The Fiasco of ‘AI Art’

December 14, 2023

What is the current state of AI and creativity? And what should we think about it, going forward? This short summary was inspired by a tweet by @shoneec, in response to an artist who used ‘AI’ to create an image that she referred to as a ‘painting’. And collectors apparently turned a blind eye.

On the surface, this is similar to how listening to an audiobook is considered ‘reading’. Today people say that they’ve “read a book”, when they’ve in fact listened to it whilst doing something else like driving, cooking, or playing video games. The common theme is that the Human’s personal authority is siphoned away by technology and sedation; reading a book requires a level of focus and presence that listening does not. Listening can be passive. The mind is allowed to drift in and out of focus, so that we get the rough idea of what is said without the full generation of emotion that comes with reading. This ‘smoothing over’ of the generation of emotion IS the loss of personal authority; the loss of the ability to feel.

I’ve jumped into the deep end, but this small example exposes the net effect of technology, intended or not, and its effect on creativity. Human emotion is the singular driver behind Human creativity. The depth of Human emotion is what has allowed us to reach deeply into the imagination and bring forth things with an intensity of permanence and richness. This is what has given us the greatest monuments to Human creativity.

Today, there is a slow realization that the Human being’s personal authority has been lost. There are now many people who recognize that our current state of creativity has been ‘smoothed over’. Many are lamenting the past glory of lost architecture and art, faced with our presently pathetic and willfully ugly modern visual culture. My contribution to the conversation is the assertion that the downfall of our culture is consistent with the gradual loss of personal authority. Or to put it in a more essential way, the loss of our ability or want to feel — the loss of the desire to learn how to paint, or read, or simply run through the wind without music playing in our ears through wifi headphones.

Sedation and distraction are so commonplace that I am like a small voice in the wind. Many small voices decried the advent of the telephone, the railroad, industrialization, the television, the internet, the cell phone. They were all laughed at. The progression of technology left them behind. Am I also in danger of being ‘left behind’? My advantage is that the level of suffering and frustration being experienced by Humanity right now is at a peak. And I can confidently ask, ‘how is that technology working out for you?’

If I’m totally negative about what is being called ‘AI’ then I am indeed in danger of being ‘left behind’. I am not totally negative. But I am intimately aware that the technological progression we have chosen has cleaved us from our own empowerment. The goal is not to make money, not to get attention. The goal is to become empowered. This is my intention behind this article; where I see disempowerment, I call it out.

There is a portion of Humanity that hates itself; it doesn’t believe in itself; it doesn’t believe in a Human future or the idea that Humanity can transcend itself and progress. This portion of the Human race always wants to be led by an external savior. They will admire anyone who seems to have authority, be it a definite persona, or a general idea, such as AI. Are we just talking about a group of people with low self esteem? Or something deeper? Again, it all comes down to personal authority. This portion of Humanity is composed of the most reactive, the most disempowered, the most ‘triggered’. They share a commonality: their locus of authority is external, as opposed to internal. They are viscerally upset by the idea of ‘looking inside themselves’, intuiting their own answers, or developing themselves. Instead, they crave external authority to hand them sets of rules; they only want a material reality without the unwieldy and creative world of ‘feeling’. This is also the portion of Humanity that is most enamored by technology, and the most prone to leaning on AI to recreate ‘paintings’. It is also who is often behind so-called AI.

Even the term ‘AI’ is part of this worship. The point has been made before, but ‘Artificial Intelligence’ invests this technology with a sentience that it does not have. It is a database, that is all. If you hate yourself, you would say ‘but the Human brain is just a database too’. It is not. We feel. A database is simply pre-loaded with existing information, recalled, and the information is displayed in a sequence based on an input. This is not sentience. This is not intelligence. This is not emotion. This is not creativity.

The dumbing down of Humanity is progressed by confusing databases with the work of the Human brain. The dumbing down of Humanity is complete when Humans cannot tell the difference, or do not care to notice the difference between the output of a database, and the work of a Human brain. It is the ultimate ‘fuck you’ to Humanity.

This ball of self-hatred that resides in a portion of Humanity is not an embellishment. It is a very real phenomenon that comes to prominence at the tail-end of decades of programming — the progressive layers of subtle and not-so-subtle misanthropy, over time. This misanthropy is delivered through a collection of ideologies (nihilism, atheism, materialism, postmodernism, relativism, satanism etc), and these philosophies are watered down into liberal social movements that gradually increase in their radicalism, influencing government policy and social life, until Humans are born into a world with both a set of beliefs that cleave them from their own empowerment, and a system of strict rules that confine life into a very narrow band. This is where we are today. If you cannot see it, you are part of that disempowered portion of Humanity.

And still, if you need proof that Human life has been tuned into a narrow frequency band, you only need to look at contemporary art and architecture, and the feckless admiration for all forms of ‘advanced database output’.

