this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
492 points (96.6% liked)
Curated Tumblr
6028 readers
165 users here now
For preserving the least toxic and most culturally relevant Tumblr heritage posts.
Here are some OCR tools to assist you in transcribing posts:
-
FOSS Android Recs per u/m_f@discuss.online: 1 , 2
Don't be mean. I promise to do my best to judge that fairly.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I would say the difference is that intent is not controlled by the artist. Sure, they give a prompt, but they don't actually control the mechanism that creates the output. In fact, the people who create it can't even parse what it's doing. It's just a bunch of seemingly random weights.
When you're holding a paintbrush, or sculpting clay, or whatever else you're doing, you're controlling the tool and manifesting your intent through it. With AI you aren't. There can be intent by the creator but there's no intent in the tool.
Demoscene sizecoders rely on pseudorandom patterns all the time. They find what they need. Maybe they didn't sculpt those mountains, draw those textures, or arrange those notes - but it's still art, and they made it.
Inscrutability means people gotta fuck around with these tools to get closer to what they want. The robot does stupid things and must be punished. Prompts get hammered into place over ridiculous details.
If an image took effort, conveys ideas, and looks good, what could that be besides art?
Did Marcel Duchamp play some kind of role in the manufacturing of this urinal?
You didn't read the whole post, and it shows
We don't actually know if he bought the urinal or made it. The screenshot of a Tumblr post just says it's a theory, and if you look into it elsewhere it's just not known.
But, it doesn't actually matter. Would it become "not art" if it turned out it was a store bought urinal?
The entire point of the post is "no".
I definitely read the whole post. Maybe you can let me know what I’m missing. From what I can see, someone asked why a guy buying a urinal and then signing it gets to be art but not an AI generated image. Another person responded by saying
But how does any of that apply to Duchamp’s fountain? He did not have any control over the inputs that went into making the urinal. He didn’t hold any clay. He didn’t even paint anything unless you wanna get cute about what a signature is.
Go read the OP again. All of it. You didn't read it, or you missed part of it, or you misunderstood something.
This is not me saying "I think you're wrong." It is saying your comment is fundamentally missing context that is in the OP. You'll know what we mean when you see it.
In my opinion, you would be better served reading a history of Duchamp and a study of the piece rather than taking for granted screenshots of random people on the Internet. It’s true that we don’t actually know if Fountain is actually a readymade sculpture or not but the idea that most art scholars believe that it is not a ready-made sculpture is simply untrue. In any case, whether or not it is actually a ready-made sculpture doesn’t really have a bearing on its quality as an artwork. On the contrary, the whole point of the piece is to demonstrate that it is not important who actually made the physical object which represents the artwork.
Now that you understand that it is not a conventional opinion that Duchamp secretly made Fountain himself, I would like you to reconsider your answer to the question. And if you don’t believe me that it’s not a conventional opinion, I invite you to consult with literally any encyclopedia that has an article on the piece.
Yup, definitely didn't read the post. He submitted several urinals, and they do not match any urinals manufactured around the time of his submission. Add in his apparent skill with ceramics and, yes, he DID make those toilets.
Then again, if AI bros could pay close attention, they wouldn't like AI images.
You're taking a screenshot of a social media post at face value. If you look anywhere else it's not regarded as a prominent notion that he secretly made it himself. Hell, I can't even find reference that he worked in ceramics.
I'm not particularly pro-ai, but people being so against it that they're willing to take screenshots of Tumblr as proof rather than consider someone's argument is ... Annoying.
It's proof, not that he made the toilet, but that they didn't read the post they claim to have "definitely read." We're discussing the post.
And you might not pay attention, but I do. I checked your post history, where you claim AI is intelligent, and AI art is art, this is not the first AI thread you've defended AI in, and your most recent post (rather than comment) is on stable diffusion. You are very much pro-AI, and you're being disingenuous by claiming you're not.
? You mean where I shared a picture I thought was fun something like a year ago?
Fuck off with claiming you know how someone feels on a topic when you're clearly not even able to understand what they're saying.
Yes, I believe AI is intelligent. With the caveat that the bar for intelligence is low enough to include thermostats.
Yes, I think AI art is art. *Shitty, low effort art, like from a dentist office.".
Without knowing to what you're referring, I can't tell you why you're full of shit with your "defending AI" claim. I've defended the academic discipline of AI, which is different from the generative AI tools we seem to be discussing. I've told people they don't understand AI tools, but that's not "defense".
Did you read the ones where I've said that we intuitively feel that the way LLMs scrape data is unfair, but that that unfairness isn't represented in copyright law, so rather than trying to twist current law to fit, we should understand how it actually works and adjust laws to match our sense of fairness?
What about where I've pointed out that LLMs can't think, but generate statistically likely continuations of input, hence propagating misunderstanding and creating misunderstanding because people are using a language tool as though it's a knowledge tool?
Did you consider that maybe I'm not pro AI or anti AI because I view it as a tool, and one wouldn't be pro belt sander or anti belt sander, but rather irritated at people who misunderstand them, frustrated that we're spending billions on the least useful sander for what it's being used for because it's the most magic looking, and annoyed that we're jamming sanders into word processors when no one asked for that?
Anyway, we were talking about how you'd rather believe random Tumblr screenshots than reality when you got caught up trying to enforce your orthodoxy that anyone who doesn't passionately hate anything that could be perceived as being AI related or supporting is clearly an ignorant techbro fetishizing the singularity. You'll be damned if you need to understand what any of those words mean to know that you hate them.
I don't know that I give a shit what the post says in regards to if he made it or bought it for the purposes of the question. It's irrelevant to the point actually being discussed, to say nothing of "seemingly not true".
Also, since you're very concerned with addressing what the post says: people overly obsessed with enforcing the form that art takes are fascists, per the post. Feel like you're kinda missing the forest for the trees there.