Bad AI art

John Gruber, reviewing (and quoting) The Oatmeal’s “graphic essay” about AI art. My website doesn't support nested quotes I think, so, from The Oatmeal:When I consume AI art, it also evokes a feeling. Good, bad, neutral — whatever.Until I find out that it’s AI art.Then I feel deflated, grossed out, and maybe a little bit bored. This feeling isn’t a choice.And Gruber’s response:I think it very much is a choice. If your opinion of a work art changes after you find out which tools were used to make it, or who the artist is or what they’ve done, you’re no longer judging the art. You’re making a choice not to form your opinion based on the work itself, but rather on something else. If you refuse to watch Woody Allen movies because of his personal life, that’s a choice, but you’re choosing not to watch some of the best movies that have ever been made.John is flat-out wrong here. I’m pretty much a total idiot on just about everything, but I took one literary criticism class in university and then read a bunch of David Foster Wallace and I’ve never encountered a compelling counterfactual to the assertion that good art is about what it’s like to be somebody else.It isn't a thing that you can hold in your hand. It's not an item in a list of Google Images search results. Art is an experience, usually somebody else’s, which you just happen to be living in for a bit.For example, it is very difficult to experientially disentangle the movie Manhattan, which is a movie about being in your 40s and in love with a child, from the knowledge that Manhattan was released one year before the 44-year-old Allen met his current wife, who was then a child. "The work" isn't just the celluloid: the work is the whole picture. And not just Allen's legacy, but also the venue where the film is being shown, and also your state of mind, and also where you are in your life, and also who you're with, and also and also.The real choice — in fact, the real effort — is in, somehow, trying to uninvolve the other person from the art. Good art is not a mirror: it's a dialogue. You are not a machine that you put “a work” through and get a Good Art Score out of.Art is good if it tells a story about what it’s like to be someone else; and so AI art instantly becomes bad the moment you learn that the story it is telling is a lie."A cartoonist's review of AI Art", The Oatmeal"Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal: 'A cartoonist's review of AI Art", Daring Fireball