I have long thought of art (including both literary art and art art) as one mind reaching out across the void and asking one poignant question: do you see it too? And the appreciation of art is of the same character; it is the mind of the viewer seeking an expression that validates or enhances what they see in the world.
Lovers can hold hands. Minds cannot touch each other in the same way. Art is how minds hold hands. By which analogy, AI art becomes a kind of sex doll. However lifelike you make it, there is no soul there, not acceptance, no affection, no loneliness reaching out to meet your loneliness.
I agree with this answer, I think it's important to recognize that "AI art" can be considered a new tool or even a new medium for artists to use and express themselves, there are many forms of artistic expression that make use of other works, collage and matte painting for example
Hmm, I think it’s one thing to call AI a tool that artists can use, and another to call the output art. How will we judge what is created when we can’t tell what is made by machine and what by human? I don’t have a solid answer to this question, just wanted to pose it for now.
Mr. Baker, if you can write a comment like this, I think you would appreciate my work to understand art...if the grass could take another day of growth unattended :)
doll is only an object, AI have artificial neurons not quite the same as the biological one but a plane doesn't need to mimic fully how bird fly to make it fly. i mean if artificial neurons have ability to be creative i think it just the matter of time before they can be self aware of them self, and when that happen people will just assume it was fake and terminator scenario will roll out
This is a wonderful, thoughtful essay. One thing I'd like to suggest, though, is that taking DALL-E and other similar systems to their logical extreme -- where they take over and there is no original art and they are left with only themselves for input -- is a good thought experiment, but unlikely in real life. Much more likely is that these systems co-exist with and parasitize human creators constantly. A good analogy is Google Translate. Google Translate can't work without a planet full of multilingual individuals using their human brains and cultural knowledge to translate among living languages by their own efforts; Google Translate then comes along and siphons this data and devalues the work of translators by allowing anyone to "use google translate" without acknowledging (let alone paying) the humans behind the algorithms who did the actual linguistic work. But Google Translate has not made people stop translating. It just devalues the work of people who are translators, who were once a highly respected and admired group, much-needed in any areas of life, and well-remunerated in many of those roles. So artists and writers face the fate of translators, I think is a better analogy. Humans continue to do the work, and DALL-E or GPT-3 simply makes that work seem pointless, even those those AIs couldn't function without the humans they exploit.
Well put Amy--it's a variant on what faces musicians on Spotify and other music providers, where first their output was diminished in value and now Spotify pushes the work of in-house musicians who emulate the tonal qualities of "real" musicians. The endless grind of capitalism at work!
Not at all, I’d choose capitalism ... but not one controlled by monolithic enterprises that so dominate domains that they distort the free play of choice.
well what about robot that learns on the real world and acquire their own knowledge with no human inventions they end up in factories but don't worry it just artificial neurons that doesn't have any self awareness
To steelman the opposite view a bit, there's still intentionality in curation. A piece of AI art can be displayed in, say, a blog post, due to a human editor deciding that it fits well there, and we can recognize that as valuable. But... yeah, if that comes to pass, it would be a very limited view of art.
I have become more optimistic on this question than I was a month ago, though. If we truly value conscious, intentional art — and I agree that we do — then we'll quickly learn to devalue AI art. Many people like DALL-E right now because it's new and impressive, but there's a negative feedback loop at play. AI art will destroy its own value soon enough.
The "curation" aspect is by far the most common response. I think it is rather weak, since the amount of curation is so minimal (you just tell it what you want). It's not even like, say, found object art, where you have to go out and get something and arrange it yourself and make all sorts of choices or interactions with the pieces. It is much more like a commission, which you text to someone, rather than curation, since you're simply asking and receiving. And we can simply view the involvement of human consciousness as a spectrum, and see that, in the worst-case scenario of replacement, its impact and role is negligible.
I’m struggling to see a curator of the sort described (a human blogger inserting an AI generated image) as an artist. The curator may be artistic in the sense of selecting the image for the harmony or dissonance it injects, but selecting a prefabricated image for publication in an altered context is nothing like what I know of writing a poem or a song to release my feelings and thoughts in a piece I personally make. The curator seems twice removed from the real (existential) experience of art, one remove as an enthusiastic viewer/reader/listener of pieces made by a machine, a second remove as a poet/singer/actor/dancer/sculptor without a provenance in a human community. There is no need for people. Art is put on life support.
Yes, but just like a commission, it's the original vision that defines whether the commission is a success or not. I'm a filmmaker who has worked with clients that have no idea what they want and because the pay wasn't that good and I wasn't that enthusiastic about it, the end product was acceptable, but not a work of art. But, I've had other clients who expressed a clear vision that was deep with intentionality and that not only inspired me, but it also gave me way better direction, which resulted in better content.
I think AI will replace jobs, but in place of jobs will be creators with intentionality in their visions using AI that will replace the hard skills needed to make their visions come alive. And if it's just reduced down to a button, then the art will be superficial as you pointed out, which means AI will be designed as a collaboration tool where the value of the art will be determined by the deeper intention behind the art.
At least, that's how I view it in our life times. Unless they're able to accurately mimic intentionality to the point of being indistinguishable from people. But even then, millions will still want to create and that will provide a huge market for AI tools that are specifically designed to act as "exo-skeletons" for creativity, similar to what we're doing over at Story Prism (Storyprism.io) for screenwriters and filmmakers.
