AI vs Art

Some time in the future, suppose humanity will be able to create a microwave so advanced that it will prepare the finest meals rivaling any five star chef in the world. There won’t be any reason to go to a restaurant, the magic of humanity’s advancement grants this magic capability to everyone in the comfort of their home. Gordon Ramsay be damned. Maybe it’s hard to imagine, but given the growth in technology, maybe it isn’t. This is the future, as far as we’re collectively labeled our time at least. It’s so many people’s religion: The Star Trek future we’ve been told about in our sci-fi stories where humanity’s problems are solved by computers. It’s remarkably psychological in a way, we simply replace hope and hero-worship with a god of our choice whether that be science, technology or UFO’s. Of course, there’s the exciting possibility of the technology-gone-wrong genre ala the Matrix and Terminator franchises. But it’s still exciting, or so the conversations usually hover around this realm; the twinkle in the eyes that people get when talking about advancement. That technology we have now is all so very fun and it’s made god-like fame seeking entrepreneurs of all of us, but I have to admit that the twinkle eludes me. Technology for me is always more interesting when it is accomplishing something rather than just being technology or reminding me of Star Trek. Jim Morrison was right to predict the people of the future would be creating their own music. They’re also creating their own short films, hundreds of thousands of computer savvy auteurs flocking to social media to boost their projects. Millions of super models, photographers and influencers, and oh it’s been written about exhaustively, so I digress. It’s really such a strange “future” that we live in. Everybody here is famous. In this strange culture that continuously frames itself as the wisest and most advanced, like dozens of cultures before it, we’ve made the next mountain to conquer that of art. In an interview with the art channel Proko, Stephen Conrad, a tech investor, details what he thinks the tech community believes: They’re creating a utopia where humans no longer need to work. Artificial General Intelligence. Art was one of the first industries tech conquered (accidentally, so he says). My question is: Who was looking for a way to get rid of having to do art? Maybe a multinational corporation, but certainly not artists. Lets say it was accidental, it’s still not the “democratization” that we needed. Get rid of mining coal or the diamond trade, but art..? It’s heart warming and dismaying to watch the internet flood itself with the fantastic art this AI is able to spit out. It reveals how much people have really secretly loved great art all along, it’s inspiring to see people explore the styles and possibilities and pushing the technology to see what it can do. Maybe art is most enjoyed when people can claim some sort of ownership of it, but lets ignore this. On the other hand, it can also reveal how poorly art is understood. We could blame a lot of things, the museums being run by a long-corrupted art market (enough articles on that already written) or cultural pigeonholing of jobs we don’t understand. Being in the field, I sometimes don’t account for how little everyone knows about it. Long regarded as some mystical talent people are born with, it’s more clear how some insist on convincing themselves artists have some other deficiency to balance things out; like being bad at business or money. A lot of times that's true for other reasons (stated below). Coincidentally, being in the VFX industry has taught me that great artists can be extremely technical people as well. Art is surprisingly technical too, as apparently many people deeply misunderstand. It takes years, if not decades to study anatomy and form, to learn to visualize three dimensional shapes in your head, to learn color theory and human perception of color, design, fonts, the human limitations in sight, as well as the audience’s and all that underlies the truly great artists who can frame that all in to great compositions and visually communicate an idea that often can’t be put in to words. While some artists manage to learn some of these things via ruthless repetition, a lot of the very best require study, knowledge and concentrated practice to achieve it. Just like an athlete, a coder, a physicist and most fields that birth impressive results, the universe makes us put forth a lot of effort to get there. Very few “amazing” things come out of us without any effort. When I look at great art, that’s what inspires me: knowing what went in to it and the mystery of the journey of it’s creation that gives it it’s own personality, whether that be meticulous penmanship or chaotic brush strokes, happy mistakes and the seeming randomness of seeing where the materials take you. The personality and the history of the artist always finds it’s way through to the work. In contrast, to see thousands of preteen Tiktoker’s fart into a computer and “create” something rivaling the greatest artists in the industry while shaking their fist at Picasso, I can’t say I’m interested or find value in that. And I can’t say I’d call it art as much as pretty pictures, the way a pile of sticks can sometimes be beautiful. But we don’t praise the sticks or the wind for having accomplished this. Art is a verb and it’s expression, but if you widen the term, I admit it depends… “Art” for a company, is a commodity. The biggest benefactors by far in this AI surge, and purportedly some of the biggest investors, are major corporations looking to tighten budgets. In this world of investors and bottom lines, “art” isn’t really the same thing at all. It’s a throw-away plastic packaging that needs to be churned out at a streamlined pace, serving only to inspire customers to throw more and more money in to the pit so that the pit can get bigger, and so on. We shouldn’t fool ourselves that this is creating anything of cultural value aside from some happy accidents, but as an artist working the field I’d have to acknowledge the incredible usefulness of AI and the promise of it’s coming capabilities in helping me do my job even more efficiently. Capitalism has it’s highs and lows, best to leave this discussion to the millions of articles on this, too. One thing is for sure: working as an artist is now coming to an end. It was, none the less, a