I don't think AI could ever replace or compete with human artists because it lacks the most important aspect of an artist - their vision - which requires a unique personality and soul.
Within the VFX film world AI is being used quite extensively in 'concept' art. Some companies have an entire department dedicated to it as it may point the way to a different approach to filmmaking - I'm talking the sci-fi , fantasy world more than yer basic drama obviously. Maybe even taking over the process at some juncture.It requires a different skill set -of course, need art direction but execution maybe a different story.
It's so interesting to see how it is being used in different fields of creative production. It's sci-fi film making now, but there will probably be some sort of relevant application in the production of yer basic drama in the future if so much investment is going into it.
We get nervous when we see how well AI compiles art at a moments notice but I always think that it requires human input to do so. Machine learning is only as good as the designer and while we have very impressive results so far, we feed the machine and there is a limit to its abilities. Advancement and overtaking real artists, oddly enough, requires more artists.
Also, since we are the consumers of what they produce, while we may be entertained for a time, we often pine for the real thing. We have so many digital resources and people still love the smell and feel of pages. The promise of obsolescence is rarely fulfilled. There will alway be (in the near term) something off kilter about AI, something that’s a clever but not complete approximation since it’s returning an image of ourselves we’ve fed to it.
As an artform- ai generated art is like wallpaper or more akin to ambient music generators today. Tomorrow it could be ground breaking building “worlds”
Thank you Victoria for the opportunity to touch this theme. We'll make of it the theme of our next article this Tuesday. We hope you don't mind to see your article referred there. It will be the starting point of the conversation.
The main point we have to address is how much central are these new technologies to the choices we are doing in our artistic work. Senses over Reason! And here we have the title. Just like that. Will the machine be able to come up with such titles. Maybe but not with the emotions and feelings and perceptions we are getting at this exact moment. It will always be a very cold and sterile "sEnSeS oVeR rEaSoN" full of 0000s and 11111s. Is art reduced to 0s and 1s because we know reasoned logic is since a very long time.
Hi Dan thanks for your thoughts and I agree with you. Yes of course you can refer to my article in yours, that's generous of you, thank you. Now that you say it like that, art reduced to 0s and 1s, cold and sterile, is an interesting idea in itself! There has been very cold and sterile art in the past of course - I'm thinking of some of the minimalist and early conceptual work that deals with logic.
Thank you very much for your kind words Victoria. It makes us very happy to be able to extend this conversation to our Lower Иotes. It seems the cycle has only now begun and the seeds are already sprouting. We have a lot to share with the community at large regarding this pivotal theme. Our perception is that this is a very virgin subject demanding high attention to raise awareness to the real problems humanity will face and not just the artistic community. Our society will be totally redesigned and the new structures that will emerge from it will depend of how far we can understand each other regarding the place of humans in a landscape overwhelmed by machines. It's up to us humans to define what will be the role we will play in it. This is our vision and we make our art with that purpose in mind.
Extended a little bit more the line of thought we are here in a fight/war against a certain vision of the world. In that sense the machines are the enemy or have the potential to become one. Just a thought: currently we are starting to see our leaders making use of drones to kill people. Think about it!
The short answer is hell no. Although what is being produced by AI is provocative, there is a universally chilly, tech feel about it. It could insert itself into the lexicon of art but won’t take it over. There’s no substitute for thickly applied paint creating an energetic scene. Human art includes mistakes, which either move the maker in another direction or wind up the genius part of a piece. Don’t get me started on what’s ‘good’ art. That seems to be left up to grand entities with a need to sustain premium marketable reputations and monster bank accounts.
Yes! There is a universally chilly, tech feel about AI art. That's a succinct way of putting it, Kim. Agree with all that you say here, including what is deemed as 'good' art. There are so many unsung, brilliant artists quietly working and struggling to get any air time. I'm going to start using The Gallery Companion as a platform for shining a light on artists who are outside of that system. I love that you do exactly that on your Substack.
Thanks! Having a great time with stablediffusion. I've been feeding it sets of Mayan glyphs such as "Lord Shield Jaguar with the Fish-Capture Glyph." No worse than most scientific interpretations. And a lot more entertaining.