So even in a World where Hollywood movies can be produced automatically with the click of a button, humans will still exist and they will still have the desire to create and with AI, 5G, AR/VR, and Blockchain provided to creators within a decentralized autonomous market network (DAMN), that will have a good chance of outcompeting the big studios who will be able to produce quality content astronomically faster. But their AI will be geared towards maximizing profits, which means safer bets with proven track records as opposed to "anything and everything". Furthermore, with asset tokenization, the fans will be able to invest and reap profits off of the content they create, something they can't get from big studios using only AI to generate content.
So, the hard-skilled artist may disappear, but the creators will thrive and more will likely be birthed from this AI revolution. Really great article, btw! Very thought-provoking!
The hard-skilled artist may disappear...the creators will thrive and more will be born. What distinctions are you making between artists and creators? Are creators midway between artists and curators? Anyway, I’m not so sure one can be a soft-skilled artist in any serious way. This is dangerous ground.
I'd say a creator is someone with a full vision for an end deliverable that can be valuated by the market and an artist is someone who possesses artistic skills in something and who generally work under contract for creators. But a lot of times creators and artists are intertwined like a writer/producer/director who may also know cinematography.
Really what I'm getting at though, is the days of contractual work for artists hired to create someone's vision will disappear and in place of that will be AI and creators "contracting" ai to assist in their vision.
So all those freelance artists who work for others will have the tools to be able to continue being artists only now they can also be creators if they have a vision for something.
This is my best guess because on film sets you have all these artists with specialized skills working for someones vision for a paycheck but secretly, a lot of them have these big ideas or stories they're developing or hoping to develop on the side. However, it's very challenging when you have to work a day job and have to know or possess a multitude of disciplines like writing, pitching, budgeting and planning, directing, etc. You have to also possess entrepreneurial skills and all of this can be learned but for each one, it can take a lifetime and even then, you may not be good at all these things.
But with AI, it will essentially give those skills to that single artist or at least supplement those skills and with better forms of networking and blockchain starting a business surrounding your visions can become a more realistic thing for all these artists.
Ah, I see the labor issue. So you don’t construe creators in the film world as artists, rather artists work for creators. The artist doesn’t create the vision but assists in making it happen. I wonder if the artists working on someone else’s vision believe they are doing when they work for the creator? I sometimes play music as a hired gun. I sometimes feel as if I am a tool used to make someone else’s music. The work these film artists are doing off the job may be their genuine art. You are on the front lines of the problem. It’s much bigger than AI isn’t it? I imagine when it works well it is because of human warmth and regard, when it doesn’t it is because of cold, mechanical relationships. AI is small potatoes. Thanks for setting me straight. I had an impoverished take on your comment and I appreciate your taking the time.
Oh man, are you kidding me? Thank YOU! Everytime I talk about this, it either falls on deaf ears or people get angry and throw cheap shots. Thank you for thoughtful response.
And yeah, a lot of people making films feel that way and are in the positions that they're in because they want a shot at making their own stuff one day.
I’ve been thinking about personality inventories in relation to instructional design, cooperative group structures, hiring, and the like. The object is to fit people into cells in a contingency table to manage personality as a commodity, a stable template. Problem is a phenotypic human personality is built from skin in the game, the fact of personal death, cultural participation in history where you get burned or massaged, biology--no predictable outcome, non-replicable, bleeds feelings, lives intersubjective lives not with tools, but with people. Unless AI can be manufactured to replicate life in a skin suit without a break except insanity, dementia, drugs, or death, Turing be damned, art made by machines can’t do what authentic art does--make instruments or blueprints that evoke human feeling. Communication suits AI. Information, data, shapes, input, output. Perhaps even interpretation and synthesis. Aesthetic events call on communication, information alignment of consciousness, joint focus of attention, to get in the door, but light up each human spirit idiosyncratically, to use Carl Jung’s word. AI does not know how to create art. Curators do. Intent doesn’t mean accomplishment. But the aesthetic outcome derives from human transactions in real time.
I mean you can arrange works of AI art (using "works" feels wrong here!) in arbitrarily complex ways. Say you print them on giant posters and make an interesting real-life gallery in a park, or whatever. So it goes beyond just prompt-writing. Then again, who's to say that there won't be a curation AI sometime soon. So I agree that none of this is remotely sufficient to rescue the lost value of intentionality in art making.
DALL-E 2 is not even possible 1 years ago the research about diffusion model comes out in 2022. seeing this amount of progress in short amount of time and not many people realizing it, is just mind blowing what will comes first?
AI art being devalue or AI can do anything human can do
Yes, I do expect a rocky ride for the next few years. The pace of change is too fast for us to adapt easily. But we'll adapt, and our values won't change that fast.
Thank you very much for this piece. The passion you put into it is special. (Wish I could word that sentence better!) My partner is executive director of a nonprofit facility that rents studios to artists and puts on exhibits, so I frequently interact with artists, from recognized to unrecognized. Also, I worked in advertising for a decade, so have interacted with commercial artists.
Your piece opens up the question of "what would society be like if there were no artists?" Even if we never saw their art, I think we would lose something by not having people being artists in our midst. We need people who are living a vision.
Perhaps thoughtful people will always be able to recognize human art. Not by looking at it, but by knowing the facts behind it. Right now, I'm looking at a Sierra Club calendar, a photo I took in the mountains, and an abstract oil painting of a redwood forest. Each connects me with nature, people and life, even though the calendar is the most remote from being art.
I read a very good book on the invention of printing and the socio-cultural changes it wrought -- not unlike what the digital world is doing to us now. In some ways, society recovered from the chaos brought on by the invention of printing, and perhaps will in the coming decades.
