Your aunt's paint-by-numbers Starry Night might be an exact replica of Van Gogh's work. Who cares about your aunt's painting? Nobody except her. (No offence to our hypothetical aunt.)
The same with a Robot Olympics. SprintGPT might one day blast the 100 metres sprint in 2.9 seconds. Nobody will care. We seek art and excellence because we are a limited and flawed species. With respect, those who claim AI will replace art, do not understand art. The intentionality is integral; the result is, at very best, secondary.
AI is a great tool. Our crisis-sodden times fetishise the future. AI is not God or a saviour. Neither are any of the other isms and illities many claim will save us/lead us to utopia/make everything better.
Why would we seek to save labor, in mechanical terms borrowed from industry, in the only category of human experience in which the labor (and the hiding of labor) IS the essential value? How can a machine express Sprezzatura? It’s a laughable proposition.
The tech-spellbound assume that two images that may be indistinguishable on an LCD screen are indeed fungible 'assets'. Art is an embodied experience however that involves more than just visual input, as your example of Caravaggio attests. A recent project to create ‘The Next Rembrandt’ frames the question. Clever programmers defined algorithms to distill data representing a quintessential Rembrandt portrait, then had it 3D printed by robots (the topographical relief of a portrait is very much a part of its verisimilitude). Curators and scholars were confronted by a manufactured portrait that appears in almost every respect observable to be a missing Rembrandt.
Had the creators read 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction?' Does the Robo-Rembrandt have anything like an 'aura'. The video is mesmerising, although this pointless exercise calls to mind a magician spellbound by the skilfulness of their own sleight of hand. A more cynical viewer may wonder whether the point of this innovation, a collaboration between Microsoft and ING Bank, is little more than the legitimation of advancements in facial recognition surveillance technology with the imprimatur of fine art.
Perhaps the move to digital media and technologies in art is likely to make counterfeiting more prevalent? As a corollary, some big name artists and their factories—for that’s effectively what they are—have become like sites of mass production. In this way, artists have arguably become almost like forgers of themselves (think Hirst, Koons), an ersatz version of their own original ideas in order to supply a market for luxury commodities desperately hungry for the big ticket names that will burnish the credentials of this or that private collection.
As digital images and digitally produced artefacts become more commonplace, my wager is that the handmade becomes more prized, and not only for becoming more rare. Life imitates art. See Philip K. Dick for details, with his riffs on counterfeit artefacts in 'The Man in the High Castle' (or indeed the replicant animals of 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep').
To accept a reproduction in place of the original also signifies a break with the ritualistic aesthetics and politics of art of earlier times. What is the purpose of art after all? Thank you Alessandra.
Art must have intention. From this stems error but also the anxiety of influence and the tension it creates which AI, to art’s (and our) poverty, vacates. We always read such sub-text with nuance and as intention, which can be a conscious display, an obfuscation, or unconscious revelation. E.D. Hirsch covers this at length in Validity in Interpretation.
I think AI and digital capitalism won't replace human art and creativity but make them irrelevant. A new cyborg art creation is coming, and its the only one aligned with the zeitgeist.
This article, and the comments, are missing a lot. First of all, it’s not like what people are worried about is AI taking over art galleries. People are worried about creative jobs which require certain skills sets, many of which absolutely can be done by AI, are being done by AI, and will increasingly be done by AI. If someone has a vision for an animated film, and they can save money and time (which might mean being able to make the film at all) by using AI, they would. And they are. And they increasingly will.
How much of your clothing right now was produced by some artisan? How much of our food comes from a local family farmer? Probably none.
It is industrial artwork which can and will get replaced. Those are the jobs that will be lost. Meanwhile, people are buying bananas taped to walls and their friends’/community members artwork, watching their live music, etc, and will continue to. And no one’s saying that’s going to change.
So we can debunk the strong version of the argument “Ai will replace creatives” that no one’s actually making. Or we can wrongly try to debunk the weak version that says “ai will replace a of technical process in the creative fields”. AI *already is* replacing those jobs.
AI may claim efficiency, but efficiency is not creation. Creation is struggle—flawed, deliberate, lived-in. You hit the nail of the head, though, I'd add that AI doesn’t just lack imperfection, it lacks intent. It doesn’t yearn, it doesn’t falter, it doesn’t decide. Art is not about precision; it’s about possession; of vision, of self of the ineffable weight behind every stroke and syllable. A machine can remix & refine But it will never own its choices. And that is the silent divide between imitation and art, between process and purpose. Between existence and being.
I've said this before. AI would not put that long chord at the end of "A Day In The Life" by the Beatles--or any AI-created Beatlesesque song--if Messrs. Lennon and McCartney had not done it first.
Yes, this is well said. The problem with the notion that the creative industries will be wiped out by AI is that, as you detail, it rests on the assumption that people will happily consume art devoid of humanity. I don't care how polished an AI-generated film might be one day or how visually "perfect" a painting... Sure, such things are no doubt impressive from a strictly technical point of view, but one of the great pleasures of engaging in art is to commune with another person -- to connect with another consciousness, namely, that of the artist. I have absolutely no interest in reading/listening to/watching/etc. an AI-generated "work of art" because, as you indicate, it's not able to ultimately say anything to help me see the world, myself, or others in a new light. Great essay, Alessandra.
