Artificial Intelligence Cheapens the Artistic Imagination

If your "art" is actually threatened by AI, I question whether you are doing art at all. Art is not going anywhere. AI will be another tool in the toolbox, but artistry and artistic sensibility is here to stay. AI tools can create pictures, but actually creating art is still a human endeavor.

From orchestras to video games, AI is going to change the way that art is done (and it already has), but the artists are not going away.

> Human creativity and the good it offers to society cannot be replicated by a machine. No matter how advanced AI systems become, it is not likely that they will ever be able to think like a person.

The story of computers since their inception has been a series of statements of this form being proven wrong.

Up until not very long ago telling a random person you worked in AI reliably produced a very skeptic response or a look of disbelief. (In my experience.)

We are naturally human centric in our thinking. But the rest of this century is going to require we face & work with reality, not against it.

Making every advance in AI as usable for as many people as possible, and in service of their own initiatives, instead of replacing and channeling people is important.

There is no reason “post-human” needs to mean the end of humans, as apposed to the future of humans.

Unless we keep settling for tech that dehumanizes us. In which case, we bifurcate and the human race suffers from a very “hard landing”.

Ethics, positive sums, transparency, on ramps, that all means more now than it ever has.

> The makers of these tools promise they will boost efficiency and productivity by making workflows easier and faster. The problem with this message is that art is not about efficiency, productivity, or smooth workflows. Art is not about “executing” a task. Art is certainly not about the metrics of quantity, low cost, and speed that characterize industrialism.

This here is really the crux of the issue.

Making art as an expression of yourself isn't about these things.

Making assets for games, etc is more about about the metrics of quantity, low cost, and speed that characterize industrialism

Having the systems for the second, doesn't remove the first from existence.

LLMs as AI are sparking this conversation, there are articles outlining similar positions against Photoshop when it first came out.

https://www.arkansasmomentos.com/burning-with-desire/2017/4/...

A counterpoint to offer to this position beyond the legitimate concerns a new technology like this is having... if it was decided to re-imagine shooting the first 3 Star Wars films created, we probably would use today's sci-fi abilities.

Of course, this doesn't cover the gamut of artistic skills and abilities.

I'm hoping this means if it makes average people into a designer or programmer, a designer or programmer with AI will be 10-20x as effective.

Learning, reskilling, upskilling, may be a reality in more areas.

The question does move towards agency, and who is driving the content creation - experienced artists, designers, etc seem best positioned to describe creative descriptions and explore artistic imagination in these new ways.

Human created art may be worth even more too.

English is the new programming language, and those people who spent many years learning to describe and discuss nuanced things like art, and the creation of it, are probably better positioned than most.

I find the premise that AI “cheapens art” to be spurious at best. There have been generations upon generations of crummy, unimaginative art. There have been decades of labor undercutting domestic artists.

AI makes it easier for companies to be cheap, but that’s not new. They’ve been fighting to be cheap forever. How many artists of all stripes have been baited by “do it for the exposure”

It doesn’t cheapen imagination. More people can express their ideas. I can’t help but think any company worth its salt is going to have artists on staff anyway - if for no other reason than to provide useful context for the art being generated.

In Germany, there is the term "Gebrauchsgrafik." It refers to visualizations of products or services. These works typically lack artistic value and are often only visually aligned with the zeitgeist. Think of your bog-standard low effort advertising or IKEA instructions, generative AI is more than suitable for that. Not everything is or has to be considered art.

There is a real concern rapidly developing for artists just like there is for all types of human labor. That is valid. But the idea that AI necessarily reduces the level of art produced by artists seems to be a false conclusion.

AI art DOES make it harder for artists to rest on pretension. But if the actual product of the artist matters, then it should make it easier to create works that are both more aesthetically pleasing AND more conceptual and relevant to society.

The more substance there is to the art, the easier this is to see. The AI can help flesh out the details while the artist focuses on the high level concepts and experience they are trying to communicate.

Like all automation, it does make classist viewpoints weaker. This article seems to be coming from that standpoint.

Sadly for many artists the AI is/will be better than the average artist. I compare it to elite football players. "FIFA estimated that there were 123,694 professional soccer players worldwide." [0]. How many are really elite football players? Probably less than 2200 [22 (11 field + 11 outfield players) * 100 (top countries)]. Top 10% artists probably will get very well paid job but the rest will either get fired or salaries reduced or stagnant.

[0] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1283927/number-pro-socce...

> As the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of a blindness, an imbecility, but had also the air of a vengeance. I do not believe, or at least I do not wish to believe, in the absolute success of such a brutish conspiracy, in which, as in all others, one finds both fools and knaves; but I am convinced that the ill-applied developments of photography, like all other purely material developments of progress, have contrib­uted much to the impoverishment of the French artistic genius, which is already so scarce. In vain may our mod­ern Fatuity roar, belch forth all the rumbling wind of its rotund stomach, spew out all the undigested sophisms with which recent philosophy has stuffed it from top to bottom; it is nonetheless obvious that this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mor­tal enemy, and that the confusion of their several func­tions prevents any of them from being properly fulfilled. Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place. If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.

— Charles Baudelaire, On Photography, 1859

https://www.csus.edu/indiv/o/obriene/art109/readings/11%20ba...

It cheapens humans, period. In the coming years, AI will be good enough to replace X% of a human's productivity. It will be as cheap as duplicating a process in a computer somewhere. It may never get to 100% but it will get to a high level. How many human equivalents will we be able to buy for a buck? AI is not the human savior people wish it would be.

A glimpse of the future of ai as a tool for art are absurd songs about drinking gasoline:

https://youtu.be/tC7bPMj5Q5Y

Or Kanye’s: https://youtu.be/GQEcxrY0CWA

I disagree, as I’ve seen lots of genuinely artistic content that was at least partially generated by AI, that gave me certain emotions or made me see the artist’s vision. I do agree it doesn’t “feel” like it should be called “art” without a lot of effort put in or because the person generating it does not have to have the same technical skill. But where do we draw the line? Modern brushes and paints and papers make art easier - should we devalue that art because the artist did not create their own paints from scratch like they did hundreds of years ago?

Humanity is going to have such a delightful crisis when live performance and physical presence become the only finite resource left we have to value. It can't scale, and like a big crunch at the end of heat death, a new universe will scatter.

I doubt I'll live to see it but it's my most optimistic fantasy for the future. If it's delusional, let me at least keep it.

After almost half a century of technology pushing a linear-scaled drip of dopamine-tied-neophilia, the recent bloom of ML has started to chew the flavor bare of this zebra gum and my jaw is concerned there is nothing left to experience if my effort remains at zero.

Generative AI is an artistic medium. Just as acrylic, marble and the cello.

You think the Bay gon let you disrespect Pac?

Photography made the same disruption to periodical illustrators in the 19th century.

I'm so tired of this argument, people think art is a zero sum game, its not. It's like saying photographs cheapens the art of paintings... they are just different.

Effort does not equal quality.

Cry me a river.

(2023)

Isn't this just "no true Scotsman?" [1]

I don't see much difference in art created by an artist using an AI, art created by an artist using photoshop, and art created by an artist using red ochre. They are all using tools to express something.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman