I love this piece on ML art, specifically the ways that it interrogates what the hell we are talking about when we talk about shit like "Théâtre D’opéra Spatial", that midjourney picture that won an art contest.
I’ll begin by noting that when I first glanced at Allen’s “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” I was taken in by the image, which struck me as evocative and intriguing. But as I came back to the image and sat with it for a while, I found that my efforts to engage it at depth were thwarted. This happened when I began to inspect the image more closely. As I did so, my experience of the image began to devolve rather than deepen. When taken whole and at a glance, the image invited closer consideration, but it did not ultimately sustain or reward such attention.This is not only because the image appeared to fail in some technical sense—hands, for example, seem to give these models trouble—it is that these errors, aberrations, or incongruities are, in a literal sense, insignificant—they signify nothing. They may startle or surprise, which is something, but they do not then go on to capitalize on that initial surprise to lead me on to some deeper insight or aesthetic experience.
emphasis mine.
This works within reader response models even ignoring "authorial" (artist's) intent. The thing is, meaning making happens as audience members navigate a series of restrictions placed on them by the art, and they explore how far they can go in any given "direction"
So for instance
- oh this has a gender reading
- this doesn't lend itself to Freudian analysis very well
- this is super Marxist
And so when we approach art culled from artists by AI, we don't even have the sort of restrictions that a human-made playlist or gallery has. There's no there there. We run against a hand with 20 fingers and we can't find either room to explore or a restriction, because there's no particular reason for the hand to have 20 fingers.