AI Art Is Uninteresting

 

The other day I read a post from someone that read something like "Art is valuable because not everyone can do it" and it rubbed me the wrong way. It gets at something that is true, that art is made more valuable by the pure fact that not everyone is capable of producing art but that's an argument of scarcity, a very economically minded argument.

If everyone on earth was capable of producing high quality art, would art cease to have any value?

I don't believe that it would. And I don't think that the ability to create art is a rare gift bestowed upon a chosen few, true mastery does take years of honing a craft but you don't have to paint a masterpiece just to make art.

This all was in response to some cope post by an AI artist. I don't think the word artist even applies here, if I have a chair making machine that makes any chair that I tell it to make, I do not become a chair maker, I become the user of a chair making machine. But let me not get into those weeds. What struck me about this whole situation is that I was struggling to articulate what I thought made art valuable to me. What is it that makes human made art different and valuable from these AI generated images? It couldn't be quality, because quality could, in theory, be solved. I think I'd still feel about AI art the way I feel about it if it were much better and more convincingly human. Just knowing that it wasn't made by a person puts a bit of a stink on it. There's also the plagiarism aspect of it, but if the training data were legally acquired with permission from its creators, then an AI generated image would still be off-putting.

After having a long think on it while scrolling around, this is what I've come up with;

Art is both a conversation between the artist and the viewer, and art is also the story of how the art was created (the first part of this is a borrowed observation from Owl Criticism, check this video out for more).

This spoke to me and was very compelling. A lot of generated images have vapid subject matter and the decisions are often so random, generated out of noise that the conversation you're having isn't substantive. What is the machine trying to tell you? Well, it had a lot of a certain kind of image in its training data so it chose to light the scene in a certain way, or inherited certain stylistic writing quirks, purely out of happenstance. What's missing is a sense of purposefulness.

The story of an artwork's creation also contributes to its artistic merit. A single-color canvas is uninteresting until you find out that the choice of colour is the darkest black the artist could invent, or a shade of red so difficult to produce that a canvas full of it is an indulgence in and of itself. Even art that you don't like typically has an interesting story.

That is why most AI art, if not all, is deeply uninteresting. The conversation with the artist is vapid, when it isn't nonsensical, and the story is that a machine spat it out. A child's stick figures at least is an earnest attempt at expression made by a growing mind, often made purely out of the joy of making art. Often those stick figures do convey something meaningful, even if it is as simple as the love a child has for their mother, or the child's glee at the idea of a day at the beach.

A lot of AI art right now is just poor attempts at catching people in acts of hypocrisy, webcomics depicting how the only thing stopping people from loving AI art is the fact that it is AI art and... Well, yeah, you got me, I like art less when I find out there wasn't an artist involved. I want to support artists and I want to engage with art and both are harder if not impossible when there isn't an artist. Sorry you had to find out this way, I hope that's not too disappointing.

I likely won't sway a any hearts and minds, I imagine anyone reading this already agrees with me, but I mostly write to express myself and any attention or care that I get is a neat byproduct, one that I am very grateful for, but I'd still be doing this if exactly zero people ever read my writing.

But if you did get this far, I hope my end of this conversation has been stimulating and I hope you enjoyed this small part of the story of my life.

From Luna, with love.