Perhaps artists themselves -- like Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol helped bring on the AI-art problem, by the way they deconstructed the values you praise in your piece. As open-minded as I try to be, personally, I don't believe Warhol's most famous works are art, and I don't think Tolstoy or you would either, for all the reasons you both present. If they are art, they are only so by a few synapse-firings conceptually.
Might the questions you raise about art be part of a broader search for authenticity in life?
People nowadays often (justifiably) laugh derisively about the concept of NFTs, but might NFTs possibly become necessary solely to authenticate human-produced art and thus force a differentiation from AI-art? Even if for many other purposes they are merely a gimmick? This thought is just a brainstorm at this moment, not developed yet.
There are many valid points here, though I take issue with two statements. Firstly, the discounting of pareidolia as "illusion of art". As an artist in whose art practice pareidolia is a central theme, I urge you to further examine its function. For one, the recognition or projection (immediately concerted in perception) of a face in rock, cloud, or other natural elements, makes apparent how the "external" world is in fact battered and processed in the brain's "interior". In the case of the rock faces, what makes them art is not the individual rock and their likeness to a face, but the human discernment that picked these samples and compiled them into a gallery. It is the ensemble presentation (the framing, similar to framing a photographic composition) that divorces the work from the natural "unconscious" elements that sculpted them (like a collage or remix).
You write "The key difference being that a sculptor is conscious, but when it is instead the wind or rain or the deep fermentation of geological processes acting as sculptor, these things are not conscious. Lacking consciousness, they lack intentionality, and therefore their products lack meaning."
Are you implying the meaning is inherent in the work, not something divined/projected/perceived by the beholder? In a sense certain artists, such as Andy Goldworthy, attempt through effort to emulate what is effortless in nature. This brings me to my other issue, with regards to your insistence on the artist's "conscious" impulse/intent to create. I understand that you mean to infer that the living artist imbued the work with his life force or intention or uses the creative process to work out some other, living processes. But much art comes from an unconscious place, and works to wrestle that into the fore, which is exactly how it foregoes the limits of conscious control and may imbue the work with a transcendental quality. AI lacks struggle, which is what creates that quality we call "soul" or "duende". AI art, as you rightfully propose, may not be able to mirror this accurately (yet). However, it is currently a kind of divination, a means for the artist (or layman) to outsource his or her brainstorm, and generate ideas, to be further worked out in collaboration with the technology. And, like the illusion of compassion glimpsed in a recently-fed (and seemingly friendly) grizzly bear's eyes, we may yet catch a glimpse of what we are by projecting it into the mirror of what we are not.
Thank you for this thoughtful piece. Much I agree with in it.
One place I would push back:
"The response of AI-art enthusiasts, like those at the tech companies standing to make trillions off AI, or those who simply enjoy nerding out over new technological toys, will be to suggest that what matters in art is solely its extrinsic properties."
I work at a company standing to make a fortune off of AI, and I enjoy nerding out new technological toys, but my response is not that what matters in art is solely its extrinsic properties. My response is that, if you actually dive into the creation of Dalle-2 - the crude attempt of apes to recreate the part of themselves that conceives, the way the neural nets are forced into desperate (mathematical) free-fall through millions of human-labelled images - there is in fact intrinsic substance behind Dalle. Pollock drips, cavemen place a hand on the wall, Pistoletto smashes mirrors, and AI researchers force mathematical constructs to reverse the diffusion of pictures. You see Dalle as devoid of humans, like a rock, but I see it as fiercely, farcically, tragically, human, like a cathedral.
All that said, Dalle isn't just hanging in MOMA. Perhaps you would have a different response if it were. Dalle is poised to cause the type of displacement you rightly lament. Like I said, I agree with much of what you say.
First, this is a brilliant summary of a complex topic. I find myself unconvinced, though, that AI-graphics are going to put artists out of commission. The rise of search engine optimization (SEO) drove a massive increase in the amount of writing needed, delivering a deluge of low quality, spammy content that serves in stark relief to quality writing (both copywriting and blogging). While GPT-3 and DALL-E could lower friction there even more, the market for authentic, well-crafted arguments and art will remain.
Your conclusion squares with what I’m thinking right now. Eric’s piece is disturbing as I think about how important the person behind the poem has been for me for an entire lifetime. There is more to making art than deep learning.
In the 19th C people thought photography would be the end of art.
It wasn't, but it certainly had an effect. For one thing, it diminished the demand for portrait painting, a commercial art, although not to zero.
I think the effect of AI art will mainly be on commercial art.
Expressive art will continue as humans will still have the urge to create and marvel at the creations of others. Expressive art will live in the real world space, with tactile materials, there to see when people raise their eyes from their phones.
Thanks for a well thought out essay! While I do agree with your main theme that AI Art is, to put it simply, essentially soulless, I do have a quibble or two. For example, if art is about emotion, then we should define emotion, and I am not convinced emotion is outside the ken of computation. I hold the view that emotion is at heart the the experience or anticipation of reward or punishment. The positive emotions reflect rewards, and the negative emotions precede or follow punishment. If, as many of your references including Tolstoy do, we define art as the ability to communicate emotions as experienced to another -- which I believe to be a bit of a reductive definition -- then I don't see a serious obstacle to producing true "AI Art" by centering it on computational emotions that are designed to be human-like. Granted, that's not at all how language models or reinforcement learners today work, but that's a matter of implementation.
