.

I have zero interest in who created any given piece or why they created it.