Part 4 of 4 in a series about AI and artistic creation.
I am not a fan of AI Art. I think the off-kilter amalgamates produced by LLMs are interesting. You wouldn’t see most of the “choices” you see in generated content made by a human. It’s fascinating. But I’m not a fan of AI art. There’s two main reasons.
The first reason is should be obvious given the content of the last blog post. I value the creation process immensely. The process of learning, failing, building your artistic style: it is here that I believe we find a deep, unique enrichment. We are doing a disservice to ourselves by skipping that in favor of consumption that has the “I made this” label slapped on. It is the process of babbling which prepares us to speak. Communication, the very core of humanity, is a process of processes. By replacing the creation process with AI, we rob ourselves of one such crucial process. Being bad at communicating is part of learning to communicate. Ergo, being bad at creating is part of learning to create. I can’t see how this process, learning to create, could ever be separated from the shifting relationships we have with the world around us. I’m sure that Narnia still has an effect on the way that I write, 15 years after I first read it. I’m sure that the essay I’m writing at the same time as this blog post has an effect on the way I’m writing it right now. Creation as a process means changing the bits and pieces of yourself that you imbue into the world.
The second reason, as you might have guessed from the title, is continuity. When I engage with art, I get to engage, not just with the product of someone’s work, but with the work that went into that product. That layer of engagement attaches their technical progression, identity, art history, culture, and emotions to my experience. In a sense, I’m getting drawn into their process of self-exploration, even as a consumer. I become part of the artwork. The art becomes part of me. This string of continuity, from one work to the next, from one person to the next, from everything I’ve ever consumed to me, is lost in AI art. By definition. If this continuity is lost in the art, then I’m lost too. I find my sense of identity in art, but it comes from more than the work itself. My identity gets folded into the process of art-making.
This is all a bit difficult to articulate, so I apologize if it doesn’t make much sense. I’m obsessed with stories in a very particular way, so my relationship with art can be a bit difficult to describe. My sense of self relies on the process of creation that others have done, so the idea that people should somehow let AI take that process over feels deeply opposed to my very identity. That’s the best way I can think of to put it, for now. This will all make it into a much more polished video sometime this summer (hopefully). Thanks for sticking along for this mess of a series.