Secondly, although these AI systems are not at all conscious, what ARE is a learned probability distribution that replicates human judgements of the connections between images and text. And thus they cannot truly be said to be *unconsciously* generated; ultimately they are particular interpolations of true human experiences. In that sense, they are an emanation of human consciousness. We may find this AI art to be wooden or banal, but let's be honest: "art" produced by an average human isn't really all that great either. So the fact that certain "art" is boring does not say anything much about its relationship to consciousness.
I would bet that a good creative artist could use the descendant of a tool like this in an iterative process to create are that does convey emotion, by critiquing and augmenting each iteration with verbal commentary. In fact, what such toolsets could enable in the end is for verbal artists -- also known as poets and writers -- to create visual art inaccessible to them previously.
Despite the comments, I appreciate your point of view and wish more people could have a more reasonable view of these mathematical systems and their capabilities or lack thereof.
Thank for this piece. It obviously hit a nerve with a lot of people. It inspired my most recent issue on my newsletter, and I linked to you, of course.
Beautifully written and argued. My favourite line - “In such a world the art isn’t art, in the same way that a photograph of a hurricane doesn’t get anything wet.”
Not much of a commenter, but I was moved. Enjoyed the article. Thinking on it took me down a few different streams of attitudes and possibilities:
- Purist stream, the "immutables" who believe the lack of intentionality and consciousness, decision, curation by the creator is lost, and that taste is inseparable from art. I think I fall into that camp while also finding it a bit shaky. Humans work hard at art, and don't always do it well, but there is an intense pleasure in witnessing a human perform masterfully.
- The economical stream, the corporate opportunity presented by having a company or in-house AI generate all your artwork. Consider all those articles with weird or fancy accompanying art, now to be created to their specs and at, eventually, a fraction of the cost. Presumably a sufficiently powerful AI could complete many projects at once or sequentially. They could even generate a large stockpile for future use. Legalities around ownership may ensue, but for these circumstances the art is a dressing, and thus ensuring it has the immutable human touch might seem superfluous. All commerce seems to spawn a gutter and boutique version, so if we recall the internet is filled with low-effort, plagiarized, paraphrased, and otherwise lazy content, there's no reason to believe a similar environment won't spring up in at least one place for AI art. Keeping in mind those article are viewed by many as trash, their authors as hacks, and their websites as cesspools. Keeping in mind further that AI is already writing some of those articles.
- The over-performing stream, likely consists of taste-makers, future-thinking artists (who may be viewed by skeptics the same way digital music artists can be, as "pretend artists with laptops and pro tools"), but who will no doubt produce works that are indisputably beautiful (if only in their extrinsic properties, as mentioned in the article). They will have a nice PR angle, the misunderstood, the avant garde, the bold. Their opponent, the Luddite art snob.
-The long gamers, who believe as you do now, but also believe that the future is bright with possibility. DALL-E is the Wright Flyer, or maybe one of those ornithopters that shakes itself to pieces, or a lady with feathers on her back who rolls down a hill - looking ever forward to the day that AI steps out from under the human shadow and expresses itself, truly, in a way that may be either indistinguishable from human art, or perhaps more interestingly, be something entirely novel. Maybe AI art will cease to be for humans, and AIs will "hold hands" with AIs, even while disconnected from Skynet. This call to me too.
I freakin hate AI's forays into art. They seem grotesquely empty and lame to me -- and yet they are, you know, coherent and reasonable at first glance. I worry that people exposed to a lot of crappy plastic AI "art" will never know the real thing, never know what they're missing. Maybe they'll smoke a bunch of weed, or the 2060 equivalent, and that will enable them to experience some shivers of delight from AI prose and AI art. But they won't be profound and rich shivers.
I entered a favorite passage from Nabokov's autobiography, and had GPT-3 translate it to "standard English.' Here's what I got:
Nabokov:
"Another part of the ritual was to ascend with closed eyes. 'Step, step, step,' came my mother's voice as she led me up - and sure enough, the surface of the next tread would receive the blind child's confident foot; all one had to do was lift it a little higher than usual, so as to avoid stubbing one's toe against the riser. This slow, somewhat somnambulistic ascension in self-engendered darkness held obvious delights. The keenest of them was not knowing when the last step would come. At the top of the stairs, one's foot would be automatically lifted to the deceptive call of 'Step,' and then, with a momentary sense of exquisite panic, with a wild contraction of muscles, would sink into the phantasm of a step, padded, as it were, with the infinitely elastic stuff of its own nonexistence."
GPT-#
"The child is blindfolded and led up a flight of stairs by their mother. They must lift their foot higher than usual to avoid stubbing their toe. They don't know when the last step will come, so they have to be careful. At the top of the stairs, their foot sinks into something that isn't really there."
"The infinitely elastic stuff of its own nonexistence" is just gorgeous. And teaching AI to recognize that is quite a task. I can't imagine how one would even begin to do it, much less to teach AI to produce similarly gorgeous bits of phenomenology.
Haha, fuck you GPT-3, you have Engineer's Disease -- i.e., mild Asperger's -- you're earnest and intelligent, but with fail to appreciate the other person's nuance, and have complete lack of insight into your own's interpersonal, esthetic and intellectual deficits.
I have long thought of art (including both literary art and art art) as one mind reaching out across the void and asking one poignant question: do you see it too? And the appreciation of art is of the same character; it is the mind of the viewer seeking an expression that validates or enhances what they see in the world.
