Background: Generative artificial intelligence is progressing quickly. Algorithms are winning art competitions by rendering complex images from simple text-based prompts, and they can write glib short stories (you can try that here with a prompt such as ‘write a one-hundred-word story in the style of Hemingway’).
Generative “art” is not art. Art must not only elicit emotion, but embody it. The emotion within it comes from the artist. The artist is a conscious being painfully striving to express real feelings and perspectives. Art is a human endeavor.
Generative “art” is nothing more than robots parroting humans. The algorithms steal from living, feeling men and women to create marvelous junk. And even once the algorithms can go beyond our styles and create their own, they will continue to create junk, not art. Robots cannot be artists just as they cannot be dogs, or friends, or lovers. To be any of those things, consciousness is a prerequisite.
If Of Human Bondage had been written by GPT-15, it would be a little interesting and entirely worthless. The reason that Maugham’s authorship makes it invaluable is because the reader knows that there is a person on the other side of the story. He is explaining his own experience, in all of its emotion, and his perspective of the world around him. The value of a robot writing
He waited. It seemed to him that he waited for at least five minutes, trying to make up his mind; and his hand trembled. He would willingly have bolted, but he was afraid of the remorse which he knew would seize him. It was like getting on the highest diving-board in a swimming-bath; it looked nothing from below, but when you got up there and stared down at the water your heart sank; and the only thing that forced you to dive was the shame of coming down meekly by the steps you had climbed up. Philip screwed up his courage. He turned the handle softly and walked in. He seemed to himself to be trembling like a leaf.
is zero. The value of Maugham—or any living, feeling author—writing the exact same passage is tremendous. The same idea can be applied to other fields: Would you rather watch robots that look identical to human beings play the World Cup—even if they are far more entertaining—or would you rather watch humans? Why? Because we want to know that there is someone on the other side of the story.
Of course, scam artists will use these tools to create fake art that is written by AI, but claimed by man. But scammers have always existed, and they will continue to exist. We must learn how to deal with them in droves. We will. They will be known not as artists, but, rightfully, only as scammers. And the companies that aid them will be complicit in their schemes.
Perhaps some will try to co-author books with artificial intelligence. Whatever they create will be diluted art. It is one thing to spend an hour searching through every possible way to describe how a kiss made you feel; it is something else altogether to use an “autocomplete for everything” to give you a menu from which to choose. That something else altogether is worth less than an honest malformed idea, and it is running in the direction of being worthless in its entirety. We would not think as highly of the David if a robot did so much as sculpt the feet, and the Sistine Chapel would not be as magical if Michelangelo had not nearly gone blind painting it. Robots remove magic.
But the question remains: Do we even care?
In a world where we are obsessed with big images of ourselves on little screens, the answer is no. In a world where an entire generation wastes away by using the CCP’s psycho-social application, the answer is no. In a world where we are actively choosing the asinine over the divine, the answer is no.
But culture can change.
We can choose not to spend our afternoons glued to the gaudy computer-generated faux-art that many seem to be excited about. We can choose heartfelt masterpieces over computer-generated Harry Potter sequels. And if the robots do win—if fiction writers are replaced by soulless computers, if painters are replaced by GPUs, if cinematic script writers are replaced by the cloud—we will only have ourselves to blame. We would be continuing in the direction we’ve been tricked into thinking that we chose: focusing on the empty over the full; the vapid over the wondrous; the addictive over the tender.
I hope that we can prioritize humans over machines. I hope that we start paying attention not only to end results but how they are achieved. I hope that we seek out emotional depth instead of cold silicon. I hope that we make it impossible for Midjourney and OpenAI’s robot renderings to win when it comes to art, because I hope that we have the foresight to not allow them into the ring. That is one world where their technology does not belong.
Well written. I am reminded of a quote from Paul Cezanne: "A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art."
There is creative problem solving, there is design, and there is art. Society will often conflate the three, probably because they all things only the human brain can do (for now), but I imagine soon the distinction will be made more often.There are two things I keep coming back to when I think about this topic though. One, these AIs aren't creating anything on their own. They need human input or they just sit there. Like noise performance artists who plug in a bunch of pedals and modulators to get complex outputs from simple inputs. The second thing is the consumer. If someone is *actually* moved by a work generated by prompting an AI- who am I to say they are wrong for it? The photograph didn't erase the desire for paintings, just certain kinds of paintings. I think graphic designers should probably be a little worried about their jobs, but people who seek to be challenged will still seek the genuine article.