Made you look, didn’t I? Seriously though, I think it will. Yes, that’s right: I believe artificial intelligence will save artists, because it (AI) will help us realize what art is about. And that will reconnect us with something we may have lost touch with for some time.
Says the fine arts landscape photographer on a forum: “this damn AI will put me out of business in no-time – what am I supposed to do now, start a new career flipping burgers!? Damn you, [insert major tech company here].”
And I can sympathize; AI, like any new technology we need to come to grips with, freaks us out. It’s all part of the human condition: we innovate, we introduce new technologies that we’ll figure out as we go along, and in the process we realize (usually too late) what the implications really are. Then, in the end, it turns out that it’s always a double-edged sword, that some will lose while others may win, and that on average, human suffering stays more or less the same on average (it’ll just end up being redistributed). Right? Well, I admit this takes some very heavy glinting through the eyelashes, but yeah, pretty much.
Back to our photographer. He (she, they) has got a point – at least it looks like it, at first glance. It won’t be long before AI will churn out perfectly tolerable landscape photographs. There was this ruckus not too long ago about Adobe angering the Ansel Adams trust by allowing you to make your own Ansel-Adams style photos while never leaving the comfort of your living room. The problem wasn’t so much the images itself, but the use of Adams’ name. However, focusing on the images for a bit: monochrome, punchy contrast, they definitely have some kind of an Adams vibe going on. Well, if Adams and Bob Ross would have somehow managed to produce a love child with a knack for computers, that is.
Still, sooner or later, the images will actually be good, technically speaking. They’ll be compositionally OK (whatever that means, but we’ll figure that out as we go along as well!) and they will certainly be photo-realistic enough to be accepted by most people as actual photographs. Heck, the first time I fired up Bryce back in the late 1990s, I pretty much fell off of my seat – how was this even possible? It looked so real, even back then! So we’ll crack this one, I’m sure.
Then, what’ll happen to our landscape photographer? And to our painter? Because keep in mind that AI isn’t confined to the virtual world – landscape photographs can be printed. Paintings…yes, they can be printed, too. In a way. So-called “2.5D printing” was ‘invented’ by Océ (later bought by Canon) about a decade ago and has been used extensively to make reproductions of valuable paintings – and many other purposes. Sculpting…well, we can 3D print, can’t we? And surely, we can CNC chop up marble just the same. So technically, we can (now, or in the foreseeable future) make works of art that are at least with regular human senses difficult or impossible to tell apart from “the real thing”.
So imagine we get there. Imagine we have AI technology that can dream up the most beautiful, creative and engaging painting – a veritable Rembrandt. Imagine we have the technology that will print/mill/digi-paint it in such a way that you can’t tell if it was man-made or not. Then imagine an identical painting hangs beside our entirely tech-generated work of art. You know one is man-made, the other is essentially computer-generated. Which one will you value more?
I bet you’ll value the man-made version more, even if you can’t tell which is which apart from reading the label next to each.
Why? Well, ‘because’, that’s why. Because the man-made artwork is made by a real person, someone like you, or me. We know that this person went through the process of imagining something, experimenting with sketches and drafts, that they went through a lengthy process of learning all manner of technique, that they tried their best to commit their vision to canvas just the way they saw it in their mind’s eye – and we can relate to that process and the human experiences involved in it.
We can relate to the joy of having a great idea. To the sweat and tears of practicing something that just won’t come out of your hands right, and the sense of victory when we succeed for the first time. We relate to the frustration of making mistakes, or simply seeing something unfold in reality that just looked entirely differently in our heads – or realizing that as it unfolds in reality, the mental vision we had really wasn’t that clear after all, and that the only way to realize it is to let the experience of creating the physical artwork guide us in realizing that vision.
We can relate to these things because they are quintessential human. And we all share and have these experiences every day, every hour, regardless of what we do. Because we all grapple with success and failure, with happiness and defeat, with frustration and that elusive, rare sense of flow.
We can relate, in short, to the craft that’s inseparable from the artistic process. And that is what will save our landscape photographer.
So here’s what I think is going to happen. And frankly, I don’t think it takes a whole lot of imagination to see it will, because for one thing, it has already been happening for quite some time. For another, it’s been happening pretty much since the dawn of art, I’m quite sure, so it really is nothing new. We may have gotten a little sidetracked and star-struck for a bit, I think.
I think that AI-generated ‘art’ will improve in quality and proliferate wildly. We’ll be swamped with it, but it won’t actually meet the demand society has for actual, man-made art – because it’s not man made. So logically, we will differentiate strictly between AI-generated and ‘real/proper’ art. We (i.e. society at large, and not just a small group with a relatively big stake/interest in art) will realize more acutely that a work of art is not just an artefact, but also the product of an artistic process.
We will come to appreciate better that art is like science in a way: it’s not just about the answer, but about the question that’s asked. It’s not just the conclusion, but also the method.