I'm with Geoffrey. I think AI image generators will soon take the place of almost all professional and creative artists.
I'll start by agreeing that AI text generation is a long way from being creative in any kind of interesting way. It's really just rearranging ideas and words it found on the internet. AI can generate the crappy text that you find on an ad or a marketing page but it can't write literature or poetry. Humans do it so much better and you can immediately tell the difference. AI might get there eventually, but it has a long way to go.
Images though…
I paint a little myself. The hardest thing is deciding what to paint. Then you have to arrange your ideas on the page and find the right mood and style to capture your emotions. This process is exactly the same whether you are using gouache, charcoal or oils. And it's exactly the same when you use AI to generate your picture. The creativity in AI is in having a picture in your head and finding the right words to describe it. When you are painting with oil, it might take a day or a week to get your ideas on the canvas. If you don't like the result, it's another week to start over. It takes seconds to generate your picture with AI, and if you don't like the result you can adjust it again and again and again.
Take that Caravaggio in your example. If you wanted to reproduce that in AI, you would have to describe the emotions in Judith's face and the patterns of light and dark on the curtains. You'd have to position the characters and capture Holofernes's pain. Someone with the skill can already do that with an image generator. It's not perfect yet, but give it a few months.
But we are not just talking about a simple reproduction. What if you wanted to paint some other biblical scene? Maybe Moses in the Bullrushes. You don't want to emulate Caravaggio; maybe Hiroshige is a better choice for what you have in mind. But not so pale! Maybe more characters; more colour. The creativity comes from imagining your picture in your head. The skill is in finding the words to describe your ideas: the layout, the mood, the style, the light, the shadows. If you have the skill and imagination for this then — hey presto! You are an artist.
For any kind of commercial art — graphic artists, the people who paint images for posters or design video games — it's job over. AI will do all that at 1% of the price.
For creative work, it will be similar to what happened with photography. Capturing real life was no longer interesting because cameras could do it better. Artists had to find new styles. The same will happen with AI except it's not just capturing real life; AI can paint everything you can paint. If artists come up with a new style, AI will copy that too. Some very rich people will still prefer art painted by a human with watercolours but everyone else will be content with AI art. No one chooses hand-crafted pots any more either.
Exactly.
Your aunt's paint-by-numbers Starry Night might be an exact replica of Van Gogh's work. Who cares about your aunt's painting? Nobody except her. (No offence to our hypothetical aunt.)
The same with a Robot Olympics. SprintGPT might one day blast the 100 metres sprint in 2.9 seconds. Nobody will care. We seek art and excellence because we are a limited and flawed species. With respect, those who claim AI will replace art, do not understand art. The intentionality is integral; the result is, at very best, secondary.
AI is a great tool. Our crisis-sodden times fetishise the future. AI is not God or a saviour. Neither are any of the other isms and illities many claim will save us/lead us to utopia/make everything better.
Why would we seek to save labor, in mechanical terms borrowed from industry, in the only category of human experience in which the labor (and the hiding of labor) IS the essential value? How can a machine express Sprezzatura? It’s a laughable proposition.
"Machines lack the imperfections that create beauty" and a human who can think, read, and write to input the prompts
The tech-spellbound assume that two images that may be indistinguishable on an LCD screen are indeed fungible 'assets'. Art is an embodied experience however that involves more than just visual input, as your example of Caravaggio attests. A recent project to create ‘The Next Rembrandt’ frames the question. Clever programmers defined algorithms to distill data representing a quintessential Rembrandt portrait, then had it 3D printed by robots (the topographical relief of a portrait is very much a part of its verisimilitude). Curators and scholars were confronted by a manufactured portrait that appears in almost every respect observable to be a missing Rembrandt.
Had the creators read 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction?' Does the Robo-Rembrandt have anything like an 'aura'. The video is mesmerising, although this pointless exercise calls to mind a magician spellbound by the skilfulness of their own sleight of hand. A more cynical viewer may wonder whether the point of this innovation, a collaboration between Microsoft and ING Bank, is little more than the legitimation of advancements in facial recognition surveillance technology with the imprimatur of fine art.
Perhaps the move to digital media and technologies in art is likely to make counterfeiting more prevalent? As a corollary, some big name artists and their factories—for that’s effectively what they are—have become like sites of mass production. In this way, artists have arguably become almost like forgers of themselves (think Hirst, Koons), an ersatz version of their own original ideas in order to supply a market for luxury commodities desperately hungry for the big ticket names that will burnish the credentials of this or that private collection.
As digital images and digitally produced artefacts become more commonplace, my wager is that the handmade becomes more prized, and not only for becoming more rare. Life imitates art. See Philip K. Dick for details, with his riffs on counterfeit artefacts in 'The Man in the High Castle' (or indeed the replicant animals of 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep').
To accept a reproduction in place of the original also signifies a break with the ritualistic aesthetics and politics of art of earlier times. What is the purpose of art after all? Thank you Alessandra.
Art must have intention. From this stems error but also the anxiety of influence and the tension it creates which AI, to art’s (and our) poverty, vacates. We always read such sub-text with nuance and as intention, which can be a conscious display, an obfuscation, or unconscious revelation. E.D. Hirsch covers this at length in Validity in Interpretation.
I would like to debate this topic.
I think AI and digital capitalism won't replace human art and creativity but make them irrelevant. A new cyborg art creation is coming, and its the only one aligned with the zeitgeist.
https://open.substack.com/pub/thecyberhermetica/p/ai-will-make-human-creativity-irrelevant?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=g6z8k
This article, and the comments, are missing a lot. First of all, it’s not like what people are worried about is AI taking over art galleries. People are worried about creative jobs which require certain skills sets, many of which absolutely can be done by AI, are being done by AI, and will increasingly be done by AI. If someone has a vision for an animated film, and they can save money and time (which might mean being able to make the film at all) by using AI, they would. And they are. And they increasingly will.
How much of your clothing right now was produced by some artisan? How much of our food comes from a local family farmer? Probably none.
It is industrial artwork which can and will get replaced. Those are the jobs that will be lost. Meanwhile, people are buying bananas taped to walls and their friends’/community members artwork, watching their live music, etc, and will continue to. And no one’s saying that’s going to change.
So we can debunk the strong version of the argument “Ai will replace creatives” that no one’s actually making. Or we can wrongly try to debunk the weak version that says “ai will replace a of technical process in the creative fields”. AI *already is* replacing those jobs.
I just plug articles into ai for ai writing detection before reading them.
AI may claim efficiency, but efficiency is not creation. Creation is struggle—flawed, deliberate, lived-in. You hit the nail of the head, though, I'd add that AI doesn’t just lack imperfection, it lacks intent. It doesn’t yearn, it doesn’t falter, it doesn’t decide. Art is not about precision; it’s about possession; of vision, of self of the ineffable weight behind every stroke and syllable. A machine can remix & refine But it will never own its choices. And that is the silent divide between imitation and art, between process and purpose. Between existence and being.
"Quality has been sacrificed at the altar of quantity.."
I've said this before. AI would not put that long chord at the end of "A Day In The Life" by the Beatles--or any AI-created Beatlesesque song--if Messrs. Lennon and McCartney had not done it first.
Yes, this is well said. The problem with the notion that the creative industries will be wiped out by AI is that, as you detail, it rests on the assumption that people will happily consume art devoid of humanity. I don't care how polished an AI-generated film might be one day or how visually "perfect" a painting... Sure, such things are no doubt impressive from a strictly technical point of view, but one of the great pleasures of engaging in art is to commune with another person -- to connect with another consciousness, namely, that of the artist. I have absolutely no interest in reading/listening to/watching/etc. an AI-generated "work of art" because, as you indicate, it's not able to ultimately say anything to help me see the world, myself, or others in a new light. Great essay, Alessandra.
I'm with Geoffrey. I think AI image generators will soon take the place of almost all professional and creative artists.
I'll start by agreeing that AI text generation is a long way from being creative in any kind of interesting way. It's really just rearranging ideas and words it found on the internet. AI can generate the crappy text that you find on an ad or a marketing page but it can't write literature or poetry. Humans do it so much better and you can immediately tell the difference. AI might get there eventually, but it has a long way to go.
Images though…
I paint a little myself. The hardest thing is deciding what to paint. Then you have to arrange your ideas on the page and find the right mood and style to capture your emotions. This process is exactly the same whether you are using gouache, charcoal or oils. And it's exactly the same when you use AI to generate your picture. The creativity in AI is in having a picture in your head and finding the right words to describe it. When you are painting with oil, it might take a day or a week to get your ideas on the canvas. If you don't like the result, it's another week to start over. It takes seconds to generate your picture with AI, and if you don't like the result you can adjust it again and again and again.
Take that Caravaggio in your example. If you wanted to reproduce that in AI, you would have to describe the emotions in Judith's face and the patterns of light and dark on the curtains. You'd have to position the characters and capture Holofernes's pain. Someone with the skill can already do that with an image generator. It's not perfect yet, but give it a few months.
But we are not just talking about a simple reproduction. What if you wanted to paint some other biblical scene? Maybe Moses in the Bullrushes. You don't want to emulate Caravaggio; maybe Hiroshige is a better choice for what you have in mind. But not so pale! Maybe more characters; more colour. The creativity comes from imagining your picture in your head. The skill is in finding the words to describe your ideas: the layout, the mood, the style, the light, the shadows. If you have the skill and imagination for this then — hey presto! You are an artist.
For any kind of commercial art — graphic artists, the people who paint images for posters or design video games — it's job over. AI will do all that at 1% of the price.
For creative work, it will be similar to what happened with photography. Capturing real life was no longer interesting because cameras could do it better. Artists had to find new styles. The same will happen with AI except it's not just capturing real life; AI can paint everything you can paint. If artists come up with a new style, AI will copy that too. Some very rich people will still prefer art painted by a human with watercolours but everyone else will be content with AI art. No one chooses hand-crafted pots any more either.
I think the future for artists is bleak.
Keep up the great work Ms. B.