I don’t think about AI a lot, but it’s on my radar. If you haven’t been following along at all, ChatGPT has gotten some people orgasmic and others screamingly anxious about the possibilities of AI-assisted writing. The shortest version I can give here is that if you give the right AI machine the right premise, it can cobble together a story or help compose an outline. It also can fix or elaborate upon one of yours.
Because it’s on the internet AI has become a divisive topic, which is why it bores me. Once everyone has planted their flags and made hating or loving a thing part of their personality, it’s not worth talking about. I’ve gone over all of this before.
In writing, there’s a future where you feed all of a genre-writers works (say, Robert Ludlum or James Patterson) into AI and it continues writing their novels for them. No grad students needed and no real loss to the culture.
The only reason I wanted to bring up AI today is because I saw two vaguely connected things that have made me rethink art.
The first was a Tweet about how good AI art is.
Just as AI can write stories, it also can make art. In fact, it’s better at art than at stories and this has people a little het-up. The quick version of the way it works is you feed the AI some inspiration (photos/drawings/paintings) and it uses them to make something new.
I find this really intriguing, and, although I haven’t experimented with it yet, I can’t imagine ever paying a graphic designer to combine stock images into a graphic or book cover for me again.
I want to be really clear here, superior art and competent graphic design work are worth paying for if you can afford it. Those of us who occupy the middle range of what we can reasonably afford get middling work back.
I really like the cover for my book, Dragged Into the Light, but the guy who made it knocks book covers out the way I knock out advertorial: competently but without love. AI may elevate hacks to mediocrity, but that’s as far as it’s going to go.
What really intrigued me, though, was this:
Londoner solves 20,000-year Ice Age drawings mystery
He collaborated with a team including two professors from Durham University and one from University College London and…www.bbc.com
We celebrate cave paintings as an example of humanity’s innate need to create, evidence that the creative urge was stronger even than the need for food. Why else would early humans draw on the walls of a cave?
According to the latest evidence, it’s just a calendar tracking mating seasons to make hunting more efficient. I don’t think they’re any less beautiful or significant because they aren’t “art” anymore.
We’re creatures that make things to make our lives easier. Sometimes the best way to make our lives easier is to take what’s in our heads and put it elsewhere. Whether or not it’s art is irrelevant. Whether it appeals is what matters.
I wanna take apart the tweet I mentioned for a second. Setting aside the cave paintings and trench poetry, it says, “You can’t convince me that we as a human species would rather have AI make our art for us.”
This could be my cynicism talking, but I think it’s adorable to believe anyone cares who makes their art. What I think he’s getting at is less about what we would prefer than what we’re going to get.
What we’re going to get is the intellectual equivalent of Panera Bread bagels and Dunkin Donuts coffee, the bare minimum effort for the lowest common denominator tastes.
It’s not just what we’re going to get. It’s what we already have. If 90% of the garbage we read on the internet started being generated by AI instead of content mills, literally no one would notice but the people who work at the content mills.
Artists make things that have to be made. It’s not a question of who “makes our art for us,” I mean, we’re not the goddamn Medicis, choosing which artists suit the tastes of the times.
If someone makes a piece of art for you, you know it. It’s something that connects you with the work, though whether that’s different from an algorithm guessing what will touch you on an emotional level is probably worth considering.
I’m more a technician than an artist. Still, when I’m writing, I hem and haw over a way to put things that will (if I succeed) connect people with my perception. I assume artists are the same, struggling to share their vision and wot-not.
For people who make stuff that they think needs to be made, the point is to connect, to translate an idea from their mind for someone else to consider. It’s about trying to bring two points of view closer together.
You and I know that there is a gap between my mind and yours. Filling that gap is a challenge. Unless and until AI becomes self-aware, it’s undertaking a different project. AI doesn’t have a point of view so much as it has a selection of points of view it can elaborate on. It doesn’t need to connect the way human makers do. It gets no satisfaction in completing the act.
AI doesn’t see a gap. It isn’t trying to connect you with its mind; it is trying to game your mind into feeling connected with.
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of people who make stuff doing the same thing. It’s the difference between someone who wants to make good food and someone who wants to own a Panera Bread. They’re both technically in the restaurant business but their reasons for getting into it are radically different.
You buy a franchise because you don’t want to be responsible for the quality or cultural significance of what you do for a living. You buy a franchise because it’s an easy, proven way to make money from people who don’t care about their food.
I have a real affinity for the cave people, scrawling what they want others to know on the wall. It’s pleasant for me to think about that in light of this notion that art is about anything more than establishing a connection. By those lights, we’re not driven to create so much as we’re driven to connect. It’s the connection that reveals the humanity, not the art itself.
Tony Russo is a journalist and author of “Dragged Into the Light: Truthers, Reptilians, Super Soldiers, and Death Inside an Online Cult.” Subscribe to his Bagel Manifesto here.