>>32229229I dont think you understand what I'm saying or you're being overly pessimistic about what artists do.
Theres a piece of art from spain that's really controversial, I forget the name but it's an artists self portrait and a portrait of the kings daughter being dressed by her handmaidens. The controversy is who is actually the subject of the painting: was the painting made as a portrait of the king from the perspective of his inner self? Or was it a political egalitarian message, here, this is what the king saw on this day. Look upon my painting and you are a king peasant for a moment peasant. Is it a mirror, if it is a mirror then why, why are the servants at the center of the painting etc. etc. etc.
Im not of the opinion that painting has to be full of meaning, after all it's just painting, but if you look into the metaphysical aspects of what Odd Nerdrum is doing or even just the normal painting controversies like "Are the peasants praying in the field in the Matins portraying piety? The hardship of pastoral life? Or is it a funeral for their dead son like Dali suggested?" You'll see that the process is completely different for AI. AI takes those works and produces a soulless pastiche of images, and sometimes they can be beautiful for a second, but they never have an inner realm you can explore. I'm not saying art is some unkillable magical human thing that will be eternal, corruption, money laundering, nepotism, postmodernism, Pollack, and photography killed painting years ago. Painting was dead before WW1 started. Picasso and Frieda were only celebrities in their time because they were political activists, Dali is more memorable for his savant garden films than he is paintings.
As for consciousness: we can't define consciousness. There are arguments over whether every atom in the universe is conscious on a level from 1 to 100 and there are elimination materialists who believe we are not conscious. According to Marcus Aurelius's definition of consciousness computers have been conscious since maybe 2003.
When GI is finally created it will not be like us at all, comparing our processes of cognition would be like expecting the biology of a creature that evolved to breathe the liquid methane under the ice of Titan to be similar to the human genome. So whether or not AI will ever be conscious or not is not something I'm interested in discussing because theres no definable goal post outside of asking if it is conscious. People like Yuval Harari and Elon Musk and even Jeff Bezos overstep their bounds when they talk about this shit but I really don't care, my original point is that in certain contexts AIs use thousands of copyrighted images to generate a picture, and because of the machine process being effectively the same as copy and pasting a picture this is going to be a legal issue at some point.