Yikes! I have to say I haven't ever given AI any real thought. I'll be looking out for it now. I'm not sure what I think. Like Billie says there's good and bad, and that's just the reality of our life, with everything.
I LOVE the project by Mario Klingemann you shared, the way he uses words and phrases generated by his AI dataset to see how we respond. We are so programmed to make meaning from what we're given. I like how he describes it as fortune telling. And the sound of the board as it shuffles, takes me right back to railway stations, waiting for informatino to come to you. Love it. Wonderful stuff. I'm going to be thinking about this post all day I can tell. So much to think about, thanks Victoria
If things weren't already complicated enough! This article makes me fear slightly how reliant we may have become on AI, as you say, without our even being aware of it. How can we know how much the powers-that-be base their propaganda on AI information, and therefore how it may be trickling down into our individual decision-making? Perhaps we're becoming part-robot at the same time as we're becoming part-plastic! I think there's enough of us out here battling, though, to keep humanity human and as Jeffrey mentioned once you unplug the machine it dies. So once again it's down to individual choice (which I'm not sure exists in bigger institutions) and how much we're each willing to sacrifice ourselves to convenience, shunning responsibility, discarding self-consciousness etc. The same millennia-old battles for we still haven't found resolution. AI is just another thing to add to the already 'delightful' mix.
One of my issues with AI is a fear of control in a malignant way that we can't even see. Is it irrational though? We can already see how harmful social media can be, and how easy it is to be manipulated. We only know what we see.
There are definitely problems with gender, race and class identification in the AI 'neural' systems of image-reading, which works to suppress and erase minorities and their histories, as this work by the poet Joy Buolamwini demonstrates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxuyfWoVV98
I reckon complete unplug from the system in general is possible for brief periods but then we have to dive back in and rejoin the scrum. Meditation, Substack Groups (😀), artistic process, wild camping, sleep, etc!!
Would you want to completely unplug? The digital revolution is as embedded in our lives as the Industrial Revolution, it’s an extension of our humanness and it could be argued it gives us additional capabilities in the same way the combustion engine did.
I get annoyed by the narrow applications of Ai in our house (Alexa/etc) but I’m not sure I’d choose to be without them either?
I think it's best not to think too hard about the negatives, and just do what you can do, as Katie says. It's too big otherwise. Like climate change. We are just teeny tiny elements in an enormous system that we can't control.
Juts wanted to add, as an artist I don't feel threatened because my work is completely analog and much of it is the process of preparing natural materials, cutting paper, assembling, the smell, the feel, etc. So much of the art world is not remotely touched by this fad.
I am exactly the same Joumana, my art is old school collage, a million miles from AI and therefore I don't feel threatened either. Fascinating subject though!
I don't believe for a second AI will ever reach the human levels of reflection and creativity. To believe that you'd have to have an overly simplistic mechanistic view of the world and no insight at all into the psyche (sadly such people exist). The machines would have to develop a consciousness first, and a rich ferment of feelings and emotions to work from, and then the term AI would no longer apply, we'd have a different problem on our hands!
This whole business is still a huge problem for the livelihood of many, and also a threat in a more insidious fake news kind of way – the idea the general public, and powers that be, may internalise the belief that creativity is nothing more than what AI is doing sends a chill down my spine.
Joumana, I agree with you on everything you've said. The idea that machines could develop a consciousness with feelings and emotions is science fiction. If not, as you say, we would then have a very different problem.
2 considerations on something I've been thinking about for a while now.
Imho the greatest impact of AI will be felt in pop culture, where mass production catering to the common denominator is key. Feed enough to the machine, and it will reproduce based on what you fed it.
Second, an AI is a machine, for the time being without consciousness, so in terms of "developing as an artist" it has a flat curve. An artist knows stages in his/her/its development, and isn't that what (also) triggers our interest?
The day AI develops a consciousness it's no longer an AI, but we're still not there yet. Not that I believe that human souls are enlightened by a divine spark or so which is missing in AI. AI is "perfect", while humans are flawed (as machines that think) and that might be our greatest trump card in the creation of art, which comes forth from our human drive, based on our flawed existence.
Anyway, a nice book on the topic imho is T-minus AI by Michael Kanaan.
