The value of art is in meaning and context.
Purely generative art is as meaningful as a pretty rock.
Think of the models as a camera.
If you take shots from a car's dash cam in a city at random you might fall upon some really beautiful photos. But this is chance, the camera didn't create the city or its scenes.
A photographer can choose or create meaningful scenes because he has a mind, consciousness and life experience.
Pretty rocks (e.g. mountains, gems, etc.) are frequently ascribed substantial meaning, despite the fact that no consciousness had a hand in creating them.
Raw gemstones are generally uninteresting until people shape them. Diamonds worth thousands may not even qualify as interesting enough to pickup in the raw state, assuming you don’t know what it is.
Mountains get meaning as aspects of our environment, but try and name the your top 10 most aesthetically pleasing mountains. At least for me, I may appreciate a scenic view but I just don’t think of them in that kind of context.
> A photographer can choose or create meaningful scenes because he has a mind, consciousness and life experience.
But so does a user. Users don't prompt "draw a dog" but give 3 lines of intricate details and iterate a dozen times until it looks right. It's not like these models work all on their own.
There are people who define art that way, and there are those who define it as beautiful things. I'd personally own and display something beautiful made by algorithm than much post modern art, which is frequently visually unpleasant in spite of being rich in some message.
Our brains are drawn to some things visually for instinctive reasons, and I don't need a big message when I'm decorating or wanting to please the eye.
That's a very reductive and limited way to look at art. You're right in stating it as decoration but I would not conflate the two. Different things, both valuable in its own right.
A rose is beautiful, a painting of a rose less so, its two dimensional and lacks many aspects of the true rose. But it has more value because there are millions of roses, while the painting captures a unique experience of viewing the rose by the painter and transmits it to the other person viewing the painting.
Unless there are ghosts in the shell, MidJourney gives an aproximation of how a painting of a rose looks like. Its like an aggrregate function that averages a million artists.
Its a weird concept.
So is it still art if a photographer is driving the car with a dash cam and they drive it with the intention of capturing great images, and then goes over all the captured frames to find the best ones?
I would say yes, this dash cam technique can be an artistic method. Reminds me of Jon Rafman's wonderful Nine Eyes project - he captures screenshots from Google Streetview, see
https://9-eyes.com