Lovers can hold hands. Minds cannot touch each other in the same way. Art is how minds hold hands. By which analogy, AI art becomes a kind of sex doll. However lifelike you make it, there is no soul there, not acceptance, no affection, no loneliness reaching out to meet your loneliness.
I agree with this answer, I think it's important to recognize that "AI art" can be considered a new tool or even a new medium for artists to use and express themselves, there are many forms of artistic expression that make use of other works, collage and matte painting for example
Hmm, I think it’s one thing to call AI a tool that artists can use, and another to call the output art. How will we judge what is created when we can’t tell what is made by machine and what by human? I don’t have a solid answer to this question, just wanted to pose it for now.
Love the thought “art is how minds hold hands”
"(appreciating art is)...the viewer seeking an expression that validates or enhances what they see in the world."
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"I need to hear some sounds that recognize the pain in me, yeah"
-The Verve
Mr. Baker, if you can write a comment like this, I think you would appreciate my work to understand art...if the grass could take another day of growth unattended :)
doll is only an object, AI have artificial neurons not quite the same as the biological one but a plane doesn't need to mimic fully how bird fly to make it fly. i mean if artificial neurons have ability to be creative i think it just the matter of time before they can be self aware of them self, and when that happen people will just assume it was fake and terminator scenario will roll out
In this case though where ML models are involved, are they actually being creative? A lot of that depends on our definition of creativity.
This is a wonderful, thoughtful essay. One thing I'd like to suggest, though, is that taking DALL-E and other similar systems to their logical extreme -- where they take over and there is no original art and they are left with only themselves for input -- is a good thought experiment, but unlikely in real life. Much more likely is that these systems co-exist with and parasitize human creators constantly. A good analogy is Google Translate. Google Translate can't work without a planet full of multilingual individuals using their human brains and cultural knowledge to translate among living languages by their own efforts; Google Translate then comes along and siphons this data and devalues the work of translators by allowing anyone to "use google translate" without acknowledging (let alone paying) the humans behind the algorithms who did the actual linguistic work. But Google Translate has not made people stop translating. It just devalues the work of people who are translators, who were once a highly respected and admired group, much-needed in any areas of life, and well-remunerated in many of those roles. So artists and writers face the fate of translators, I think is a better analogy. Humans continue to do the work, and DALL-E or GPT-3 simply makes that work seem pointless, even those those AIs couldn't function without the humans they exploit.
Well put Amy--it's a variant on what faces musicians on Spotify and other music providers, where first their output was diminished in value and now Spotify pushes the work of in-house musicians who emulate the tonal qualities of "real" musicians. The endless grind of capitalism at work!
Not at all, I’d choose capitalism ... but not one controlled by monolithic enterprises that so dominate domains that they distort the free play of choice.
well what about robot that learns on the real world and acquire their own knowledge with no human inventions they end up in factories but don't worry it just artificial neurons that doesn't have any self awareness
To steelman the opposite view a bit, there's still intentionality in curation. A piece of AI art can be displayed in, say, a blog post, due to a human editor deciding that it fits well there, and we can recognize that as valuable. But... yeah, if that comes to pass, it would be a very limited view of art.
I have become more optimistic on this question than I was a month ago, though. If we truly value conscious, intentional art — and I agree that we do — then we'll quickly learn to devalue AI art. Many people like DALL-E right now because it's new and impressive, but there's a negative feedback loop at play. AI art will destroy its own value soon enough.
The "curation" aspect is by far the most common response. I think it is rather weak, since the amount of curation is so minimal (you just tell it what you want). It's not even like, say, found object art, where you have to go out and get something and arrange it yourself and make all sorts of choices or interactions with the pieces. It is much more like a commission, which you text to someone, rather than curation, since you're simply asking and receiving. And we can simply view the involvement of human consciousness as a spectrum, and see that, in the worst-case scenario of replacement, its impact and role is negligible.
I’m struggling to see a curator of the sort described (a human blogger inserting an AI generated image) as an artist. The curator may be artistic in the sense of selecting the image for the harmony or dissonance it injects, but selecting a prefabricated image for publication in an altered context is nothing like what I know of writing a poem or a song to release my feelings and thoughts in a piece I personally make. The curator seems twice removed from the real (existential) experience of art, one remove as an enthusiastic viewer/reader/listener of pieces made by a machine, a second remove as a poet/singer/actor/dancer/sculptor without a provenance in a human community. There is no need for people. Art is put on life support.
Yes, but just like a commission, it's the original vision that defines whether the commission is a success or not. I'm a filmmaker who has worked with clients that have no idea what they want and because the pay wasn't that good and I wasn't that enthusiastic about it, the end product was acceptable, but not a work of art. But, I've had other clients who expressed a clear vision that was deep with intentionality and that not only inspired me, but it also gave me way better direction, which resulted in better content.
I think AI will replace jobs, but in place of jobs will be creators with intentionality in their visions using AI that will replace the hard skills needed to make their visions come alive. And if it's just reduced down to a button, then the art will be superficial as you pointed out, which means AI will be designed as a collaboration tool where the value of the art will be determined by the deeper intention behind the art.
At least, that's how I view it in our life times. Unless they're able to accurately mimic intentionality to the point of being indistinguishable from people. But even then, millions will still want to create and that will provide a huge market for AI tools that are specifically designed to act as "exo-skeletons" for creativity, similar to what we're doing over at Story Prism (Storyprism.io) for screenwriters and filmmakers.