You might be right about AI and pop culture gery. It made me think how AI machines could be producing generic pop music based on similar tunes, creating composite songs. I'm sure that must already be happening. There's certainly the potential for popular/trash fiction to be created from AI etc The livelihoods of artists of all genres certainly looks under threat.
In answer to the question, I see human thought as fuel for algorithms, so I don’t see a future where humans are completely absent from art (unless we are extinct)
I’ve been following a London based artist who is using Ai generated images on Instagram, she’s doing some pieces around childbirth /maternal experiences that caught my eye. I love the caption with this one which also highlights how ‘flippin slippery’ human nuance and language is to the digital world.
Another perspective I have is from my career in analytics and AI and working with teams of coders (who are data artists in their own right). Ai is wrapped by human experience, when we enter key words into an Ai tool /algorithm, a human has thought about the purpose, direction and output of that process. There are also limitations that developers have to sit with when accessing personal and commercial data sets, but the lines feel blurred here under the artistic banner and the way images are displayed front and centre in our digital landscape rather than behind the scenes in a database.
I don’t worry that Ai will take autonomy and creative thought from our world, im excited for the possibilities, how digital aided art can be used by more people to express ideas, from an accessibility perspective ... now that’s pretty awesome.
I think the worries I have lend themselves to the privacy and ethics of how the data has been scraped, and how individual artists are paid (more often not/not credited) for that contribution.
Interestingly the artist you have directed us to on instagram, Sarah-Jane Field, is a friend of Thomasina's!
Thanks for all these thoughts and different perspectives. I deliberately didn't go into the copyright issues that AI brings up for artists. I know it's hugely damaging to some livelihoods and also there's the potential for an artist's style to be hijacked. Artistic style is not protected by copyright in the UK anyway, so it's hard to chase down.
I was privately messaged by a subscriber who angrily told me how I should be ashamed of myself for suggesting that artists are not going to be made obsolete by AI. I think she skipped some of my argument but clearly feels very threatened by AI. She unsubscribed, and pointed me to this article, which is very interesting: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/31/opinion/sarah-andersen-how-algorithim-took-my-work.html
Oh wow! I’m trying to remember who it was on Instagram that shared her work in stories 🤔I only followed her about a week ago. The reimagining of obstetrics piqued my interest after the work I did with maternity services and hearing service user narratives.
Ethics and data are hot topics in the cyber psychology world, I didn’t realise artistic style wasn’t covered, but that does make some sense... after-all, art is reimagined all of the time right? There must be a hazy line between influence/copy.
I’m reading all of the comments here with so much interest, there has been a swell of opinion pieces on Ai over the last few months, and we’ve seen a tipping point with the accessibility of what we call ‘broader’ Ai (beyond simple ask question get simple answer Alexa type) entering people’s lives, so we are caught in an uncomfortable place of change that we might not feel so in control of. Malicious acts will always happen in the world (perpetrated by humans I might add!) but I can understand the threat (and real world examples) of this taking place in an anonymous way aided by Ai is frightening.
Good article here. I disagree with one sentence. That of (para) “…when we stop being interested in … etc….then we won’t need artists”. IMO, that is exactly when we DO need artists.
The populace is influenced by governments, corporations, advertising, and literally everything else. Perhaps graphic illustrators and product photographers and most copywriters will be gone, but a work of art from the artist can distract many people from their slumbering lives to help us think of life differently.
In addition, most of what is written here has many of us associating “art” with 2D work. Painting, graphic design, drawing and photography. AI will learn to replicate and interpret words and images and spit them out into a new image. But an ‘image’ isn’t art. The original can be art. The copies are reproductions. Art is made by humans. The origin of ‘art’ refers to ‘skill’. An action or product made by a human being that is both: 1) skillful and 2) expressive is considered art. Many artists differ with me on this. I am old school, and I prefer to use the word from it’s original meaning.
Humans program computers, and computers can rewrite the software as it learns new pieces of information. They are like human beings in this regard. But let us remember that when the software gathers it’s data to begin making the art, how does it make:
• It’s mark?
• The sound? The notes of music?
• Print the image?
• Use the 3D printer?