In practice, what does this mean? I think the implication will be that in ‘consuming’ (viewing, experiencing, enjoying) a work of art, we’ll be more aware of, and demand deeper insight into, the person(s) and the process behind the artwork. Of course, if you go to a gallery or a museum, this contextual information is already part and parcel of the exhibition. But I expect this will seep into more informal modes of display/exhibition just as well.
Furthermore, I think identity of the artist will start to matter even more than before. Today’s Western society is highly individual, and the ease of connecting with a vast population enables us to be picky in who we seek out and choose to associate with. Social media with their filtering algorithms enable and promote this tendency. I believe that increasingly, we’ll start to limit our ‘art consumption’ to not just art that appeals to us, but also artists who appeal to us.
In turn, this may relate to another tendency which is also happening in other areas of society: a renewed or increased focus on ‘local’. One of the main trends we’ve seen over the past few decades is that of globalization. It’s easy to buy from and connect with people and business across the globe. And nice as this may seem, it strikes me that people are just not wired to deal with big worlds. We evolved in the context of tribes and villages, and tend to limit our social interactions to fairly small/manageable groups of maybe a few hundred people.
How well do we really deal with impacts globalization has on us, such as being confronted news from different continents, worldviews very different from our own and the complexity of vast supply networks? I think the honest answer is that we really don’t – we are selective, which we need to be in order to not succumb to a massive information overload.
So I think a logical response is that we will focus more as “arts consumers” on artists we can relate to, both socially and geographically. An added benefit in the future AI-rich landscape is that the origins of the art we appreciate are easier to verify. If you can physically visit the artist working in their studio, you have tangible proof of and insight into how their art is produced.
Not only does this help you in a quasi-legal sense to verify legitimacy of claims made that something is properly ‘artisanal’. Being able to witness and perhaps even interact with the artistic process also deepens the connection with the art and the artist. By contrast, AI as we know it is and remains a black box, even to those intimately involved in creating the different aspects of these models/neural networks.
Keep in mint that the key principle of AI in its current form is that of a black box: the fact that the machine is essentially allowed to train itself and thus create its own algorithm or logic (or lack of logic!) to create the desired output from a provided input. It’s black box nature is not an accident – it’s very deliberate. And when it comes to art (and several other things, coincidentally, such as the conceptual basis of science), this will turn out to be a liability, ultimately. We will simply not accept or very much appreciate art that arises from a process and a maker we cannot relate to.
Does this automatically mean that everyone who considers themselves an artist is safe and will be guaranteed an income from interested buyers around the corner? No. But that never was the case. I just think that AI is not going to make as much of a difference in this regard as some people fear.
It will make a difference, evidently. There are plenty of people who we may consider artists, but whose methods and output are not necessarily very creative, innovative or crafty. This is not to denigrate these people or to dismiss their efforts as unnecessary. I’m merely pointing out that some human activities lend themselves to being automated without much or any loss of quality in the end product – which again is nothing new under the sun.
If you visit your local IKEA or DIY store and have a look at the wallpaper section, bed linen or anything else with a nice and quite print to complement your interior design, odds are that AI will pull this off just fine, and certainly as good as a human creator. Personally, I doubt it’s a loss to humanity if this kind of design will become machine-made instead of man-made. What loss there is, has materialized decades ago, already, when we started losing attention to detail and the actual creativity and artistry that permeated movements like Bauhaus, in exchange for higher efficiency and lower cost. It’s a ship that has sailed long ago, so why lament its departure only now that AI arrives?
And, at the same time, AI will also become another (very advanced) brush in the artist’s toolbox. Yes, AI will put some people out of business, I’m sure (though not necessarily artists). But it will also enable artists to create in new ways that weren’t available before. So far, I’ve not yet come across truly interesting works of art that were heavily AI-based – but it’s a matter of time until people figure out ways to create meaningful art using AI. Not everyone who picks up a crayon becomes an artist, but if an artist picks one up, it doesn’t matter anymore that it’s just a lowly crayon.
Does this mean that all artists are off the hook? Certainly not – but not all is lost with the advent of AI. It may create a few new challenges for some, but for the most part, I believe it will only emphasize (but perhaps help solve) challenges that have always existed: For instance, how to warm up the general public to the value of (real, human made, Naturally Intelligent) art? Sure, you can’t make a horse drink even if you lead it to the water. But have we really succeeded in the latter? Maybe AI will help by flooding horses with something so stale that they might become a little more receptive to (or even start actively looking for) a fresh drink of water.
Mind you, there will always be winners and losers. And my thoughts above are evidently a mixture of conjecture, some rare optimism and attempting to extrapolate what’s already happening, insofar that’s even possible. One thing I’m very certain of, though. AI is not going to change a bit about the human tendency to produce art. Art will prevail, always.