I’d bet money that the Disney deal falling through was because OpenAI couldn’t guarantee that Sora couldn’t be used to generate porn of their characters, since attackers will almost certainly always find new prompt injections.

Surprise surprise, it’s a giant fucking black box that you can never have complete control over.

Does the fact people can make anything, even when the tool is explicitly designed not to let them, have any impact on the insistence it’s never art?

The act of breaking the AI and the guardrails around it is certainly a kind of art, I think. That’s rebellion, satire, a spit in the face of corporate fascism. The actual content that’s produced is rather irrelevant.

But for argument’s sake, if the core essence of art is to be a celebration of human creativity, then to pretend that typing a two-sentence prompt into a computer program and then slapping your signature on whatever it spits out is “art” is just absurd.

This topic invites some odd takes on the nature of art, but ‘the text is irrelevant’ is a new one.

How many sentences does someone have to type before we say an idea is theirs and the tool is how they express it? I’m genuinely confused by how many people insist a visual medium, transmitting a concept from one person’s brain to the brains of an audience, can never be art. If someone spends days tweaking a thousand words to get the perfect combination of fifteen unforgivable fetishes, then whatever you’re looking at is their soul laid bare. Even if all they did was look at a thousand slot-machine pulls to pick one that has the right vibe, that’s akin to nature photography. Those artists usually did nothing to influence their subject. They just observed it real nice.

Consider this image. It’s full of outright errors and questionable details, yet it conveys a complex subject in a clever way. People have chided ‘the model doesn’t know what a bouncer is,’ but it doesn’t have to, for a human being to use a bouncer to communicate an opinion.