Artists have been using AI. But AI needs the human. Turn off, unplug, delete files, remove software. Oh! Where did the AI go? When we don’t give the AI any power, there is no AI. There is no art.
Thanks for your interesting comment Jeffrey. It's indeed so that AI is limited to the digital world, I don't see an impact on graffiti art for instance. It made me think of what happened in the DJ world, where a digital revolution already happened. I used to DJ with vinyl, which needs skills to master, but swapped to DJing with VirtualDJ 16 years ago. Some of my DJ friends argued that I wasn't a real DJ anymore, since real DJs use vinyl to express their creativity. But meanwhile their view changed since working with DJ software simply requires a different skillset and opens up new possibilities. Today, the DJ landscape is a hybrid one, with digital and analogue DJs working side by side, each with their own vibe. In the end, the introduction of digital DJing simply enriched the landscape.
Thanks for your thoughts Jeffrey. That last sentence from me was a bit tongue in cheek - I don't ever think we will stop being curious and interested in who we are as humans, so we'll always need artists! I agree, AI needs the human, but it would take one almighty unplug to delete all the files!
Interesting you should bring up the cultural fear about machines getting out of control. There was an exhibition at the Barbican in London a couple of years back about AI which addressed this point. It was curated by two curators, one from Britain and the other from Japan. And the different cultural perspectives they brought to thinking about AI was very different. Western views of AI were often clouded by this fear of the machine-out-of-control, whereas in Japanese culture there is an acceptance that humans and machines live and work alongside each other. Here's a link to the exhibit website: https://www.barbican.org.uk/hire/exhibition-hire-barbican-immersive/ai-more-than-human
I don't think AI could ever replace or compete with human artists because it lacks the most important aspect of an artist - their vision - which requires a unique personality and soul.
Yes, totally agree Andrea. And welcome!
Within the VFX film world AI is being used quite extensively in 'concept' art. Some companies have an entire department dedicated to it as it may point the way to a different approach to filmmaking - I'm talking the sci-fi , fantasy world more than yer basic drama obviously. Maybe even taking over the process at some juncture.It requires a different skill set -of course, need art direction but execution maybe a different story.
It's so interesting to see how it is being used in different fields of creative production. It's sci-fi film making now, but there will probably be some sort of relevant application in the production of yer basic drama in the future if so much investment is going into it.
We get nervous when we see how well AI compiles art at a moments notice but I always think that it requires human input to do so. Machine learning is only as good as the designer and while we have very impressive results so far, we feed the machine and there is a limit to its abilities. Advancement and overtaking real artists, oddly enough, requires more artists.
Also, since we are the consumers of what they produce, while we may be entertained for a time, we often pine for the real thing. We have so many digital resources and people still love the smell and feel of pages. The promise of obsolescence is rarely fulfilled. There will alway be (in the near term) something off kilter about AI, something that’s a clever but not complete approximation since it’s returning an image of ourselves we’ve fed to it.
Yes to all of this Chevanne! Agree.
As an artform- ai generated art is like wallpaper or more akin to ambient music generators today. Tomorrow it could be ground breaking building “worlds”
Yes at the moment it feels quite clunky and basic, but there it will surely get more sophisticated
Thank you Victoria for the opportunity to touch this theme. We'll make of it the theme of our next article this Tuesday. We hope you don't mind to see your article referred there. It will be the starting point of the conversation.
The main point we have to address is how much central are these new technologies to the choices we are doing in our artistic work. Senses over Reason! And here we have the title. Just like that. Will the machine be able to come up with such titles. Maybe but not with the emotions and feelings and perceptions we are getting at this exact moment. It will always be a very cold and sterile "sEnSeS oVeR rEaSoN" full of 0000s and 11111s. Is art reduced to 0s and 1s because we know reasoned logic is since a very long time.
Hi Dan thanks for your thoughts and I agree with you. Yes of course you can refer to my article in yours, that's generous of you, thank you. Now that you say it like that, art reduced to 0s and 1s, cold and sterile, is an interesting idea in itself! There has been very cold and sterile art in the past of course - I'm thinking of some of the minimalist and early conceptual work that deals with logic.
