A.I. “Art”: We Need To Talk.

Here’s something that is true: AI “art” isn’t art.

I’ll give you a better term and an appropriate simile for it later, and I’ll also address why debating the semantics is less important than discussing the actual impact this technology will have on the human condition.

But first let’s talk about talking about AI “art”.

Definitions

Starting here: the word “luddite” is no longer an effective word to use in this kind of conversation. Yes, there are similarities between the mill-mashing Luddites of yore and the creatives of the modern world pushing back against the growing contributions of AI to art.

The problem is that the modern use of the word “luddite” is exsanguinated of any historical context and is almost only ever used as an ad-hominem insult. Which, again, makes it ineffective.

“Ah, don’t like text-to-visual AI art synthesis programs, huh bud? Why don’t you go back to your cave and beat rocks together, you luddite scum!”

But looking at the word through a historical lens, we should all be AI luddites to a certain extent: concerned parties pushing back against a wave of innovation that will most surely destroy them and all they have worked for, the skills they have spent countless years developing, their way of life, their very purpose.

Tell me this: why would a megacorporation spend mountains of wealth on recruiting, hiring, training, and retaining professional workers when they can pay a monthly subscription fee for AI creative synthesis services, downsize, and be done with it? Why pay writers to churn out compelling scripts when Jasper can do that for a nominal fee in ten seconds flat?

We all have skin in this game, whether you admit it or not.

See, the original Luddites were CORRECT in their foresight that the cotton mills would put them out of work, and thus their desperation was justified. We should all wonder what they did to feed themselves and their families after their predictions came true. Did they find work again, or were the mills the heralds of their complete annihilation?

Sympathy aside, I think we can all agree that the development of industrial cotton and wool mills made it so more people had access to more clothing and blankets and thus the overall state of the human race was improved. Yes?

Less suffering is more good, yes?

Yes.

Sometimes technological progress is indeed progress.

Here’s the problem: art isn’t a basic commodity. Art ain’t shirts. Art is an expression of the human condition. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then it is art’s province to describe what lies on the other side of that glass.

And thats a vital distinction to make in this discussion. That’s where applying the epithetical term luddite to those of us criticizing the deployment of AI against the modern creative landscape misses the mark.

We’re not talking about trousers here. Art is one of the few faculties we humans have to differentiate us from the animals, to raise us from the muck of the mundane world, and to orient us towards a more beautiful and humane future.

We’re talking about handing art over to the machines and their handlers.

Pseudo-Art And The Unfelt Joy of Producing Art

I’m not going to argue that AI-generated content isn’t appealing. Quite the contrary: it’s stunning.

This stuff stops me in my tracks. I drool over it. I feel something tighten in my guts when I look at it.

It makes me feel nostalgic for a movie I’ll never see from a decade of film many of us absolutely cherish. Which is maybe why so many modern “re-boots” feel like McDonald’s has built a restaurant over the family burial plot, but I digress.

AI pseudo-art (and it IS pseudo-art, to be colloquially called “pseudo”, if you please) is beautiful, captivating, but ultimately synthetic. I feel a great sadness when I look at it. Not because of any specific thematic content, but because these machines are incapable of experiencing the joy of accomplishment that we humans would experience by creating such masterful works.

If art is to become the work of machines, and the storied pursuits of creatives are to be replaced with algorithm and profit…tell me, how is this of benefit to humanity writ large?

I see a billion little flames, some guttering, some roaring, each starting to contract, to tighten, as the oxygen is sucked away into the ravenous void above. The splendor dims, darkens, then vanishes.

Hyperbolic? Perhaps. But only perhaps.

A Simile And Assimilation

We are training these AI services to manipulate human minds and human emotions through art. This is what art does, and theres just something so perverse about that, about being hoisted by our own petard.

Prior to the last two years (give or take), art has been a strictly human endeavor (elephant art doesn’t count), drawing from the richness of shared human experiences. Through intimate understanding of our core realities.

And that’s the thing, I think.

It’s the artist’s humanity, their joys and sorrows, their urgency and mortality and flaws and internal struggles, things we all share, that make art art. Tempus fugit. Memento mori. You better hurry and write your novel, for you’ll be dead in a mere forty years and that’s barely enough time even for the gifted.

These are things you can taste in good art. You catch a whiff of it every time you walk through an art gallery. The sculptures radiate it, the paintings reek of it: torment and elation.

Here’s how I think about it: AI pseudo-art is a lot like “having relations” with a blowup doll. It looks like the thing, but it ain’t the thing.

There are certain visual and mechanical similarities, but the purpose, the essence, the vital je ne sais quoi is missing.

In a word, what’s missing from pseudo is humanity.

Humanity is a requirement for art. At least for human art. Without it, it’s just another commodity. A zero-calorie sugar substitute designed to trick the senses.

The Human Artist, The Creative Golem, And The End

In the early 80’s, a person was born. Male, female, doesn’t matter. Their scribe didn’t pick up the quill and start recording memories for the first few years, so they’re as smudged and indecipherable as this person’s first pieces of art. Wild colors, shapeless, careless, but real.

Early memories are hazy but a few punch through, permanently affixed to their mind like too-much screw through too-little wood. Lying on their back in a sandbox and looking up at clouds scudding through a crystalline sky. Days spent rained-in at the cousins’ haunted farmhouse in Marion, Wisconsin. Circus Day in kindergarten.

Small memories. Flashes. But little nudges make for huge differences if you start with them.

Life proceeds and things happen to wound the heart, to open it to the world. Sometimes these…things…open the heart beyond its ability to heal, to be healed. We share this, all of us, this vulnerability to the blades of daily life. Many of our wounds will never heal, or they heal up only to be torn open again in later life.

Love found and lost, soul-rending trauma and recovery. Healing is more than platelets, fibrinogen, myocardium. We know this. Its a question of mind, of spirit, of art.

What I’m trying to say is that art, the phenomenon of art, is often the fruit of harm and healing. It’s a means of coping with the horrific world around us, or of simply navigating the internal wilderness of the human experience. It’s a way of struggling with what could be called “original sin”, a handy binomial for saying “our fucked up human nature”.

Art is the transubstantiation of our flaws, our past, our present, our hopes for the future. The more intimate, the more honest, the better.

This is true.

Somewhere on the West Coast squats a bank of computer servers, lights blinking, cooling fans whirring. It is a marvel of modern technology.

Having compiled and metabolized the entirety of human art, cave paintings, the Louvre, the panoply that is ArtStation.com, this sprawling machine completes its Frankensteinian task and shits out ten million new pieces of “art”, each more vibrant and captivating than the last. And there is much rejoicing.

Within the next three years, possibly five, most definitely ten, pseudo will be bespoke, and it, along with its corporate handlers, will consume art-media the same way a python devours a baby goat: glassy eyes, no remorse, and with room to spare.

Those that have made a living off of their lifelong dedication to the creative arts will only be the first-order victims of this wave of technological “progress”.

What follows? What happens to art when pseudo is calibrated, voluminous, and instantaneous? What do we gain as individuals, as a race, and are these gains worth the price that we will pay?

If the pogroms of the 20th century have taught us anything, it’s this: not all progress is for the betterment of mankind. Forward movement without consideration for what lies ahead is the apogee of foolishness.

Just ask the lemmings.