“Artist Friend In my case, I received an AI-generated picture as a gift. I get that she’s trying to personalize the concept, and it’s well put together, but part of me still feels a little cheated. is that fair? ”
-Non-returnable
Non-returnable,
There is something implicitly paradoxical about feeling “cheated” by a gift. A gift, by definition, is something that belongs to you without cost or effort, and is an object that exists outside the economic concepts of debt and fair exchange. But the fact that these gifts often leave us feeling unsatisfied suggests that there is a dark economics of gift-giving, the rules of which are implicit and vaguely defined. Masu. I don’t pretend to know the nuanced history of the duties and accomplishments that underpin your friendship, but I think I can guess why the AI-generated picture disappointed you. First, this gift did not cost the friend any money. This painting was probably generated by one of the free diffusion models available online, and no financial sacrifice was required. Second, this gift required no real creative effort other than the prompt idea. Your friend is an artist and creatively gifted person, but he seems to have refused to donate some of his personal property to your gift. The resulting artwork feels mundane and impersonal to you, lacking any unique imprint of your friend’s creative mind.
Your question reminded me of Lewis Hyde. gift, a 1983 book about the role of the arts in a market economy. Although the writers and artists who have praised the book (including Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace) tend to regard it as something of a metaphysical tome, This book claims, somewhat dryly, that it is a work on economics. Anthropology. Hyde begins with a lengthy discussion of gift economies, such as those found in the South Sea Islands and among Native Americans. He argues that while modern markets are defined by precision and reciprocity, and it is important that sellers receive compensation commensurate with the work they do, the gift economy is circular rather than reciprocal. . The recipient of a gift is not expected to repay the benefactor directly, but is expected to contribute in some way to the community, to pay it forward, so to speak. Rather than valuing equity, these communities develop a certain belief that what you give will come back to you, even if it is not directly or on a set schedule. Maintained. “When a gift moves in a circle, its movement is beyond the control of the individual ego,” Hyde writes. “Each donor must therefore be part of a group, and each donation is an act of social faith.”
Hyde’s larger point, which may be relevant to your question, is that artists tend to thrive in a gift economy, where art is not seen as a commodity with exact monetary value, but as what Hyde called “commercial”. It means that it is seen as an expression of communal energy called “. creative spirit. ” Inspiration itself is obtained osmotically from various external sources, so the act of artistic creation is already in a current of giving and receiving. We refer to talented people as “gifted” because we understand that true creativity is acquired without intention, and that there is no private reserve. “When our gifts spring forth from a pool beyond our measure, we become light,” Hyde writes. “Then you will see that they are not solitary egoisms, but inexhaustible.” That is why a true encounter with art completely obliterates the usual logic of fairness and economic value. It is. When I stand in awe of a Hokusai painting, I don’t usually think about the museum admission price or whether it was a bargain. The gifts of these encounters give the recipient the inspiration to create something of their own, and the generative energy continues to be passed on from person to person.
You alluded to the general quality of the AI art given to you, despite your friend’s well-intentioned attempts to customize it. What is interesting is that inhumanity is a characteristic that characterizes both the best and the worst art. For example, perhaps the transcendence we feel when listening to Bach’s cello suites or reading Sappho’s lyric poems stems from a sense that the genius of the work was that: It is not produced by the individual mind, but is drawn from the wells of the collective unconscious. (Recall the many artists who called themselves “conduits” or “instruments” and claimed that they were nothing more than technological devices for greater cosmic energies.)
But there is a difference between art that achieves sublime universality and products that are conscientiously created to be universal. The transpersonal nature of great art has its dark side in the blank spaces of hotel paintings, muzak, and stylized paperback novels. I think it can be said that AI-generated art, at its current stage of development, belongs to the latter category. To borrow Hyde’s formulation (an apt description of the vast reservoir of training data that constitutes the model’s unconscious), it is drawn from an “incomprehensible pool,” but its probabilistic logic is the same as that of human creativity. As opaque and mysterious as it is, its output still bears the stain of art created by committee and calculated to achieve certain market goals. Perhaps things will change if generative models can create something like the original Van Gogh. Currently, your friend tells you starry night jigsaw puzzle.
