It occurred to me the other day that while art is the dumbest possible thing for us to have ai pursue, it makes a certain amount of sense.

Art is subjective. When put to objective take machine learning algorithms tend to do poorly. They don’t mind lying, or rather they don’t have anyway to evaluate and value true things. A subjective task is perfect for a thing designed this way.

We don’t need AI art. It’s pointless. It just turns out that making pointless art is probably what this tech is best suited to. Ask them to do anything that can be objectively evaluated and you will be disappointed.

I could be convinced that the whole thing is a smoke and mirrors grift. The “art” seems impressive right what an expression of individuality!! But, it is actually just covering up that this entire line of research has led to systems that can’t do anything functionally useful. Since most people (myself included) are not really equipped to evaluate art. We don’t notice that it isn’t very good at art either.