@troy_s Disagree. These artifacts are created as directed by people and presented by people, which provides the cognition you indicate is absent.

Arguing otherwise is, IMO, arguing in space very much adjacent that which posits the noncogitant paint splatter makes Pollock art not art.

@millenomi The concept fails on sign and signified in the scope of the mechanics of active interpreter. (At risk of leaning hard into semiotics.)

That is, with a human interacting with a surface, the mark formed is active interpretation. Here, the sign, signified, *and active formulation* of the mark is outsourced.

Could a human form an assemblage of Statistical Nonsense? Absolutely. But the *activity* is the part being missed here. The *activity* is pure nonsense affect.

@millenomi The issue is guidance of the mark. I'm sure you've experimented with even the chat versions... and they too fail in the exact same ways. The guidance of the mark is interpretive loop not only missing here, but the formulation of "meaningful marks" is missing.

Ask how a stochastic diffuse pattern forms "this is meaning" and it reveals the precise faulty foundation of the label of "art".

Most certainly nuance here, and I appreciate that it vibes like a "hot take". Nuance!

@troy_s yeah; I am willing in my definitions here to abstract over the mark as in the specific effect produced on canvas by a specific technique, since this is clearly an accident or second-order effect of the tool.

There's a lot of 'are curation and recomposition art?' and 'how much of either is here?' here as gradients, and I am willing to appreciate how much this tool implicitly pushes people over the shallower end of this pool. Yet even here I am sad to discount the agency of the prompter.

@millenomi Again, you've surely tried it. Have you noticed that there is an almost iron fisted inability to steer the mark? This is not an accident. And this is really exactly the sort of nuance of the interpreter-in-loop between sign and signified here.

And yes, I'd clearly clap for someone who takes the assemblage of clip art of Statistical Nonsense and makes a powerful piece.

But as mark-maker, it is such a shallow construct to as be almost laughable, were it not for confusion.