I heard a bunch of explanations but most of them seem emotional and aggressive, and while I respect that this is an emotional subject, I can’t really understand opinions that boil down to “theft” and are aggressive about it.
while there are plenty of models that were trained on copyrighted material without consent (which is piracy, not theft but close enough when talking about small businesses or individuals) is there an argument against models that were legally trained? And if so, is it something past the saying that AI art is lifeless?
AI art proved beyond a doubt that death of the author was always 99% bullshit justifying media illiteracy. Now that we have art without an author and it is totally void of expression.
Death of the author is the idea that reader interpretation matters more than author’s intent, and it’s absolutely fair for media analysis. Sadly, too many people bundle it together with the idea that the author didn’t mean anything at all.
Heck, “the curtains were blue” applies authorial intent that there was no meaning behind the curtains. The death of the author reading shows that the curtains had a symbolic reason to be blue.
Who uses the Death of the Author to justify media illiteracy? I think you may be misunderstanding what the term means?
When people say “the author is dead”, what they mean is that, when interpreting a piece of art, it doesn’t matter what the original artist meant to say with it - for the purpose of the interpretation they are dead and you cannot ask them what they meant.
It’s always a personal matter what you see in art, any interpretation that makes sense to you is valid, even if it may not be what the artist intended. (That does not mean you can bullshit your way through poem analysis in school, different situation)
No, the thing that the author was trying to express has far greater validity than whatever the reader makes up. If that wasn’t the case, AI art, where the author lacks any intent, wouldn’t seem so lifeless.
That presumes you can read the author’s mind. It’s impossible to tell with 100% certainty what an author meant to say. You can make assumptions and some can be more plausible than others and people can agree that one interpretation seems more valid than another but that’s it. When a work of art is released into the world, the author has no authority over its meaning.
A good artist of course can make certain intentions very obvious and control, to a certain degree, what the recipient feels. That’s what you’re perceiving as missing in AI generated pictures.