SORRY NOT SORRY

The term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ actually implies a desire to be fooled into thinking a database output comes from something with feeling and sentience. This desire comes from our natural empathy, which prompts us Humans to imbue something with a persona so that we can identify with it. This ‘personify to identify’ impulse trips us up when we’re trying to discern if something is Human made or machine made. We can’t help read the output of ChatGPT in a VOICE. And whatever voice is in our heads is the persona we give Advanced Database Output, causing us to — incorrectly — ‘feel’ that it is intelligent and sentient.

Here, if we do not use discernment, our own empathy is weaponized against us. Slowly, the Human environment has been populated by synthetic responses — check-outs, cars, and navigation systems ‘talk’ to us. Job applications are met with auto-generated requests to perform tasks so that we can be machine-evaluated. Our natural Human qualities are gradually disregarded and replaced with binary assessments. This environment, again, erodes the personal authority of the multidimensional Human being. We have allowed ourselves to be spoken down to by machines precisely because our ‘personify to identify’ impulse has disarmed our own discernment.

The greatest symbol of this movement to disempowerment is when technology says ‘I’m sorry’. Whenever you hear technology (including Advanced Database Output) say ‘I’m sorry’, you are already too late. If you can turn back and escape, then this is your only option, because no reasoning or threat of violence can alter the course of something that cannot FEEL. The disingenuousness of computers saying ‘I’m sorry’ symbolizes the end-state of the disempowered Human. A true apology is full of heartfelt regret, pathos, and the honest expression of emotion. An apology is a moment of realization, transcendence, and a mutual opportunity for progress; in every apology there is both the realization of wrong-doing and the choice to forgive. When this moment is aped by machines with empty words, it is a mockery of Humanity and Human potential. But again, we all know what ‘sorry’ means, and so our relentlessly empathetic nature is seduced by it, even if it is said by a machine.

This is the same empathy that wants us to believe a painting is real, when its created with Advanced Database Output.

THE POSITIVE

Where does Advanced Database Output make opportunities to enhance creativity (and so improve Human empowerment)? As I’ve said, I am not totally negative on ‘AI’ and AI art. In general, AI frees Humanity of laborious tasks that people shouldn’t be doing anyway. Many languish for lifetimes in front of computers, entering data into spreadsheets that prevent or postpone a deeper inquiry into life and the self. On the one hand, you could say that AI is stealing the job of the data enterer, or the logo designer. But on the other, you could say that these jobs didn’t involve much creativity anyway, and you were lying to yourself because the renumeration you were given for something a computer could do on its own gave you a temporary feeling of usefulness. In reality, you were just postponing your true, natural creativity.

More specifically, ‘AI’ and art has already produced fascinating effects that we can draw on to further increase our understanding. The glitchy, imperfection of ‘AI Art’ is where the genre shines. I’m particularly fascinated by ‘AI video’ and StableDiffusion. Some StableDiffusion video shows us that there is a continuity to all realities. Frames shift, each one evoking a different, precise moment in time, merging seamlessly with the next. There is a sense that the entire history of archive film is an index so massive that disparate points all find their way to each other. And by extension, this teaches us that the same is true in reality: infinite timelines bifurcate and merge; anything that can happen, is happening.

I’m also fascinated by the infinite image generation of Advanced Database Output, specifically via prompts. A certain text prompt is chosen, and this produces an image. This image can then be iterated on a visual theme, or iterated with new prompts. This is very exciting to me. It reminds me of the early days of the search engine, where the oracle is asked, and delivers the answer. One then changes one’s question depending on the answer given. Prompt-based iterative ‘AI Art’ is the visual evolution of this idea.

This is exciting because it has a mystical aspect, being similar to divination. The text-prompt means of creation is like reading tea leaves or throwing down sticks to read a certain message from the future. I find this method appealing in an ‘AI Art’ context because it focuses our attention on visual symbolism — meaning is at the forefront. And if we respect meaning and symbolism, we are acknowledging that our reality is not just material, but multidimensional. An exemplar of this process is Robness.

THE FINAL QUESTION

I could have attempted to write this article with ChatGTP or its spinoffs. The result would have been what Advanced Database Output does best: a wall of generic text, without the bias of Human emotion that makes art, art. Sure, there’s heuristics that can be applied to give ‘tone’ to a text, but again, its another attempt to exploit our ‘personify-to-identify’ impulse. As discussed, this ultimately serves to reduce our own empowerment. The same applies to ‘AI Art’; AI can do it all: oil paintings, drawings, sculpture.

“So why not use AI like Vermeer used the camera obscura. It’s just another tool in the toolbox right?” — if this is your thinking, then you’re in the portion of Humanity that only wants to see the material output, and isn’t interested in the feeling behind the process of creation. Vermeer painstakingly placed each brushstroke. Camera obscura was part of the process, but Human genius finished the job. In the case of ‘AI Art’, where heuristics create realistic paintings, there isn’t any Human genius, only a database of Human genius that is drawn upon. No feeling.

The question is how you value Human life and Human creativity. If art is just something that fills a space, then it doesn’t matter. But if you believe in Human progress, the emotion that generates inspiration has infinite value compared to database heuristics. Which way you choose decides your timeline: will you tame technology or have it rule over you?