Don't let AI art distract you from the intelligent paintbrush
The case for a coming glory age of art
I see a lot of hostility towards AI imagery. This animus is often neighbor to a fear that humans soon will be out of the loop, replaced by creative algorithms. Other times it is just a feeling of aesthetic repulsion from online garbage piles of kitschy AI art. While I sympathize with latter response, and while there are valid reasons to be anxious as an artist, I personally find this time to be exhilarating. The moment is pregnant with the potential to be the beginning of a new era of great novel art and beauty, created by skilled humans wielding new powerful tools. The power of good human taste, creativity, and effort is as valuable as ever.
This post is first and foremost championing a perspective shift. Many people have discussions about AI art. However, I think "AI art" is an unproductive way to conceptualize this moment. AI image generators ought not be thought of as art generators at all. Rather, they are the next step in the evolution of tools that humans can use to make beauty and art. They are intelligent paintbrushes.
Just like with a normal paintbrush, the lazy user will mostly produce generic junk. A paintbrush in the hands of someone with neither skill nor taste will not produce something good. The same is true here. The human operator is indispensable. If you browse through a sample of random paintings created by random humans (like me), you will not find much of value. This is the equivalent activity that you are engaging in when you are scrolling through random AI-generated pictures created by random strangers on the internet. Just like most people are not skilled painters, most people are not (yet?) skilled at using an intelligent paintbrush.
Let us examine the output of a lazy and generic prompt fed to Midjourney, one of the AI image generators.
Lazy prompt: a person staring into a beautiful landscape
Yuck. Boring. Tacky. We have all seen a gazillion such images. A lazy and generic prompt unsurprisingly converted into generic images.
Let us try to put more effort. Maybe you have a hunch that combining the styles of two different artists or artistic schools would yield a novel and interesting visual expression? Personally, I recently discovered an interesting artist called Andrea Galvani. Furthermore, I've always liked two styles of visual art known as photograms and chemigrams. The former is a kind of proto photography, where an object is placed on a photosensitive material which is exposed to light, yielding an image of the object. The latter is a technique where various chemicals are placed on a photosensitive material to produce an image. I am curious to see the type of composition Galvani produces, but simultaneously using the techniques photograms and chemigrams. Unless Andrea Galvani decides to make adopt these techniques tomorrow, this neighbourhood in the space of beauty would remain unexplored without the intelligent paintbrush. Now we can try it out:
While not masterpieces by any stretch of the imagination, by infusing the process with some of my knowledge and tastes, I have taken a definitive step away from the generic garbage pile of kitsch AI imagery. At least as measured by my aesthetic sense. In a gallery, I would stop to ponder a couple of these.
I am not only interested in creating tasteful combinations of styles, however. I want to communicate something about my particular conscious experience in this moment in time. People argue that this is what art is about. As the two former interesting links argue, art is a form of communication by conscious people for conscious people. While I agree with this, I do not agree with their conclusion: that imagery created using a non-conscious AI cannot be art. If I am really just wielding a powerful paintbrush and using it to navigate the space of imagery until I find something that strongly resonates with my conscious experience, why does that not fit their defintion of art? I was the wielder of the paintbrush, moving the brush while introspecting and stopping only when I honed in on an image that resonated with me. The final result is clearly a reflection of my conscious experience, only produced with a novel technique. Is it fundamentally different from photography in any meaningful sense? I am sure painters of old complained about photography, since the imagery was not directly produced, line by line, by a shaky hand. The photographers were just lazily capturing existing images in the world with the click of a button, perhaps turning some knobs here and there. Of course, today most of us dismiss this critique. The camera is just another hi-tech paintbrush. Thus, generative AI tools wielded by a human can create art to the exact same extent that that a camera can. No more, no less.
While masterpieces of art sometimes result from divine inspiration, equally often they are obtained through a painful slog of trial and error. A careful fine tuning in the space of sensory signals, using the artist’s taste as the compass. Hundreds of hours of fine adjustments. One way to really feel this is the following: try to make modifications to any truly great musical composition. You will find that more or less every change you try to make will make the piece worse. This is not an accident. It is the result of an arduous process of honing into a local maximum of beauty that simultaneously captures a conscious experience important to the artist. If computing power can help us speed up this honing, while still relying on the artist’s aesthetic compass, then I suspect that art is about to enter a glorious new age.
Let now me pick up the intelligent brush again. This time, before painting, I am going to ask myself a question: what thoughts and feelings are coloring my experience these days? Here is the first that came to mind for me: for the first time in my life, I have started feeling a tinge of envy of those that believe in God. During most of my past, I have been a fairly militant atheist. And while I doubt I will ever be capable of believing in the gods of old, I have started to ponder the downsides entailed by the life we signed up for when we agreed with Nietzsche that god, indeed, is dead. What are the consequences of adopting the trinity of The Self, Rights, and The Market? Have I lost something by not keeping the idea of a divine being present in my mind? How does it color my actions and view on the world? Let me paint with an intelligent brush while investigating these feelings. With this novel tool, I can quickly move through a space of varying aesthetics, more effectively searching for an expression that captures how I feel. After 45 minutes of trial, error, and honing, I produced two images that resonated with me. They might not resonate with you, and that is fine. That is how art has always been.