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Francesco D'Isa's avatar

I’ve read your essay and find myself agreeing with much of its anatomy of “neck vs necklace,” yet still questioning the conclusion you draw from it. You’re right that great art needs a thick, particular context, and your Guernica-in-the-woods thought-experiment makes the point vividly. But the essay treats generative systems as if they stand alone, when in fact every non-trivial AI artwork already arrives encased in multiple layers of human meaning: prompt, curation, framing, display, reception.

You also grant, late in the piece, that “someone will eventually create an AI masterpiece,” yet most of the argument reads as though this were impossible in principle. Photography offers a useful timeline check: in 1841, barely two years after Daguerre’s first public demonstration, it would have been premature to pronounce the absence of photographic masterpieces; Stieglitz’s The Steerage and Atget’s Paris were still half a century away. Declaring a deficit ­now, when generative tools have been publicly available for scarcely three years, risks repeating the same snap verdict critics made about early “mechanical” cameras.

Finally, the essay often equates “AI art” with raw, unedited machine output, then measures that output against canonical paintings. Yet the most serious practitioners work exactly where you say meaning is made: they choose or even shoot the training data, design prompts as scores, iterate, crop, print, mount, title and tell stories around the images. In other words, they restore the very specificity you claim is missing.

So I share your intuition that the first undisputed AI masterpiece will arise when an artist harnesses the medium’s native properties like stochasticity, scale, recursion rather than using it for mimicry. I just doubt we’ll recognise that moment if we decide in advance that no such work can yet exist. The history of new media suggests we’re still far too close to the invention to make that call.

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Jason Baldridge's avatar

A lot of what makes art art is intention, including expression of ideas and feeling. It’s makes the artist feel something, or the viewer feel something, or both.

A problem with AI generated outputs and their proliferation is the Bach faucet problem, which has been ongoing for sometime in generative imagery:

https://x.com/jasonbaldridge/status/1591783325303177217?s=46

The ghibli effect was the most recent instantiation of this.

Overall, I think a mistake many people make, both AI fans and AI skeptics/haters, is that the end state is that we can make the standard images, movies, music. Instead, we need to broaden the aperture to new forms of artistic expression, storytelling, etc, that taps into these tools to bring new visions and experiences to life. Think: truly generative stories and experiences, branching narratives, interactive mysteries, and who knows what else.

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