I think defining art wholly and solely by the intentions (and humanity) of the artist is clear cut at least, but not very illuminating, because for the person experiencing the art these properties are in general unknowable.
100 years hence you find a beautiful image. Is it art? Who knows — we don’t know whether the artist intended it to be, nor whether they were even human.
“I like this” != “this is art”. The fact that an image you may have found looks good to you without context is orthogonal to whether it is art.
(If you are certain that at least a human has produced such an image, you could speculate about and attempt to empathize with that unknown human’s internal state of mind—lifting the image to the level of art—but as of recently you’d have to rule out that an unthinking black box has produced it.)
You may be inspired by it to create art—but since art is fundamentally a way of communication, when there is no self to communicate there’s no art.
The problem with your definition is art is worthless.....
Art in a sense is no different from money. If it can be counterfeited in such a manner that a double blind observer has no means of telling an original bill (human made art) from a counterfeit (AI art) then you're entire system of value is broken. Suddenly your value system is now authenticating that a person made the art instead of a machine (and the fallout when you find that some of your favorite future artworks were machine created).
The problem comes back down to inaccurate langage on our part. We use art as a word for the creator and the interpreter/viewer. This it turns out is a failure we could not have understood the ramifications at the time.
This is not offered as some sort of authentication mechanism, the distinguishing quality of art as opposed to a pretty thing is art fundamentally being a way of self-expression, which is inevitably communication. There’s no self-expression when there’s no self to express. If there’s no human on either side, there’s no communication and it’s not art. One may find an object pretty and hang it on the wall, but that doesn’t make that object “art”.
The “complicated” case you hint at is not complicated: if people are misled into thinking some object has been produced by a human while it’s raw output of a neural network without human intervention then it’s not art, no matter how many people assume it’s art. If a machine produced a piece of art that is a frankenstein monster of art pieces, then we are not looking at art.
(And of course if a machine produced a piece of art identical to a piece of art produced by a human before then we’re effectively looking at a piece of art produced by that human.)
> Art in a sense is no different from money.
Per above, couldn’t be further from the truth as far as I’m concerned, but you do you.
I don’t know, I’m more concerned with the effect that art has on me than the motivations of the artist (though those can be interesting of course).
For instance I read The Fountainhead as a youth and was moved by it for purely personal (non-political) reasons, and with regards to that experience it doesn’t matter to me what Ayn Rand was on about.
> I’m increasingly convicted there is inherent value in humans doing things
And in many fields I think many (most?) Americans at least would agree with you — there’s some special value in a handmade product, regardless of whether a machine-made equivalent would be technically superior. For instance a leather bag, a wooden chair.
California. But also probably they are counting from first missed payment to actual eviction. Usually you don’t start trying to evict the day after rent was due.
Literally the people this is for are too overweight/overworked/overwhelmed to do enough physical activity to jog a couple of miles. We need all the help we can get!
“The US doesn’t work” can only be taken as rhetorical. Perhaps you feel it doesn’t “work” well, and certainly you’ve identified serious flaws. But it’s still there ticking along… if it doesn’t work then “work” is just shorthand for “work the way I want” which isn’t particularly interesting or useful.
Separately, I’m not sure that US folks are actually any better at accepting the distribution of their taxes far afield than anyone else but I suppose that could make sense.
Mostly things that are very widely used in industry are indeed no longer “in fashion”. Instead they were in fashion and actually proved valuable enough to have staying power (as opposed to most fashionable things that are junk). Charitably, anyway — sometimes it seems you can’t tell why something is still widely used.
Probably the mentioned hooks-based approaches are indeed fashionable now. Remains to be seen whether they’ll stick around.
My team at work has completely rewritten from Redux with Redux Form to Tanstack query and React Hook Form over the past two years, and we don’t miss a single thing about Redux.
We make an app that contacts lots of microservices in sequence and combines the data in many ways. Having automatic refetching, caching and the like by default makes a world of difference.
I don't know if it's still the case but when I started my career (granted, some decades ago) using the new hotness X/Motif + C++, there were still more lines of COBOL around than anything else. (Hell, might not have been the case then, but that was the yarn.)
Cigarettes really aren’t bad for you on a short term basis. So it makes some sense that, while even a modicum of good decision making (courtesy of the mentioned prefrontal cortex) could help you kick smack, deciding to quit smoking due to some nebulous fear of illness decades in the future might prove more challenging.
> ...some nebulous fear of illness decades in the future...
Old guy's perspective: Most of the family / friends / neighbors who I knew to be regular cigarette smokers 3-4 decades ago are now either dead, or suffer profoundly reduced qualities of life - generally due to lung cancers & other stereotypical "smoker's diseases". Not a random sample, and the value of n is too small to call it solid statistics, but...
It is fair to say that the prospect of lung cancer in one's 60s or bladder cancer in one's 70s is not going to impress every eighteen-year-old.
They are difficult to quit. My father took a good dozen years to quit, with repeated failed attempts. During one of the big takeover battles of the 1980s, somebody explained the desirability of owning a cigarette manufacturer: you make them for a dime, you sell them for a dollar, and people get addicted to them.
> ...not going to impress every eighteen-year-old.
Quite true. OTOH, I know a guy who was still a heavy smoker in his early 50's. Plenty to live for - corporate V.P. & rising, great girlfriend, his kids getting out of college.
If he had any interest in quitting, it was a well-kept secret.
~8 years later: After a few not-quite-good-enough attempts, his oncology team found a chemotherapy drug toxic enough to kill the lung cancer that had spread all through his body. Faced with "or die", and missing his oldest daughter's wedding day, he signed off on the side effect. Those were as advertised: He now lives in a hospice, and needs to a couple good, strong caregivers to safely get out of bed. On a good day. "Never really there for him" is a pretty accurate description of how well his brain is working, too.
100 years hence you find a beautiful image. Is it art? Who knows — we don’t know whether the artist intended it to be, nor whether they were even human.