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Nick Cave on ChatGPT and the creative process

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Re: Nick Cave on ChatGPT and the creative process

#51

Post by chefandy »

poopbutt7 wrote: post #10
vouaobrasil wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, society is set up now so that the ONLY thing people CAN do is go after money. It was pushed hard in that direction by tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook because they wanted to maximize pure short-term profit by sucking life out of people. There was a time in history where you COULD create real art and make a decent living out of it. Now, AI has set up the ultimate PRISONER'S DILEMMA (…

> There was a time in history where you COULD create real art and make a decent living out of it. Honest question, is that actually true? Historically, professional art always struck me as the domain of the rich, the starving artist, or the person taking commissions for the rich.

You can currently. You've always been able to.

I have a friend that is a workaday oil painter. He went to college for oil painting, got good at painting seaside vistas, and sells them steadily. There are also all manor of other commercial artists. Concept artists, illustrators, graphic designers, animators, composers, musical instrumentalists... they are artists who make a living from being artists. They get artistic satisfaction from their work just like a developer gets creative satisfaction from writing code for a living. They put their heart and soul into the things they create even if it might end up making them, or even other people profit. Art doesn't have to be some magical personal journey completely divorced from the prospect of money to be art. I'll bet that nearly every single musical artist you like made the majority of their work to sell it and make money. That does not make that work worse or less artistic. If you removed the things in our lives we get artistic enrichment from that were created to sell, it would be a pretty stark landscape.

I see a lot of people who generally haven't done artistic things meaningfully grappling with the "what is art" question for the first time, and making a bunch of sweeping declarations that make them feel better about riding this wave. If you're someone who has put a bunch of years, educational dollars, and effort into becoming an artists, some group of software developers "explaining" to you what "real art" is can be pretty infuriating. I was a developer for a decade-- I know this hubris from both sides. It helps when you're plowing into a new problem space to make it better with code, but when you start using those generalizations to deem someone and their life work as worthy or not, it's obnoxious, counterproductive, and generally completely inaccurate.

Re: Nick Cave on ChatGPT and the creative process

#52

Post by dilap »

A hack songwriter looks at other songs, mixes them together, and writes some songs.

A true artist communicates something about their own experience of life through their songs (still taking inspiration in techniques of course from previous songs -- nothing is completely original!)

ChatGPT is currently the ultimate hack songwriter. It has read every song and can remix to create new stuff like you wouldn't believe. But there's no truth of unique experience behind it because...ChatGPT doesn't have any experiences. Yet.

But I think pretty soon we'll throw some GPT-derived AI in a robot body, and it will go out there and have experiences, and sooner or later write an album about what it's like being an AI in a robot body, and probably that album will be a true, effortful piece of art.

Re: Nick Cave on ChatGPT and the creative process

#53

Post by pmoriarty »

librexpr wrote: post #43
jnovek wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my head, I keep making this comparison to photography. I like to take pictures. Usually, I take many, many -- hundreds -- of pictures for a project and I'll find one or two that I like most in that bunch. I think this is a pretty common practice in photography, euphemistically referred to as portfolio editing. I see a strong analogy between portfolio editing and operation of AI like ChatGPT. The camera and the AI…

You'll note that "photography" as an art has its own name and is considered a different art than painting or drawing. And if you took a photo and then said "I drew this", people would say you were lying. So personally I have no problem with considering GPT stuff "art", but I think it should be considered a separate art form and given a different name.

Why oes it matter if we call it "art" or not?

AI creations are going to be enjoyed or not, used or not, given attention or not, just like human creations, regardless of what we call them.

More and more I'm leaning towards seeing the whole category of "art" as nothing more than gatekeeping.

Re: Nick Cave on ChatGPT and the creative process

#54

Post by mostlylurks »

fhd2 wrote: post #29
lll-o-lll wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not an artist, but many people refer to the creative part of making software as an “art”, so here’s a take. ChatGPT allows for rapid iteration of ideas. I have an idea, I get ChatGPT to flesh it out, I iterate. The value ChatGPT is providing is not to be the source of creativity, it’s in speeding up the process from idea to concrete implementation. It’s a tool. In software development and engineering more generally,…

Art, at least how I understand it, is about sharing emotions and experiences. We know artists (as opposed to programmers) because we are curious about the person that put a part of themselves into the thing that evoked some emotion in us or gave us an interesting experience. Software can be a tool to create art (games for example), but mostly it's about problem solving. Sometimes creative problem solving, sure. But l…

It is relatively rare, but software itself (not just the resulting program, such as "a game") can be art. Most examples of this focus on using code to communicate something humorous about the culture surrounding software. I cite FizzBuzz Enterprise Edition [0] as a notable example. There's also code poetry, which encompasses quite a bit more than just humor.

[0]: https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...

Re: Nick Cave on ChatGPT and the creative process

#55

Post by jstarfish »

RichieAHB wrote: post #41
jnovek wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my head, I keep making this comparison to photography. I like to take pictures. Usually, I take many, many -- hundreds -- of pictures for a project and I'll find one or two that I like most in that bunch. I think this is a pretty common practice in photography, euphemistically referred to as portfolio editing. I see a strong analogy between portfolio editing and operation of AI like ChatGPT. The camera and the AI…

Taking a picture is deterministic. You aim at something, configure the settings and the cells / CMOS will capture that light in the right manner. You can argue that autofocus and portrait-mode are eroding this but ultimately, if you, the human are not pointing at something good in the first place, well you’ll very likely not have a very good picture. I feel like with AI and a random seed you can ask a question of whi…

You do have to provide novel input though, otherwise it's just a vending machine for motel art. Everybody is capable of generating the same generic crap by default, but if you're sufficiently creative in your prompt, it's no different than an artist having an assistant.

