What art means to me in this era of AI tools
OpenAIs latest image generation model has made its round on the web, especially with the popular prompt creating images in Studio Ghibli style. This has created another wave of negative reactions towards AI generated âartâ and yet again highlights the fundamental difference in world views between creative people and those who are often called âtech brosâ.
Erik Hoel put it in a context of what he called âa semantic apocalypse" , where the long term consequence of the popularization of these tools is a general loss of meaning:
While ChatGPT canât pull off a perfect Miyazaki copy, it doesnât really matter. The semantic apocalypse doesnât require AI art to be exactly as good as the best human art. You just need to flood people with close-enough creations such that the originals feel less meaningful.
The main threat from AI is not necessarily in its capabilities, but in the sheer scale it is utilised to flood and drown out everything else. It is the same kind of worry I have with AI use in software development. It is not replacing good software engineers anytime soon, but it makes it easier to flood the market with low quality slop solutions that is just going to make the industry as a whole worse to be in.
Of course this might make us appreciate the originals more and demand high quality when everything else becomes mediocre, but every great artist was mediocre at one point. It is in the process of working to get better that true greatness forms, and the dangers of tools like these is that it can make us lazy consumers of its output. Taking the easy shortcut instead of working to get better, but then we will be forever stuck on mediocrity.
Just gathering my thoughts on blogposts like this is hard, and I am sure I could drop my notes into ChatGPT and it would likely produce something pretty readable. I have played around with it to see what it can do and in some ways it is a better writer that what I do here, but it wouldnât be me. I prefer my personal blog to be personal, including my mistakes and clumsy sentence structure.
Aaron Ross Powell has written about how tech bros overestimate the capabilities of these models, which makes their claims on that we are just so ever closer to real AGI even more ridiculous. He writes:
The second feature is a basic lack of taste. That Sam Altman thinks his chatbotâs short story is brilliant tells us much more about Altmanâs literary sophistication than it does the nearness of AGI. That tech bros think OpenAIâs Sora video generation model can replace auteur filmmakers says more about their need to watch more episodes of Every Frame a Painting on YouTube than it does about the nearness of Hollywoodâs end.
I think it is clear that some of these people see art as merely a product to be consumed, or what one could call simply âcontentâ. I think I would have been in a similar camp myself if these tools was released when I was in my 20s. Who wouldnât want to be able to just algorithmically create everything exactly to your own personal taste? In recent years I have come to appreciate and reflect more on what human creativity actually means and why it isnât merely a means to an end to have a product to consume.
Art is basically a form of communication between humans. Removing the human element and it becomes pointless. Art always says something about the person behind it. Even my kids drawings says a whole lot about them, their current state of mind, what they have recently learned or discovered, as well as both their conscious and subconscious thoughts.
The communication between the artist and the one who reads/listens/watches is not the same for everyone. The artist may have some intent with what they want to say, but I think the true meaning of art comes when it is observed and reflected upon by another human. It might be something completely different than what was initially intended, but it doesnât make it any less real or less meaningful.
MichaĹ Sapka goes even further in his criticism of the tech bro world view:
Art seem to be incomprehensible for them. People don't make art to make money; they make money to make art. Art can not exist without love, as only product will remain. I will strongly object to anyone calling anything generated by GenAI "art", because it is the opposite. It's a creation of deep misunderstanding of where art comes from. And as a result, it comes from hatred to humanity.
In this commercialized world it is sometimes easy to forget that any form of creative output has the possibility of inducing so much more than mere entertainment. The literature we write and read, the music we play and listen to, the movies we create and watch, are all part of our cultural upbringing, help fors us and influences us as much as how our parents raises us. That shared discourse is what makes each nationality unique and different.
But at the core of my disdain for how these tools are applied, is the question of "Was this really a problem that needed to be solved?â Why are we spending so many resources on replacing human creativity and human connection? As Joseph Earp from The Guardian writes:
What I am not happy to outsource is most of the things that AI is desperate for me to outsource. I do not want a computer to summarise texts sent by my friends into shorter sentences, as though the work of being updated on the lives of those I love is somehow strenuous or not what being alive is all about. I do not want Googleâs AI feature to summarise my search into a pithy (often incorrect) paragraph, rather than reading the investigative work of my fellow humans. I donât want AI to clean up the pictures that I take on my phone that are rich and strange in their messiness.
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Simply put: I donât know where this endless march of shortening the act of living leads us to. AI promises to free up time. But if what it spares us from is learning from our friends, writing, painting and exploring the world, then what, actually, are we meant to do with that time?
To end this somewhat messy gathering of my thoughts on this topic through various blogposts and articles I have read, I pasted the above text into Kagiâs AI summarizer and it ends its summary with this:
Ultimately, the text advocates for a deeper appreciation of the human elements in art and creativity, rather than succumbing to AI's allure of convenience.
I admit that is a pretty good summary of what I was trying to convey here. But I do hope that at least some people will read more than a summary, and can see that this blogpost also says something about me as a person and my values, and not merely the point I am trying to make. That includes all the links in here as well. They are all worth reading and have more nuances and insights than my chosen quotations. There is always more than the final conclusion.