So even in a World where Hollywood movies can be produced automatically with the click of a button, humans will still exist and they will still have the desire to create and with AI, 5G, AR/VR, and Blockchain provided to creators within a decentralized autonomous market network (DAMN), that will have a good chance of outcompeting the big studios who will be able to produce quality content astronomically faster. But their AI will be geared towards maximizing profits, which means safer bets with proven track records as opposed to "anything and everything". Furthermore, with asset tokenization, the fans will be able to invest and reap profits off of the content they create, something they can't get from big studios using only AI to generate content.
So, the hard-skilled artist may disappear, but the creators will thrive and more will likely be birthed from this AI revolution. Really great article, btw! Very thought-provoking!
The hard-skilled artist may disappear...the creators will thrive and more will be born. What distinctions are you making between artists and creators? Are creators midway between artists and curators? Anyway, I’m not so sure one can be a soft-skilled artist in any serious way. This is dangerous ground.
I'd say a creator is someone with a full vision for an end deliverable that can be valuated by the market and an artist is someone who possesses artistic skills in something and who generally work under contract for creators. But a lot of times creators and artists are intertwined like a writer/producer/director who may also know cinematography.
Really what I'm getting at though, is the days of contractual work for artists hired to create someone's vision will disappear and in place of that will be AI and creators "contracting" ai to assist in their vision.
So all those freelance artists who work for others will have the tools to be able to continue being artists only now they can also be creators if they have a vision for something.
This is my best guess because on film sets you have all these artists with specialized skills working for someones vision for a paycheck but secretly, a lot of them have these big ideas or stories they're developing or hoping to develop on the side. However, it's very challenging when you have to work a day job and have to know or possess a multitude of disciplines like writing, pitching, budgeting and planning, directing, etc. You have to also possess entrepreneurial skills and all of this can be learned but for each one, it can take a lifetime and even then, you may not be good at all these things.
But with AI, it will essentially give those skills to that single artist or at least supplement those skills and with better forms of networking and blockchain starting a business surrounding your visions can become a more realistic thing for all these artists.
Ah, I see the labor issue. So you don’t construe creators in the film world as artists, rather artists work for creators. The artist doesn’t create the vision but assists in making it happen. I wonder if the artists working on someone else’s vision believe they are doing when they work for the creator? I sometimes play music as a hired gun. I sometimes feel as if I am a tool used to make someone else’s music. The work these film artists are doing off the job may be their genuine art. You are on the front lines of the problem. It’s much bigger than AI isn’t it? I imagine when it works well it is because of human warmth and regard, when it doesn’t it is because of cold, mechanical relationships. AI is small potatoes. Thanks for setting me straight. I had an impoverished take on your comment and I appreciate your taking the time.
Oh man, are you kidding me? Thank YOU! Everytime I talk about this, it either falls on deaf ears or people get angry and throw cheap shots. Thank you for thoughtful response.
And yeah, a lot of people making films feel that way and are in the positions that they're in because they want a shot at making their own stuff one day.
I’ve been thinking about personality inventories in relation to instructional design, cooperative group structures, hiring, and the like. The object is to fit people into cells in a contingency table to manage personality as a commodity, a stable template. Problem is a phenotypic human personality is built from skin in the game, the fact of personal death, cultural participation in history where you get burned or massaged, biology--no predictable outcome, non-replicable, bleeds feelings, lives intersubjective lives not with tools, but with people. Unless AI can be manufactured to replicate life in a skin suit without a break except insanity, dementia, drugs, or death, Turing be damned, art made by machines can’t do what authentic art does--make instruments or blueprints that evoke human feeling. Communication suits AI. Information, data, shapes, input, output. Perhaps even interpretation and synthesis. Aesthetic events call on communication, information alignment of consciousness, joint focus of attention, to get in the door, but light up each human spirit idiosyncratically, to use Carl Jung’s word. AI does not know how to create art. Curators do. Intent doesn’t mean accomplishment. But the aesthetic outcome derives from human transactions in real time.
I mean you can arrange works of AI art (using "works" feels wrong here!) in arbitrarily complex ways. Say you print them on giant posters and make an interesting real-life gallery in a park, or whatever. So it goes beyond just prompt-writing. Then again, who's to say that there won't be a curation AI sometime soon. So I agree that none of this is remotely sufficient to rescue the lost value of intentionality in art making.
Yeah works feels wrong...maybe "products"
DALL-E 2 is not even possible 1 years ago the research about diffusion model comes out in 2022. seeing this amount of progress in short amount of time and not many people realizing it, is just mind blowing what will comes first?
AI art being devalue or AI can do anything human can do
Yes, I do expect a rocky ride for the next few years. The pace of change is too fast for us to adapt easily. But we'll adapt, and our values won't change that fast.
Thank you very much for this piece. The passion you put into it is special. (Wish I could word that sentence better!) My partner is executive director of a nonprofit facility that rents studios to artists and puts on exhibits, so I frequently interact with artists, from recognized to unrecognized. Also, I worked in advertising for a decade, so have interacted with commercial artists.
Your piece opens up the question of "what would society be like if there were no artists?" Even if we never saw their art, I think we would lose something by not having people being artists in our midst. We need people who are living a vision.
Perhaps thoughtful people will always be able to recognize human art. Not by looking at it, but by knowing the facts behind it. Right now, I'm looking at a Sierra Club calendar, a photo I took in the mountains, and an abstract oil painting of a redwood forest. Each connects me with nature, people and life, even though the calendar is the most remote from being art.
I read a very good book on the invention of printing and the socio-cultural changes it wrought -- not unlike what the digital world is doing to us now. In some ways, society recovered from the chaos brought on by the invention of printing, and perhaps will in the coming decades.