lucky job to even have in the first place though. Capitalism might be the best type of economy to live in, but eventually every passion project that sees success inevitably grows in to an unforgiving money machine that has absolutely no interest in humanity at all. Do we really believe Apple is interested in making better iPhones or Starbucks making better coffee more so than they are about creating money? If you could pay slaves in a 3rd world country to make your products cheaper, you just kind of have to do it in this economy and if you can lay off all your artists and replace them with computers well you just have to do it because you need to answer to your investors. Like they all say, capitalism is cruel, so what can you do? Art has meant a lot of things through out history though, to be fair. Cave drawings turned to Greek god worship and eventually it was commissioned by the wealthy during the Renaissance that we all know so well, giving birth to Da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo and other popular turtle namesakes. Though it’s often looked to as a standard of achievement in the art world, this wouldn’t be the ideal economy we artists would wish for either, being a glorified photographer for royalty or forced to depict Bible stories utilizing pagan and Greek mythological symbols. Eventually the artists found little ways to make their own statements in spite of their restrictive patronage, such as Michelangelo insisting his figures be nude, even when the Church forbade it. I know a lot of you know this, but it bears repeating for context. After the Renaissance, it became more common for artists to be famous in their own right. The public became interested in the expressions of the artists themselves, which today is still the pinnacle of most dreams; being paid to freely create. You had expressionism followed by hundreds of other ‘isms and artist experimenting with the way things could be depicted (think Monet, Van Gogh and Picasso) and the human mind (Dali, Man Ray, Ernst). This expressive style of art, in contrast to the patron format, has led to what many popularized as “the starving artist”. With so many in history feeling the calling to create so strongly that they forgo a living wage, it’s a wonder that anyone would argue that art needed to to be “solved”. This is one of very few jobs people actually enjoy doing. Now we’ve come to point in history where the world’s art, like music, is easily converted digitally and uploaded in it’s entirety to the internet. Also like music, it’s devalued and accessibly by anyone, no matter the grueling hours, talent and study that it took to create these sometimes staggeringly masterful accomplishments. Musicians, Mozart-level or not, now earn a half-pence per stream and independent artists will be lucky to get anything at all. Now AI is here to truly put the nail in the coffin. The works of the world’s greatest artists of all time have had their paintings, drawings, line work, color mastery and everything else fed into a meatgrinder that can spit out gorgeous wonders of Frankensteined mash ups at mere phrase. Most of the more knowledgeable will quickly divert the conversation to point out that’s not exactly how it works. It’s not mashing the art together. It’s recreating, sort of digitally redrawing it by being “trained” to do so. Computers don’t know what’s beautiful any more than a pile of sticks do, so it needs instructions which basically amount to being fed masterful artwork and run through a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) to prove to the program what us humans think looks good. The underlying details are actuality so complex that most of the people who worked on it don’t even really understand the “how”. While I suppose we ought to wonder at the magic of technology here, which is fine, I’d suggest that’s missing the point. What we’re doing with the technology is what interests me. What’s the purpose? Is this really creating anything of cultural or social value? I think we can agree, it’s largely a fun toy and if it’s useful to our world in any way at all, it’s in a corporate setting “generating” art for products. That’s different than expressionism, but it’s not too far off from portrait painters being replaced by cameras and chefs being replaced by assembly lines. Why learn about composition or color theory when you can have a computer do it? Why learn to cook or play music? People still do these things because it’s the doing that matters. The accomplishment is part of the value of the end result. Gymnast or robot, I bet you people will still be interested in watching humans in the Olympics. So why post all this? Because I don’t think people understand art. It’s not magic, it takes work, deep thought and technical knowledge. Typing to an AI that spits out a conglomerate Frankenstein with a Dali moustache and Van Gogh brush strokes isn’t “creating” art anymore than a McDonald’s assembly line worker is a top chef. As a technical artist, I have to have my head in the game with dozens of digital art programs as well as having a good knowledge of cinematography, the physics of light and materials to boot, and I’m still mystified by the technicality involved in traditional art. So, being an artist, I’m not offended by AI art and I don’t think anyone should be. I couldn’t care less about it’s artistic merits and I don’t find any artistic value in it whatsoever, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun or interesting. I do feel a lot of sorrow for the concept art and art directors communities, in a historical way like great chefs being replaced by microwaves and musicians replaced by AI generated songs (coming soon). The great thing about AI though, even when I see these great artists that I love regurgitated and generated into text prompts, is seeing the public finally appreciate their great work. It’s a testament to those artists achievements that someone would try to build a machine to mimic them, to be trained by them in a desperate attempt to copy all their best parts so that everyone with a computer can have what they painstakingly accomplished for free and without effort. To be honest, it’s much better than most of the modern art adorning our museums today. For all those artists out there, I leave you with a recent quote from an artist I admire: “To make art is to be human.“ #AI #entertainment #art #media #stablediffusion #midjourney