On “AI art” and the artist’s vision

(An image created by MidJourney that caused controversy a few years ago when winning a photography/ digital art award). 

1/ I once saw a tweet saying “the brain is literally a computer and there are a lot of people who deny this for some reason.” In response, someone called Duncan Reyburn (@duncanreyburn) wrote:  

“Amazing inability to see the difference between an analogy and an identity here. Left-hemispheric overreach. Computers have no intentionality, for one thing, and also no capacity to feel their own being, to sense their own life, to transcend their own limitations, to be porous to vibes, etc.

To reason properly, you have to be able to spot not just similarity but also difference. You need to assume that your own immediate, conscious assumptions are shutting the door to some pretty important aspects of meaning.” 

I thought of that exchange when I was talking to my friend Himadri recently about “AI art” and he said: 

“It’s an interesting question: given all the possible uses for AI, why are so many people so insistent that it can produce art, and that, some day AI will produce works of the level of Caravaggio, Mozart, Tolstoy? I think the reason is this:

There are many who are very deeply wedded to the idea that humans are no more than machines. Incredibly sophisticated machines, but machines nonetheless. They absolutely hate the idea that humans can have souls - that is, that humans can have some element in them that are beyond rational analysis, beyond rational explanation. If AI can replicate the greatest works of art, they will be proved right. Even Caravaggio and Rembrandts were mere machines.”

But why? I don’t understand. The enthusiastic cheering for “AI art” is deeply anti-art and anti-human. 

2/ A couple of years ago, I had a discussion with someone, also on Twitter, who said that there’s no difference between “AI art” and art made by humans, because “all art is a mash-up of previous art.” 

I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the way all AI-loving tech bros think. But as I pointed out back then, artists don’t just take something from other artists, they have something of their own—their own experiences and vision of life and obsessions and antipathies and regrets and fears and desires and hangups—artists may also break the rules and do something new and transcend the boundaries—all these things are beyond AI. 

Apart from a profound misunderstanding of art and its creation, I can’t help thinking that some people have had their thinking distorted by decades (or perhaps a century?) of sci-fi (a genre I have never particularly liked) and it has made them believe that AI (such as we currently have) could be conscious. It is not. And if you use AI to generate something, you’re not the artist—you’re the equivalent of a commissioner. 

3/ When I read, I’m not only interested in characters, details, imagery, metaphors, motifs, language, style, etc—I’m also interested in the author’s vision. 

When people say that a reader is either a Tolstoy person or a Dostoyevsky person, for example, it’s because they don’t just have different writing styles but also have different visions of life: Dostoyevsky writes about the abnormal and the extreme, Tolstoy writes about a wide range of “normal” people; Dostoyevsky believes in free will, Tolstoy believes in determinism; Dostoyevsky depicts life as made up of dramatic moments and great decisions determining the trajectory of one’s life, Tolstoy sees life as formed by all the little decisions one makes every moment; they are opposite. Then you read Chekhov and he again has a different vision of life: Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are both religious whereas Chekhov is a humanist (if you’re new here, I’m a Tolstoy and Chekhov girl). 

These things fascinate me. Chekhov, Jane Austen, and Flannery O’Connor all strike me as having no illusions about human nature, for instance, but Chekhov looks at people with warmth and compassion, Jane Austen laughs at them, and Flannery O’Connor coldly dissects and studies them. 

It’s also because I’m interested in the artist’s vision that in painting, I have zero interest in photorealism: the skills are impressive, but so what? All I see is someone painstakingly reproducing what the camera “sees”. Most of my favourite artists are not realistic as such—Egon Schiele, Van Gogh, Monet, Cézanne, Turner, etc.—even the more “realistic” ones such as Rembrandt or Sargent, I like them not because they depict people with great accuracy, but because their subjects feel alive and because I love Rembrandt’s use of lighting and Sargent’s way of focusing on the face but using broad brushstrokes and a more impressionistic style for the clothes and surroundings. 

But it’s not just me. Who would be interested in “art” made by machine, made by something that doesn’t see the world, doesn’t experience things, doesn’t have feelings? I don’t think most people are. The only people (I see) enthusiastically promoting and cheering for “AI art” are the tech people who are not really interested in art in the first place. 

The various subspecies of philistines

Left, right, everywhere we’re surrounded by philistines. 

On the left are the philistines who see everyone and everything through the lens of identity politics, who divide the world neatly into oppressor vs oppressed, who reduce literature to stories and perspectives, who do not believe in universal appeal and the test of time, who think that Shakespeare’s status as the greatest writer of all time is thanks to nothing but colonialism and “structures of power”. These are people who speak of relatability, as though we can only relate to characters with the same sex or skin colour. These are people who speak of relevance, as though only contemporary books can resonate with readers. These are people who associate classic books with “white supremacy” and replace them with contemporary books, as though other countries don’t have their own classic literature. 

There are philistines who call for trigger warnings and sensitivity readers, who want to censor racist or otherwise offensive words, who think writers shouldn’t write about characters from a different community, who think novels should only be from the perspective of the victim rather than the perpetrator, who cannot distinguish the narrator from the author. There are also philistines who demand “moral purity” and “the right opinions”, who cannot separate the art from the artist. Related to such puritans are the philistines who think that a work of art with “an important message” is worthwhile and important. 

On the right are the philistines who constantly say Western culture is under attack but cannot say which classical works they cherish and why, who bemoan modern architecture and praise Disney-style castles, who think representational art is the peak and Hitler is a better artist than Egon Schiele, who applaud vulgar and soulless works such as the sculptures of Luo Li Rong or Jago. These are people who lose their minds over the casting of a Shakespeare production, but neither read nor watch Shakespeare themselves. These are people who are incapable of looking at culture except through the lens of the culture war. These are people who affect to be living in the past but know next to nothing about it. 

There are also conservative philistines who want books removed from schools—not only sexually explicit, borderline-pornographic books (which is understandable) but also serious literature such as The Bluest Eye, or important documents such as Anne Frank’s Diary. 

And now, beyond politics, beyond the right and the left, are the philistines who happily cheer for “AI art”, who praise AI-generated videos not realising their emptiness and vulgarity, who draw (false) parallels between AI-generated images and photography, who think human beings are nothing but sophisticated machines, who believe AI can one day produce a Shakespeare or a Rembrandt, who have no idea what art is or why human beings engage with it, who dismiss others as reactionaries refusing to be with the times.

All these people have no idea what art is—they either attack art, or produce slop. 

It’s infuriating.