The Role of AI in Art

GRIMES, MAC BOUCHER, MARIYA JACOBO, EURYPHEUS Marie Antoinette After the Singularity #1 and Marie Antoinette After the Singularity #2

I have been thinking a lot recently about the role AI may play in art.

Yesterday, I gave a talk and received a vociferous response when I mentioned AI and the arts: a number of people felt deeply offended that AI and art should be considered in the same sentence!

Perhaps the view is that the medium has become the villain if it is viewed as competitive to the creator. This argument finds varying degrees of success depending on your perspective. To wit, much of the NFT/web3 craze relied upon the "market" as the arbiter of taste, and the mechanism of distribution as lubrication to validate those decisions.

Indeed, if you did not have sole-rights to said JPEG, how can you validate it's aesthetic merit? A critical analysis would be quite difficult, but an image, for a token, translatable into crypto, and then to fiat, which can buy real things; well that is evidence enough. For the detractors?

"Have fun being poor!"

More recently, we've seen @Grimezsz' project with The Misalignment Museum, which is "[a] 501(c)3...place to learn about Artificial Intelligence and reflect on the possibilities of technology through thought-provoking art pieces and events," depict Marie Antoinette After the Singularity via a "thoughtfully woven [tapestry] on a mechanical, digital Jacquard loom with a simple composition (1 yarn)." This is a triumph, in my mind, of the commercial savvy and ingenuity of humankind (including notably one of our most famous musicians, expensive yet dwindling Belgian tapestry makers, and duopolistic auction houses - thankfully the more approachable @ChristiesInc in this case) to sufficiently survive in the brave new world that humanity collectively faces on the eve of hypercapable AI.

That is not to say the rugs are without artistic or commercial merit. While I am not a contemporary art buyer in general, I feel quite certain this is a no-brainer lot from a commercial perspective. Although one must feel a bit of fear that Elon Musk could end up rage bidding against you. (Would it be an honor or curse to be the underbidder to the world's richest and most controversial man?)

At the other end of the spectrum, X accounts like @liminal_bardo are exploring new AI-to-AI conversations, lightly guided by humans, which don't neatly fit into our traditional conception of art. Should I enjoy or fear these discussions? Are they (or is the project) closer to a philosophical exploration? Or a non-scientific experiment? Should we feel sorry that the account has no clear commercial mechanism? Art has always followed a close, although sometimes antagonistic, relationship with the commercial forces which serve to support it. This is in the face of the fact that it is not commercial, nor religious, validation that makes great art. That is, in fact, relegated to a somewhat murkier criteria.

There are three art historians that I most admire: @arthistorynews, @JANUSZCZAK, and @simon_schama and I believe one of them (although I don't remember which one) some time ago had the deep insight that excellent art must be defined by its execution in the medium in which it is created.

That is, the qualities that elevate a van Eyck to the highest order of work are bounded by the medium it was created in as an oil painting. It has a unique quality that is expressed most beautifully, most movingly, because it is painted.

Similarly, I think O Fortuna’s artistic impact would be quite hard to replicate as a photograph: it's emotional resonance is most clearly felt in the notes as they course through our body.

The most important question now is what shape AI created art will take. I don't think that it will be as simple as Midjourney created oil paintings -- that has a place of course, but it is not the unique, differentiated art that will characterize this new modality.

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet indeed! The line, though referencing a different modality, is so nicely expressed with words.

We should expect these new artworks to be creative and resonate with the human experience, but fundamentally they must utilize this new medium effectively to define something entirely unknown. This is what we call category defining. The work is yet to be done, and it is an exciting and interesting time for new artists to explore. Much of modern and contemporary art is a boring and bland trick played on naive collectors to enrich the artists, galleries, and greater fools who bought the lot (not the artwork mind you) at the next sale.

Let us hope that AI art will produce a truly elevated aesthetic. And even moreso let us hope that @j_amesmarriott sees this and writes more on this topic as he would do a much better job than me.