We asked, you answered: Can AI make art?
đź‘‹ Welcome back to the Medium Newsletter
Issue #166: how political polls work, a dispatch from Venezuela, and urgency vs. importance
By Harris Sockel
Last Friday, we asked you whether AI is capable of making art — and your responses were so fascinating and varied that I wanted to highlight a few.
Jim the AI Whisperer wrote: “While it’s true anyone can plug in a word and get a picture, the best forms of AI art being made today are being done by people who make hundreds, thousands of choices.” This is the art of prompt engineering. Jim argues that if a human makes a choice, it’s art.
Photographer Laura Marland disagrees: “No. Art is an experience had by the creator who shares that experience with the viewer, reader, or listener.” Jeffrey Anthony, a former music analyst with Pandora’s Music Genome Project who’s previously written about the limits of AI-generated art, has a similar point of view: “human artistic expression is rooted in embodied experience, temporality, and context and this is KEY!”
This reminds me of something I think is true about writing (like all art): It’s a process. Writing is thinking! It’s more than a final product.
What do you think? As Tyagarajan Sundaresan wrote: “This is such a loaded question because it goes to the very heart of defining what art is.” Yes! I’m really curious how you’d define it.
⚡ Lightning round: Great, recent Medium stories in 2 sentences or less
- Policy analyst Ari Weitzman breaks down how political polls work (I’m curious about this because I don’t think I’ve ever been polled). Pew Research Center sends physical packages to around 10,000 people and pays them each between $5–20 to reveal who they’re going to vote for — and their polling data has Trump and Harris tied.
- Venezuelan conservation biologist Isabel Villasmil, MRes. explains why the country’s economy is too unstable to support scientific research.
- The Bear’s “Fishes” episode, aka the most anxiety-inducing 66 minutes of TV in history, won Christopher Storer the Emmy for outstanding directing on Sunday. Ryan Brown walks us through what makes this Christmas-gone-wrong so memorable: “This home doesn’t feel like a home, but rather the belly of the beast: a lion’s den, and we’re about to waltz right into it.”
Your daily dose of practical wisdom: on the Eisenhower Matrix
What’s urgent is not always important. What’s important is not always urgent. Alex Miguel Meyer introduces us to the Eisenhower Matrix, supposedly inspired by former President Dwight Eisenhower himself, who was a big fan of distinguishing between urgency and import. Basically, it helps you sort tasks into four buckets:
- Do First: urgent and important.
- Schedule: important but not urgent.
- Delegate: urgent but not important.
- Eliminate: not urgent and not important.
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com
