#ive taken art history classes in addition to the more technical labs where we actually make the art

[hyliagirl42]

Literally art is nothing but symbolism?? The whole point of art is to create a piece that communicates an idea to your audience, in a way your audience will understand. Whether the art succeeds in doing so is a different conversation, but regardless of that, the only way to communicate ideas in a visual medium is THROUGH symbols! And symbols dont have to be something deep like "oh the curtains are blue which means xyz about the emotional state of the people living in the building". Sometimes it does, of course, but more often the symbols are much simpler than that!

Imagine a heart, for example. Youre likely either imagining a cartoony heart shape like you would get with an emoji, or a realistic rendition of a human heart. Both of those shapes are regularly used to communicate a heart. That is a symbol. It is quite literally as simple as that, even if we arent going in depth about how theyre both colored red and the emotional and symbolic ties to the color red. That deeper symbolism can be used to bring you to a greater understanding of the piece and make some cool connections, but its not necessary. What is necessary is that you can look at a very specific shape and your brain will automatically recognize that shape as a heart. Thats what symbolism is.

And with the above art piece, a human can look at a painting of soldiers walking into the water and make the connection that theyre supposed to be getting off their ships and marching OUT of the water, onto land, where their battle is. But theyre not, in this image. Theyre marching into the waves. It doesnt take much imagination to make the connection that theyre marching to their deaths that way. So instead of depicting soldiers on their way to fight a glorious battle, as the AI prompter probably intended, its depicting soldiers walking to their doom. That isnt some super deep symbolism, there. Its jist the most surface level thing you can notice looking at the piece!

But AI cant notice that. Its only trained to recognize patterns - it can connect symbols to their name, but not to their meaning. It could generate a battle scene for you including battle ships and the waves of the ocean, but it doesnt understand that the soldiers are marching to their deaths if theyre going towards the ocean instead of away from it. And thats the issue here.

Symbolism is literally the entire basis of art, and AI can only do so much to replicate it.

AI people: we're just as much artists as you are, you gotta be so observant and go through so many correcting phases for the picture to look good uwu also AI people: