Dont forget there is also lots of thinking involved. Artists understand their context and work with that. Like they do things to piss people of or to contradict something. They are also painfuly aware of the fact that work cannt be too novel to become popular. Often times they “train” their audience to come to work they’ve done years ago. Artists are not only repeaters of image patterns like current AI is.

So unless the AI becomes concious then i dont think they will replicate this process. On they other hand they will be probably able to “brute force” novelty with mashing random things and help of humans to sort it out.

That seems to be the challenge: If you train an AI model on all of the art Van Gogh could have observed, but not any of Van Gogh's own images, would it come up with anything like "Starry Night?"

There's a gap between what comes before and what comes after, and it's not totally clear than an AI model trained on what comes before can cross that gap in a way that a human can. Maybe? I don't think it's an "of course" thing, though.

I think of it this way: an AI model trained on existing images has billions of images to draw upon, more than a human does. But a human has some subset of those billions of images and their lived experiences, too. That is, as I stand at my desk typing these words, I see out a window where the bushes in front of my house are overgrown and need trimmed back, but the blooming trees across the street are visible through the bushes and providing splashes of color in a tangle of leaves that look nice to me. The branches of the post oak in my front yard reach out toward the street, and are suffused with dark green while the trees across the street are more medium green and yellow. As I walk around the neighborhood later, I'll see much, much more sensory input than even billions of static images supply.

Artists in the past were often constrained by the choice of medium, and things like having to mix chemicals to produce new paint colors dictated the palettes with which they could paint. Those artificial restrictions affected things in ways that might or might not be clear to a trained AI model.

Perhaps you tag the year of each image in the model training corpus so that it could, in theory, have some sense of progression, but would it choose to consider that feature? If you then asked for a painting as of 1880, could it make enough sense of that to avoid colors and techniques developed after that time, or at least techniques that built on techniques developed after that time? It's possible the future will involve more carefully trained models rather than the "everything all at once" models the current generation of models is using, but... I'm not sure.

In any case, I think the poster to whom you're replying is suggesting that someone like Van Gogh isn't just creating "more like what already exists," but that sometimes they are introducing something entirely new, at least new to the art world, perhaps drawn from life, or a fever dream, or strong drink.

>Van Gogh was influenced by myriad artists before him.

> The Impressionists were influenced by myriad artists before them.

Yes. That's why I'm saying, if you can train an AI exclusively on the stuff that could have influenced van Gogh, and coax it into reinventing van Gogh's work, then I'll believe you've developed an AI that's capable of something like the sort of innovation that van Gogh was.

I'm skeptical that what van Gogh produced can be reduced down to a function of the paintings that preceded him, in the way DALL-E is just a big function of all the images it's been trained on. Humans are "trained" on a lot more than images.