Thank you very much for your kind words Victoria. It makes us very happy to be able to extend this conversation to our Lower Иotes. It seems the cycle has only now begun and the seeds are already sprouting. We have a lot to share with the community at large regarding this pivotal theme. Our perception is that this is a very virgin subject demanding high attention to raise awareness to the real problems humanity will face and not just the artistic community. Our society will be totally redesigned and the new structures that will emerge from it will depend of how far we can understand each other regarding the place of humans in a landscape overwhelmed by machines. It's up to us humans to define what will be the role we will play in it. This is our vision and we make our art with that purpose in mind.
Extended a little bit more the line of thought we are here in a fight/war against a certain vision of the world. In that sense the machines are the enemy or have the potential to become one. Just a thought: currently we are starting to see our leaders making use of drones to kill people. Think about it!
The short answer is hell no. Although what is being produced by AI is provocative, there is a universally chilly, tech feel about it. It could insert itself into the lexicon of art but won’t take it over. There’s no substitute for thickly applied paint creating an energetic scene. Human art includes mistakes, which either move the maker in another direction or wind up the genius part of a piece. Don’t get me started on what’s ‘good’ art. That seems to be left up to grand entities with a need to sustain premium marketable reputations and monster bank accounts.
Yes! There is a universally chilly, tech feel about AI art. That's a succinct way of putting it, Kim. Agree with all that you say here, including what is deemed as 'good' art. There are so many unsung, brilliant artists quietly working and struggling to get any air time. I'm going to start using The Gallery Companion as a platform for shining a light on artists who are outside of that system. I love that you do exactly that on your Substack.
Outstanding! And thank you!
Thanks! Having a great time with stablediffusion. I've been feeding it sets of Mayan glyphs such as "Lord Shield Jaguar with the Fish-Capture Glyph." No worse than most scientific interpretations. And a lot more entertaining.
Ha! Yes, I lost a good hour on Stable Diffusion yesterday...
Yikes! I have to say I haven't ever given AI any real thought. I'll be looking out for it now. I'm not sure what I think. Like Billie says there's good and bad, and that's just the reality of our life, with everything.
I LOVE the project by Mario Klingemann you shared, the way he uses words and phrases generated by his AI dataset to see how we respond. We are so programmed to make meaning from what we're given. I like how he describes it as fortune telling. And the sound of the board as it shuffles, takes me right back to railway stations, waiting for informatino to come to you. Love it. Wonderful stuff. I'm going to be thinking about this post all day I can tell. So much to think about, thanks Victoria
Thanks Helen, so glad you liked Mario Klingemann. Have a look at his website as he has done some other really interesting projects too
If things weren't already complicated enough! This article makes me fear slightly how reliant we may have become on AI, as you say, without our even being aware of it. How can we know how much the powers-that-be base their propaganda on AI information, and therefore how it may be trickling down into our individual decision-making? Perhaps we're becoming part-robot at the same time as we're becoming part-plastic! I think there's enough of us out here battling, though, to keep humanity human and as Jeffrey mentioned once you unplug the machine it dies. So once again it's down to individual choice (which I'm not sure exists in bigger institutions) and how much we're each willing to sacrifice ourselves to convenience, shunning responsibility, discarding self-consciousness etc. The same millennia-old battles for we still haven't found resolution. AI is just another thing to add to the already 'delightful' mix.
One of my issues with AI is a fear of control in a malignant way that we can't even see. Is it irrational though? We can already see how harmful social media can be, and how easy it is to be manipulated. We only know what we see.
There are definitely problems with gender, race and class identification in the AI 'neural' systems of image-reading, which works to suppress and erase minorities and their histories, as this work by the poet Joy Buolamwini demonstrates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxuyfWoVV98
Not sure if fear is the right word here. Perhaps just the perception of reality and the acknowledgement of its future impact to the human species.
I know what you mean
I reckon complete unplug from the system in general is possible for brief periods but then we have to dive back in and rejoin the scrum. Meditation, Substack Groups (😀), artistic process, wild camping, sleep, etc!!
Would you want to completely unplug? The digital revolution is as embedded in our lives as the Industrial Revolution, it’s an extension of our humanness and it could be argued it gives us additional capabilities in the same way the combustion engine did.