Perhaps artists themselves -- like Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol helped bring on the AI-art problem, by the way they deconstructed the values you praise in your piece. As open-minded as I try to be, personally, I don't believe Warhol's most famous works are art, and I don't think Tolstoy or you would either, for all the reasons you both present. If they are art, they are only so by a few synapse-firings conceptually.
Might the questions you raise about art be part of a broader search for authenticity in life?
People nowadays often (justifiably) laugh derisively about the concept of NFTs, but might NFTs possibly become necessary solely to authenticate human-produced art and thus force a differentiation from AI-art? Even if for many other purposes they are merely a gimmick? This thought is just a brainstorm at this moment, not developed yet.
There are many valid points here, though I take issue with two statements. Firstly, the discounting of pareidolia as "illusion of art". As an artist in whose art practice pareidolia is a central theme, I urge you to further examine its function. For one, the recognition or projection (immediately concerted in perception) of a face in rock, cloud, or other natural elements, makes apparent how the "external" world is in fact battered and processed in the brain's "interior". In the case of the rock faces, what makes them art is not the individual rock and their likeness to a face, but the human discernment that picked these samples and compiled them into a gallery. It is the ensemble presentation (the framing, similar to framing a photographic composition) that divorces the work from the natural "unconscious" elements that sculpted them (like a collage or remix).
You write "The key difference being that a sculptor is conscious, but when it is instead the wind or rain or the deep fermentation of geological processes acting as sculptor, these things are not conscious. Lacking consciousness, they lack intentionality, and therefore their products lack meaning."
Are you implying the meaning is inherent in the work, not something divined/projected/perceived by the beholder? In a sense certain artists, such as Andy Goldworthy, attempt through effort to emulate what is effortless in nature. This brings me to my other issue, with regards to your insistence on the artist's "conscious" impulse/intent to create. I understand that you mean to infer that the living artist imbued the work with his life force or intention or uses the creative process to work out some other, living processes. But much art comes from an unconscious place, and works to wrestle that into the fore, which is exactly how it foregoes the limits of conscious control and may imbue the work with a transcendental quality. AI lacks struggle, which is what creates that quality we call "soul" or "duende". AI art, as you rightfully propose, may not be able to mirror this accurately (yet). However, it is currently a kind of divination, a means for the artist (or layman) to outsource his or her brainstorm, and generate ideas, to be further worked out in collaboration with the technology. And, like the illusion of compassion glimpsed in a recently-fed (and seemingly friendly) grizzly bear's eyes, we may yet catch a glimpse of what we are by projecting it into the mirror of what we are not.
What he said!
Thank you for this thoughtful piece. Much I agree with in it.
One place I would push back:
"The response of AI-art enthusiasts, like those at the tech companies standing to make trillions off AI, or those who simply enjoy nerding out over new technological toys, will be to suggest that what matters in art is solely its extrinsic properties."
I work at a company standing to make a fortune off of AI, and I enjoy nerding out new technological toys, but my response is not that what matters in art is solely its extrinsic properties. My response is that, if you actually dive into the creation of Dalle-2 - the crude attempt of apes to recreate the part of themselves that conceives, the way the neural nets are forced into desperate (mathematical) free-fall through millions of human-labelled images - there is in fact intrinsic substance behind Dalle. Pollock drips, cavemen place a hand on the wall, Pistoletto smashes mirrors, and AI researchers force mathematical constructs to reverse the diffusion of pictures. You see Dalle as devoid of humans, like a rock, but I see it as fiercely, farcically, tragically, human, like a cathedral.
All that said, Dalle isn't just hanging in MOMA. Perhaps you would have a different response if it were. Dalle is poised to cause the type of displacement you rightly lament. Like I said, I agree with much of what you say.
So on point, as usual--but the more I think about it, you gotta admit DALL-E is an utterly brilliant name.
yeah, they nailed it
First, this is a brilliant summary of a complex topic. I find myself unconvinced, though, that AI-graphics are going to put artists out of commission. The rise of search engine optimization (SEO) drove a massive increase in the amount of writing needed, delivering a deluge of low quality, spammy content that serves in stark relief to quality writing (both copywriting and blogging). While GPT-3 and DALL-E could lower friction there even more, the market for authentic, well-crafted arguments and art will remain.
I very much hope you’re right
Me too.
Your conclusion squares with what I’m thinking right now. Eric’s piece is disturbing as I think about how important the person behind the poem has been for me for an entire lifetime. There is more to making art than deep learning.
In the 19th C people thought photography would be the end of art.
It wasn't, but it certainly had an effect. For one thing, it diminished the demand for portrait painting, a commercial art, although not to zero.
I think the effect of AI art will mainly be on commercial art.
Expressive art will continue as humans will still have the urge to create and marvel at the creations of others. Expressive art will live in the real world space, with tactile materials, there to see when people raise their eyes from their phones.
Thanks for a well thought out essay! While I do agree with your main theme that AI Art is, to put it simply, essentially soulless, I do have a quibble or two. For example, if art is about emotion, then we should define emotion, and I am not convinced emotion is outside the ken of computation. I hold the view that emotion is at heart the the experience or anticipation of reward or punishment. The positive emotions reflect rewards, and the negative emotions precede or follow punishment. If, as many of your references including Tolstoy do, we define art as the ability to communicate emotions as experienced to another -- which I believe to be a bit of a reductive definition -- then I don't see a serious obstacle to producing true "AI Art" by centering it on computational emotions that are designed to be human-like. Granted, that's not at all how language models or reinforcement learners today work, but that's a matter of implementation.