The real problem is the long tail. You found a unique form of expression? Your work gets trained on and you get cut out of your own agency.

I fully expect deliberately-bad art will become a thing, because it would be ruinous to datasets to be trained on, will stand out in a sea of KincaidDiffusions, and go generally unexamined by AI crawlers. Lomography was ahead of its time.

Re: Nick Cave on ChatGPT and the creative process

#56

Post by jamesjuicy55 »

danielvaughn wrote: post #47
vouaobrasil wrote: post #5

From the article: > ChatGPT is fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanising the imagination. It renders our participation in the act of creation as valueless and unnecessary. That ‘songwriter ‘you were talking to, Leon, who is using ChatGPT to write ‘his’ lyrics because it is ‘faster and easier ,’is participating in this erosion of the world’s soul and the spirit of humanity itself and, to put…

I see it as any other technology - you can either use it as a crutch or as a stepping stool. Inevitably we're going to see a lot of both, but the former are not going to get very far, because they're going to be vastly outshined by the latter.

I agree. AI is a tool. A hammer. Those who do not wish to use the hammer and go on strike because the hammer workers are faster or better, will be left behind.

Re: Nick Cave on ChatGPT and the creative process

#57

Post by librexpr »

pmoriarty wrote: post #53
librexpr wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll note that "photography" as an art has its own name and is considered a different art than painting or drawing. And if you took a photo and then said "I drew this", people would say you were lying. So personally I have no problem with considering GPT stuff "art", but I think it should be considered a separate art form and given a different name.

Why oes it matter if we call it "art" or not? AI creations are going to be enjoyed or not, used or not, given attention or not, just like human creations, regardless of what we call them. More and more I'm leaning towards seeing the whole category of "art" as nothing more than gatekeeping.

I explicitly said that I don't mind calling it "art". I meant that things like "AI songwriting" should be given a different name than "songwriting" like "photography" has a different name than "painting", even though all of these things are considered "art". The name could be just "AI songwriting", or it could be some fancier name (like "photography" has a fancy name).

Giving it a different name would also imply that you shouldn't submit AI songs to a songwriting competition, much like you wouldn't submit a photograph to a painting competition, but you could have separate competitions for AI songs, and separate competitions that accept anything, and so on.

Re: Nick Cave on ChatGPT and the creative process

#58

Post by agumonkey »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #5

From the article: > ChatGPT is fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanising the imagination. It renders our participation in the act of creation as valueless and unnecessary. That ‘songwriter ‘you were talking to, Leon, who is using ChatGPT to write ‘his’ lyrics because it is ‘faster and easier ,’is participating in this erosion of the world’s soul and the spirit of humanity itself and, to put…

In a way chatgpt is just the prolongation of humans laziness and quest for leverage.. but the effect are not linear. what we benefited from not having to carry weights and lift stuff all day long is not the same as not having to think, imagine, dream .. and society has a strange response to cultural productions because if it's too often, too easy, too obvious (and when people don't try hard, they will repeat the same things, it's inherent to that structure) it has no value.

Re: Nick Cave on ChatGPT and the creative process

#59

Post by buildsjets »

fnovd wrote: post #48
vouaobrasil wrote: post #5

From the article: > ChatGPT is fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanising the imagination. It renders our participation in the act of creation as valueless and unnecessary. That ‘songwriter ‘you were talking to, Leon, who is using ChatGPT to write ‘his’ lyrics because it is ‘faster and easier ,’is participating in this erosion of the world’s soul and the spirit of humanity itself and, to put…

Takes like this confuse me. ChatGPT is not stopping anyone from making art. It may stop you from profiting off of your artistic labors. Though, if you need a profit motive to make art, were you really making anything truly expressive and creative to begin with? We're seeing the same thing with the actors and writers striking. Sorry folks, if you're making me choose between embracing neoluddism or living with some art…

There is nothing un-artistic about wanting to both make art and to be able to afford rent, dinner, and pants.

Re: Nick Cave on ChatGPT and the creative process

#60

Post by dottjt »

As a song writer who's tried to use ChatGPT to help with writing songs, what I realised in the end is that it's simply more effective to rely on your imagination.

This isn't to say that ChatGPT isn't good at what it does, but at the end of the day, it's an abstraction over the creative process, and therefore not as useful as people might think.

Because when you're creating something, ultimately it comes down with how you engage with it, and ChatGPT takes you away from that. As a tool it's really good at coming up with ideas, but it then becomes a burden as you try and engage with this material and line it up with your vision.

I'm not sure if it's the right analogy, but it would be equivalent to using a bionic arm to hand write a poem. Yes, the bionic arm can do amazing things, but ultimately you'll be thinking more about interfacing with the bionic arm and figuring out the optimal solution to using it to write the poem best, than simply writing the poem.

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