I get annoyed by the narrow applications of Ai in our house (Alexa/etc) but I’m not sure I’d choose to be without them either?
Probably not...but...it would be nice to understand how and the extent to which it does play a role in our lives.
I think it's best not to think too hard about the negatives, and just do what you can do, as Katie says. It's too big otherwise. Like climate change. We are just teeny tiny elements in an enormous system that we can't control.
Juts wanted to add, as an artist I don't feel threatened because my work is completely analog and much of it is the process of preparing natural materials, cutting paper, assembling, the smell, the feel, etc. So much of the art world is not remotely touched by this fad.
I am exactly the same Joumana, my art is old school collage, a million miles from AI and therefore I don't feel threatened either. Fascinating subject though!
I don't believe for a second AI will ever reach the human levels of reflection and creativity. To believe that you'd have to have an overly simplistic mechanistic view of the world and no insight at all into the psyche (sadly such people exist). The machines would have to develop a consciousness first, and a rich ferment of feelings and emotions to work from, and then the term AI would no longer apply, we'd have a different problem on our hands!
This whole business is still a huge problem for the livelihood of many, and also a threat in a more insidious fake news kind of way – the idea the general public, and powers that be, may internalise the belief that creativity is nothing more than what AI is doing sends a chill down my spine.
Joumana, I agree with you on everything you've said. The idea that machines could develop a consciousness with feelings and emotions is science fiction. If not, as you say, we would then have a very different problem.
2 considerations on something I've been thinking about for a while now.
Imho the greatest impact of AI will be felt in pop culture, where mass production catering to the common denominator is key. Feed enough to the machine, and it will reproduce based on what you fed it.
Second, an AI is a machine, for the time being without consciousness, so in terms of "developing as an artist" it has a flat curve. An artist knows stages in his/her/its development, and isn't that what (also) triggers our interest?
The day AI develops a consciousness it's no longer an AI, but we're still not there yet. Not that I believe that human souls are enlightened by a divine spark or so which is missing in AI. AI is "perfect", while humans are flawed (as machines that think) and that might be our greatest trump card in the creation of art, which comes forth from our human drive, based on our flawed existence.
Anyway, a nice book on the topic imho is T-minus AI by Michael Kanaan.
You might be right about AI and pop culture gery. It made me think how AI machines could be producing generic pop music based on similar tunes, creating composite songs. I'm sure that must already be happening. There's certainly the potential for popular/trash fiction to be created from AI etc The livelihoods of artists of all genres certainly looks under threat.
In answer to the question, I see human thought as fuel for algorithms, so I don’t see a future where humans are completely absent from art (unless we are extinct)
I’ve been following a London based artist who is using Ai generated images on Instagram, she’s doing some pieces around childbirth /maternal experiences that caught my eye. I love the caption with this one which also highlights how ‘flippin slippery’ human nuance and language is to the digital world.
https://www.instagram.com/p/ClYtxPsoCzH/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
Another perspective I have is from my career in analytics and AI and working with teams of coders (who are data artists in their own right). Ai is wrapped by human experience, when we enter key words into an Ai tool /algorithm, a human has thought about the purpose, direction and output of that process. There are also limitations that developers have to sit with when accessing personal and commercial data sets, but the lines feel blurred here under the artistic banner and the way images are displayed front and centre in our digital landscape rather than behind the scenes in a database.
I don’t worry that Ai will take autonomy and creative thought from our world, im excited for the possibilities, how digital aided art can be used by more people to express ideas, from an accessibility perspective ... now that’s pretty awesome.
I think the worries I have lend themselves to the privacy and ethics of how the data has been scraped, and how individual artists are paid (more often not/not credited) for that contribution.
More info here https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/09/have-ai-image-generators-assimilated-your-art-new-tool-lets-you-check/
Interestingly the artist you have directed us to on instagram, Sarah-Jane Field, is a friend of Thomasina's!
Thanks for all these thoughts and different perspectives. I deliberately didn't go into the copyright issues that AI brings up for artists. I know it's hugely damaging to some livelihoods and also there's the potential for an artist's style to be hijacked. Artistic style is not protected by copyright in the UK anyway, so it's hard to chase down.