Secondly, although these AI systems are not at all conscious, what ARE is a learned probability distribution that replicates human judgements of the connections between images and text. And thus they cannot truly be said to be *unconsciously* generated; ultimately they are particular interpolations of true human experiences. In that sense, they are an emanation of human consciousness. We may find this AI art to be wooden or banal, but let's be honest: "art" produced by an average human isn't really all that great either. So the fact that certain "art" is boring does not say anything much about its relationship to consciousness.
I would bet that a good creative artist could use the descendant of a tool like this in an iterative process to create are that does convey emotion, by critiquing and augmenting each iteration with verbal commentary. In fact, what such toolsets could enable in the end is for verbal artists -- also known as poets and writers -- to create visual art inaccessible to them previously.
Despite the comments, I appreciate your point of view and wish more people could have a more reasonable view of these mathematical systems and their capabilities or lack thereof.
Thank for this piece. It obviously hit a nerve with a lot of people. It inspired my most recent issue on my newsletter, and I linked to you, of course.
Beautifully written and argued. My favourite line - “In such a world the art isn’t art, in the same way that a photograph of a hurricane doesn’t get anything wet.”
Not much of a commenter, but I was moved. Enjoyed the article. Thinking on it took me down a few different streams of attitudes and possibilities:
- Purist stream, the "immutables" who believe the lack of intentionality and consciousness, decision, curation by the creator is lost, and that taste is inseparable from art. I think I fall into that camp while also finding it a bit shaky. Humans work hard at art, and don't always do it well, but there is an intense pleasure in witnessing a human perform masterfully.
- The economical stream, the corporate opportunity presented by having a company or in-house AI generate all your artwork. Consider all those articles with weird or fancy accompanying art, now to be created to their specs and at, eventually, a fraction of the cost. Presumably a sufficiently powerful AI could complete many projects at once or sequentially. They could even generate a large stockpile for future use. Legalities around ownership may ensue, but for these circumstances the art is a dressing, and thus ensuring it has the immutable human touch might seem superfluous. All commerce seems to spawn a gutter and boutique version, so if we recall the internet is filled with low-effort, plagiarized, paraphrased, and otherwise lazy content, there's no reason to believe a similar environment won't spring up in at least one place for AI art. Keeping in mind those article are viewed by many as trash, their authors as hacks, and their websites as cesspools. Keeping in mind further that AI is already writing some of those articles.
- The over-performing stream, likely consists of taste-makers, future-thinking artists (who may be viewed by skeptics the same way digital music artists can be, as "pretend artists with laptops and pro tools"), but who will no doubt produce works that are indisputably beautiful (if only in their extrinsic properties, as mentioned in the article). They will have a nice PR angle, the misunderstood, the avant garde, the bold. Their opponent, the Luddite art snob.
-The long gamers, who believe as you do now, but also believe that the future is bright with possibility. DALL-E is the Wright Flyer, or maybe one of those ornithopters that shakes itself to pieces, or a lady with feathers on her back who rolls down a hill - looking ever forward to the day that AI steps out from under the human shadow and expresses itself, truly, in a way that may be either indistinguishable from human art, or perhaps more interestingly, be something entirely novel. Maybe AI art will cease to be for humans, and AIs will "hold hands" with AIs, even while disconnected from Skynet. This call to me too.
I freakin hate AI's forays into art. They seem grotesquely empty and lame to me -- and yet they are, you know, coherent and reasonable at first glance. I worry that people exposed to a lot of crappy plastic AI "art" will never know the real thing, never know what they're missing. Maybe they'll smoke a bunch of weed, or the 2060 equivalent, and that will enable them to experience some shivers of delight from AI prose and AI art. But they won't be profound and rich shivers.
I entered a favorite passage from Nabokov's autobiography, and had GPT-3 translate it to "standard English.' Here's what I got:
Nabokov:
"Another part of the ritual was to ascend with closed eyes. 'Step, step, step,' came my mother's voice as she led me up - and sure enough, the surface of the next tread would receive the blind child's confident foot; all one had to do was lift it a little higher than usual, so as to avoid stubbing one's toe against the riser. This slow, somewhat somnambulistic ascension in self-engendered darkness held obvious delights. The keenest of them was not knowing when the last step would come. At the top of the stairs, one's foot would be automatically lifted to the deceptive call of 'Step,' and then, with a momentary sense of exquisite panic, with a wild contraction of muscles, would sink into the phantasm of a step, padded, as it were, with the infinitely elastic stuff of its own nonexistence."
GPT-#
"The child is blindfolded and led up a flight of stairs by their mother. They must lift their foot higher than usual to avoid stubbing their toe. They don't know when the last step will come, so they have to be careful. At the top of the stairs, their foot sinks into something that isn't really there."
"The infinitely elastic stuff of its own nonexistence" is just gorgeous. And teaching AI to recognize that is quite a task. I can't imagine how one would even begin to do it, much less to teach AI to produce similarly gorgeous bits of phenomenology.
Haha, fuck you GPT-3, you have Engineer's Disease -- i.e., mild Asperger's -- you're earnest and intelligent, but with fail to appreciate the other person's nuance, and have complete lack of insight into your own's interpersonal, esthetic and intellectual deficits.
That Nabokov passage is gorgeous.
You are a great writer, Erik, I am happy I discovered you. Powerful ideas.
Thank you Igor, I appreciate that