Many moons ago back when I was in college, I posted a printout of something similar to the image you see here on the wall of the Art wing of our University with the question "Is this art?", along with a piece of paper beneath it where people could write their comments. Some people said it was garbage psychedelic trash, some people thought it was interesting, and a few people understood it for what it was -- a fractal.

A simple explanation of a fractal is that it's a bit like a graph -- it's the plotting of results of a mathematical function. This fractal, the Mandelbrot set, was discovered in 1978, and is the result of a way of plotting a very simple mathematical formula: Zn+1 = Zn2 + C. That little line of code, I mean math, is baked into the Universe and creates this pattern. If you "zoom in" on the pattern (a bit like doing more iterations), you find that the pattern continues in similar ways -- but never exactly the same. It doesn't ever actually repeat, but is infinitely complicated with infinite variations. An entire universe of patterns are contained within that little formula. It's quite beautiful, and many people are stunned by the complex, delicate, immense structures that exist in the set.

The question that I was asking so long ago in a oblique way was that if this seems like art, then who is the artist? It's literally baked into the Universe, anyone can explore it just by doing math and plotting the results. Until computers existed it wasn't possible for humans to see this stuff, we just can't think fast enough or plot things with that much precision.

What AI seems to be demonstrating is that there is something deeper that we've discovered regarding the nature of information in our universe. (Reading up on latent space and the manifold hypothesis gives some idea of the how the higher-end mathematicians are trying to figure this stuff out -- the mathematics details are far beyond my ability to understand, let alone describe). But much like an incredible, infinitely complicated pattern can be stored with a single line of Universe Code that is the Mandelbrot set, there is a type of math that can describe and even reproduce the interrelations of patterns that make up what we consider to be human-produced "art" -- and that math is simple enough that even in these early days we've figured out how to boil it down into just a handful of gigabytes of data.

Mankind has just discovered something fundamental about the Universe -- the pretty pictures we are making right now are an example of us exploring how this fundamental thing can be used. The fundamental question behind the debates we have about whether it's art or not are much deeper than "am I an artist for writing a prompt" or "is this a tool or a Xerox". The real question is: does art, as we perceive it, require an author? The definition of art would seem to imply that it does. And yet we have now discovered something about the universe that allows us to make a black box, the inner workings of which are opaque to us, that will create entirely new works of art out of pure math that look exactly like human authored art. All of our styles, our compositional logic, our medium choices, our themes -- it seems like the "soul" of human art exists inside this black box, which is very decidedly not human, not conscious, not possessing of *any* of the things that we previously thought were required to create good art (first and foremost -- agency!). What does it mean when I can click a button and out of the box pops a new, engrossing novel good enough to win the Man Booker prize -- authored by nobody? What will it mean when I press a button and out pops a 4K two hour long Hollywood big budget Oscar-bait blockbuster that makes me laugh, makes me cry, makes me think about life -- that is just the result of pure math applied to some invisible universe created by letting more math run against the entirety of existing movies? What does it mean that I can click that button over and over again and keep getting masterpieces, again and again, for as long as I keep clicking?

Forget for a moment about the artists this would impact -- what does it mean that this is even *possible*? Because part of how we define our humanity, part of how we see our place in this universe revolves around the fact that there are some things about us, as humans, that are very different than the things around us. Similar to how somehow an entire human being (and most other animals on earth) can be biologically explained with 800MB of DNA or less, apparently the patterns and linkages of the entire creative, expressive output of humanity can also be expressed with simple, relatively small mathematical representations that, when dug into, can be used to reproduce, sans author, one of the most intimate things that people can do -- create art.

To me that's a little head-exploding. Even if I flip the coin and look at it from the other side -- that the AI is just fooling us by creating patterns that mimic what we think of as being art -- that only makes me less certain about the nature of human art in general. If two things can't be distiguished experimentally, then aren't they fundementally the same? Either all art is just humans making meaningless expressive patterns that other humans misinterpret as having communicative significance, or the expressive patterns in AI art that make us "feel" things or perceive it as art or feel like it’s communicating something to us means that somehow this little black box is indeed making art, and that the artist is either "nobody" or "something inside the box" or "all of mankind".

Anyway. Food for thought. 🙂

#aiart #mastoart #philosophy #technology #tech #fractals