Art is a difficult, subjective matter sometimes. I don't think we can expect everyone to "get" every piece of art. If the poster upthread wanted to, they could read more about the painting, in detail, where perhaps someone writes about various specific features of it and what people believe those features mean. Maybe that would provide more understanding, and they could feel his emotions that way.

I'm not saying they have to or should do that; maybe they just don't care enough. And that's fine. But the option is there.

If someone prompts an AI, "generate an image in the style of Picasso's Guernica", then the result of that, by definition, has no deeper meaning. No emotion went into creating it. The person who prompted the AI could make something up, but it's hard to say what's "real" there. Even if they were to guide the image generation by describing their own emotions, the result wouldn't really be their own expression of their emotions. It would be the AI's probabilistic guess as to what those emotions look like on paper, when rendered using Guernica's style, based on a mish-mash of thousands of different artists and art history research. Ultimately it just doesn't mean anything.

I accept the idea that a talented artist could guide the AI with much deeper specifics about what to "draw", how to draw it, etc. And maybe -- maybe -- that's something that would convey the human's emotions faithfully. But I don't think that's what we're talking about here.

Many things require one to reject self-imposed boundaries. For example[1]:

> There's a story that, IIRC, was told by Brian Enos, where he was practicing timed drills with the goal of practicing until he could complete a specific task at or under his usual time. He was having a hard time hitting his normal time and was annoyed at himself because he was slower than usual and kept at it until he hit his target, at which point he realized he misremembered the target and was accidentally targeting a new personal best time that was better than he thought was possible. While it's too simple to say that we can achieve anything if we put our minds to it, almost none of us are operating at anywhere near our capacity and what we think we can achieve is often a major limiting factor.

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Art is nothing like shooting. My first instinct looking at Guernica is that I also feel nothing, but one can limit oneself and say: if I feel nothing initially, I will feel nothing at all. If you prime yourself to be open to an experience of putting yourself into the shoes of the author, you might start feeling something.

[1]: https://danluu.com/culture/

I don't consider context a clear win. I'd argue that there's also quite the disconnect sometimes between what a work is about and why it's popular.

Let's take Zombie by The Cranberries as an example. I really liked this song as a kid, still do, I think it has a great sound. The difference is that I now speak English, can understand the lyrics, and could look up the historical context. Ever since I did so, listening to it has never been the same, and not in a good way.

There are also examples which are not going to be so specific to my opinions. Kendrick's Swimming Pools was a house party staple, despite the song carrying heavy anti-alcoholism messaging. The contrast is almost comical.

For a different example, let's consider temporal contextuality; you describe Guernica being reliant on this. When I try to think of an example, I'm reminded of vague memories of shows with oddly timely subtitles. Subtitles that referenced things that were very specific to the given cultural moment, basically memes, but vanished since. It's not a good experience, and I'd say it would be reasonable to chalk such a thing up as a critique, rather than something worthy of praise.

This is also why I half-seriously referred to the piece being "aggressively pretentious". Rather than coming across as something I'm just genuinely missing the context for, it comes across as something with manufactured sophistication (which then I am indeed missing the context for, but unapologetically). This might still be a mirage, but I think with how pretty much stereotyped this experience is at this point, I'd imagine there's got to be some truth to it at least.

Yes, context is really important. But:JS Bach made a whole raft of music, and quite a large fraction of it was religiously inspired. In spite of that it is perfectly possible to appreciate it at a deep emotional level without that particular spiritual connection. This is the genius of art to me: that it opens up an emotional channel between two individual separated by time and space and manages to convey a feeling, as clear as day.

Take U2's October as a nice example. (You mentioned Zombie, incidentally one of my favorites, the anger and frustration in there never fail to hit me, I can't listen to it too often for that reason), superficially it is a very simple set of lyrics (8 lines I think) and an even simpler set of chords. And yet: it moves me. And I doubt any AI would have come up with it or even a close approximation if it wasn't part of the input. That's why I refuse to call AI generated stuff art. It's content, not art.

Because it is mimicking human input. Effectively you are getting a mixture of many pieces of artwork that humans made distilled down into some sloppy new one that was made without feeling, purpose or skill and that can be described by its prompt, a few kilobytes at best. Original human art can only be approximated but never captured with 100% fidelity regardless of the bitrate, that is what makes it unique to begin with. Even an imitation by another human (some of which can be very good) could stir you in the exact same way but they'd be copies, not original works.

Anyway, this gets hairy quickly, that's why I chose to illustrate with a crappy recording of a magnificent piece that still captures that feeling - for me - whereas many others would likely disagree. Art is made by its creator because they want to and because they can, not because they are regurgitating output based on a multitude of inputs and a prompt.

Paint me a Sistine Chapel is going to yield different results no matter how many times you would give that same prompt to Michelangelo depending on his mood, what happened recently, what he ate and his health as well as the season. That AI will produce the same result over and over again from the same prompt. It is a mechanistic transformation, not an original work, it reduces the input, it does not expand on it, it does not add its own feelings to it.

It's not. If one takes the fact that art is in the eye of the beholder [0], then yes, even AI art may stir you, especially as a human is the one generating at the end of the day, for a specific purpose and statement about what they want to convey.

There is a good part of the series Remembrance of Earth's Past (of which The Three Body Problem is the first book) where the aliens are creating art and it shocks people to learn that the art they're so moved by was actually created by non-humans. This is exactly what this situation with AI feels like, and not even to the same extent because again AI is not autonomously making images, it's still a human at the end of the day picking what to prompt.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author