> I can enjoy just looking at something, whether it's a painting or a generated image, or just the sky. It doesn't take away anything from the experience to me if I know there is no meaning or intent behind it.
I feel like that's an attitude that's particularly common among software engineers: see an artifact as its surface presentation and nothing more. Maybe it's a result of thinking about abstractions like APIs too much.
When I appreciate an image, it typically has to be either a reflection of reality (this thing I'm seeing is a real thing that I now know about) or an actual person's expression (an act of communication) for me not to feel cheated.
It doesn't help that one of the biggest use-cases for "AI" image generation is the creation of clickbait bullshit masquerading as a reflection of reality.
Basically: the context is as important as the raw image itself.
I think this gets it entirely upside down: There is meaning and symbolism and patterns everywhere, but we can never be sure our interpretation matches sone intent, and I see no compelling reason to see that 'intent' as more than complex computation anywhere, and pretty much everything, everywhere is computation.
There is context to a storm, or a tree too. Many things have more, and more complex, context than human intent.
Intent is just one categorisation of data, and it can be interesting, but so are many other categorizations of data.
And we also often get authorial intent wrong, often embarrassingly so.
It also compels me to see the dismissive attitude to AI art as fundamentally flawed, in that while we're clearly not "there" yet, I see no fundamental conceptual difference between different forms of computation - including the human mind - so any dismissal of the "just statistics" kind to me is an attempt to imbue the human mind with religious characteristics I fundamentally reject.
At the same time, to me, that attempt denigrated human art, which to me is equally just a result of computation.
If you can't enjoy art unless you think there's some spark of something more behind it, then to me the only reason you fail to reject human art too is faith in something there's no reason to think I'd there.
Nothing we know suggests we are - or can be - anything more than automatons resulting from computation any more than the trees in a forest or waves on a beach.
Yet we still have intent, even if it is just a product of computation.
And we still produce beautiful patterns that I enjoy whether or not I recognize your intent, and whether or not there was any intent behind any given aspect I enjoy.
> I feel like that's an attitude that's particularly common among software engineers: see an artifact as its surface presentation and nothing more.
I think there's no there there. Most of my time as a software engineer is spent understanding what someone else was thinking and trying to accomplish at the time through the lens of the code they ended up writing. Is that archaeological endeavor not strongly connected to if not exactly what we're talking about here?
It's just that I also know how to enjoy looking at things without any of that.
I feel like that's an attitude that's particularly common among software engineers: see an artifact as its surface presentation and nothing more. Maybe it's a result of thinking about abstractions like APIs too much.
When I appreciate an image, it typically has to be either a reflection of reality (this thing I'm seeing is a real thing that I now know about) or an actual person's expression (an act of communication) for me not to feel cheated.
It doesn't help that one of the biggest use-cases for "AI" image generation is the creation of clickbait bullshit masquerading as a reflection of reality.
Basically: the context is as important as the raw image itself.