A personal reflection on AI, art and my career as a designer.
AI as a buzzword seems to be on the decline. Nevertheless, it remains a hotly discussed topic in the ecospheres of tech and art. Alongside the broader adoption of AI technology the concept of ‘prompt artists’ has arisen—creators who do little more than write text that AI responds well to. Matching this new breed of artists are creatives who stand on the bastion of human emotion, pronouncing that no machine can ever reproduce what the human spirit is capable of achieving. And many in the field, such as myself, just want to be prepared for a future where my skillset might be considered obsolete.
A nonstarter is the question, can AI generated work actually be “art.” I think we can pretty quickly move on from this discussion as we can with most questions in the form of ‘…but is it art?’ So long as there’s human intent in the creation of an artifact we can call it art. The process of ‘how’ something is made has no impact on its categorization as art. We have been remixing and remixing and remixing for a long time. Milton Mouse existed years before Mickey Mouse and the rap scene has been sampling for as long as it’s been a genre. Nor does art need to be ‘good’ for it to be categorically art. Is a child’s drawing less ‘art’ than a grown-up’s?
Much of the backlash against AI art has come from those who stand to loose the most by its wide adoption, namely, illustrators and artists. These devoted crafts men and women have poured years into developing a skill and mastering their medium. It is a genuine loss when such skill becomes cheapened by the corporate push for art at a discount.
My very own profession has been subject to existential questions regarding its long term viability in the face of emerging tech. What use will there be for me when AI can generate and launch a successful landing page with a few keystrokes or voice commands? It’s a grim future where I’m jobless and my years of expertise have been replaced by a computer scraping works and regurgitating them out to the masses for pennies on the dollar.
In my more optimistic moments, however, I think back to the history of the camera: A new technology that killed the art of its day. At its onset Neoclassicism was the prevailing art movement. A style which sought to emulate life and realism on canvas with as little distortion as possible. A skilled human hand could create brush strokes so fine that it was near impossible to discern from the texture of the cotton that receives the paint. Proportions of the body were studied and defined to such a degree that we might call them ‘picture perfect.’ Realism was the mark of a talented artist who spent years steadying shaking hands, practicing movements that mirror the shapes of reality.
A camera doesn’t have hands that shake. The artifacts it produces are free from the confines of human limitations. The camera could paint a more realistic image than any artist could ever hope to… The camera doesn’t need years of study nor does it cost as much to employ. What place then existed for the artist?
Out of this crucible the impressionist movement arose. Instead of hiding brush strokes, thick globs of paint are smattered on canvas. Details are hidden and color exaggerated. The paintings look nothing like real life. And yet they are able to capture a truth that the camera cannot… these paintings are able to capture the pathos of a scene. An emotional truth hidden behind the detail of the real world. The impressionists created art that doesn’t recreate reality but rather expresses how we engage with it.
The impressionist movement is one of my favorite moments of art history. I’m amazed at how little abstract brush strokes can contain so much meaning. Emphasizing the medium somehow is able to bring to life ephemeral moments. This movement set the groundwork for modernist art, out of which greats such as Picasso and Dali arose.
The future is unknowable. Perhaps as tech evangelists might hope, AI will come to replace most digital (and eventually physical) labor. Or maybe AI is a profit driven fad that feeds on recursive data until every output is meaningless and void of truth. Most likely, I suspect it will be somewhere in the middle. As the camera is a mirror to humanities most horrific and most beautiful moments so AI can reflect our best and worst intentions. But the very human desire to create will continue. ‘Art’ will not be lost to the machine, but it may evolve and I hope it will evolve into something beautiful.
