Brandon Sanderson on AI art

[sijopunk]

I've always liked Brandon Sanderson, and he has been instrumental in shaping my skills as a writer through his series of lectures that he gives & publishes every year. He gives a keynote speech about AI generated art. He's mainly talking about writing, so it hits us close to home.

I posted a thread several months ago asking whether people here considered themselves artists, and I seem to be fairly alone in considering what we do to be art. However, I think if you listen to his speech more of you will come around to my (and I believe his) way of thinking.

There's an implication that he doesn't state, but circles enough times that I heard it loud and clear. I'm not as certain about the future of AI as the techbros want us to be, so I'm glad he didn't come out and make a hard prediction.

 

[Nynah]

I think BrandoSando is fine, he's a successful author who actually seems to give a shit about passing down his knowledge and what worked for him to the next generation of writers, so good on him for outlining his stance on genAI in general. Obviously I know that his focus is on writing but including other mediums like animation, video games and visual art within the scope of his speech was nice. I do agree with him that art isn't just the end product but also the process so to have him apply that to all creative processes is the correct take. I do wish he would have done a little bit more in the way of admonishing writers (and other creatives in general) who hypocritically use genAI for things not in their chosen medium but I'll take what I can get.

 

[Rob_Royale]

I do agree that what we do is art.
I did enjoy that monolgue. Thanks for posting it.

 

[Bamagan]

I posted a thread several months ago asking whether people here considered themselves artists, and I seem to be fairly alone in considering what we do to be art. However, I think if you listen to his speech more of you will come around to my (and I believe his) way of thinking.

There's a definition of the word art in which anything people produce by skill or craft is 'art', whether that's a painting or a story or a piece of rope. Prior to the advent of AI, I would have called it a fairly trivial definition, at least for the purposes of determining what is or isn't Art (great art, fine art, popular art, or whatever), since it means a doodle is in the same bucket as The Birth of Venus and other things in museums. But with computers that are now able to produce things that look basically like what people could do, the 'skill or craft' clause has maybe become more meaningful.

That being said, the amounts of skill and craft to be found in the works of this site are highly variable ( ), so I can understand why some folks demand a certain level of... grandeur(?) to be displayed before they'll agree that something is Art rather than mere art.