I was privately messaged by a subscriber who angrily told me how I should be ashamed of myself for suggesting that artists are not going to be made obsolete by AI. I think she skipped some of my argument but clearly feels very threatened by AI. She unsubscribed, and pointed me to this article, which is very interesting: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/31/opinion/sarah-andersen-how-algorithim-took-my-work.html
Oh wow! I’m trying to remember who it was on Instagram that shared her work in stories 🤔I only followed her about a week ago. The reimagining of obstetrics piqued my interest after the work I did with maternity services and hearing service user narratives.
Ethics and data are hot topics in the cyber psychology world, I didn’t realise artistic style wasn’t covered, but that does make some sense... after-all, art is reimagined all of the time right? There must be a hazy line between influence/copy.
I’m reading all of the comments here with so much interest, there has been a swell of opinion pieces on Ai over the last few months, and we’ve seen a tipping point with the accessibility of what we call ‘broader’ Ai (beyond simple ask question get simple answer Alexa type) entering people’s lives, so we are caught in an uncomfortable place of change that we might not feel so in control of. Malicious acts will always happen in the world (perpetrated by humans I might add!) but I can understand the threat (and real world examples) of this taking place in an anonymous way aided by Ai is frightening.
Ms. Powell,
Good article here. I disagree with one sentence. That of (para) “…when we stop being interested in … etc….then we won’t need artists”. IMO, that is exactly when we DO need artists.
The populace is influenced by governments, corporations, advertising, and literally everything else. Perhaps graphic illustrators and product photographers and most copywriters will be gone, but a work of art from the artist can distract many people from their slumbering lives to help us think of life differently.
In addition, most of what is written here has many of us associating “art” with 2D work. Painting, graphic design, drawing and photography. AI will learn to replicate and interpret words and images and spit them out into a new image. But an ‘image’ isn’t art. The original can be art. The copies are reproductions. Art is made by humans. The origin of ‘art’ refers to ‘skill’. An action or product made by a human being that is both: 1) skillful and 2) expressive is considered art. Many artists differ with me on this. I am old school, and I prefer to use the word from it’s original meaning.
Humans program computers, and computers can rewrite the software as it learns new pieces of information. They are like human beings in this regard. But let us remember that when the software gathers it’s data to begin making the art, how does it make:
• It’s mark?
• The sound? The notes of music?
• Print the image?
• Use the 3D printer?
Artists have been using AI. But AI needs the human. Turn off, unplug, delete files, remove software. Oh! Where did the AI go? When we don’t give the AI any power, there is no AI. There is no art.
Jeffrey
Thanks for your interesting comment Jeffrey. It's indeed so that AI is limited to the digital world, I don't see an impact on graffiti art for instance. It made me think of what happened in the DJ world, where a digital revolution already happened. I used to DJ with vinyl, which needs skills to master, but swapped to DJing with VirtualDJ 16 years ago. Some of my DJ friends argued that I wasn't a real DJ anymore, since real DJs use vinyl to express their creativity. But meanwhile their view changed since working with DJ software simply requires a different skillset and opens up new possibilities. Today, the DJ landscape is a hybrid one, with digital and analogue DJs working side by side, each with their own vibe. In the end, the introduction of digital DJing simply enriched the landscape.
Such an interesting comparison gery. Makes total sense. Enriching the landscape.
Thanks for your thoughts Jeffrey. That last sentence from me was a bit tongue in cheek - I don't ever think we will stop being curious and interested in who we are as humans, so we'll always need artists! I agree, AI needs the human, but it would take one almighty unplug to delete all the files!
Interesting you should bring up the cultural fear about machines getting out of control. There was an exhibition at the Barbican in London a couple of years back about AI which addressed this point. It was curated by two curators, one from Britain and the other from Japan. And the different cultural perspectives they brought to thinking about AI was very different. Western views of AI were often clouded by this fear of the machine-out-of-control, whereas in Japanese culture there is an acceptance that humans and machines live and work alongside each other. Here's a link to the exhibit website: https://www.barbican.org.uk/hire/exhibition-hire-barbican-immersive/ai-more-than-human