AI Art?

If you follow me on Instagram or Facebook, you may be wondering why I’ve been posting series of strange images lately. I’ve become fascinated by generative AI and its potential impact on the future of art.

As an amateur go player, I have seen the disruption caused by AI in the go community. Some top-grade professionals became so disillusioned that they quit the game altogether. However, now that the dust has settled down, AI is mostly used as a tool for learning and game analysis. As an amateur musician and composer, I wonder whether generative AI will have the same impact on the art community in the next ten years.

Just like AlphaGo changed the perception of a centuries-old game, generative AI like MidJourney and DALL-E are already changing our perception of the basics of art. Is AI art art? AI generated images certainly evoke emotions and feeilings of beauty and appreciation - see the examples in this post – all generated using MidJourney). People buy prints of such images and give them a place on their living room wall. For some, that makes it art.

However, for others, art is a connection between the artist and the audience, a way to convey part of the the artist’s inner world to other people. This connection closes the circle of artistry. For a musician, there is nothing as fulfilling as seeing that the sounds you have produced have touched another human being. In the case of AI ‘art’ that circle seems to be incomplete, making it not art in that sense of the word.

Some argue that the operator of the AI, the person creating the prompt on which the AI bases its output, is the artist. Many people who have skilled themselves in creating effective prompts for particular AI engines now call themselves ‘AI artists’. They claim that their keyboard and the AI’s GPU processors in the cloud are their brush and canvas, a technologically evolved version of the camera and studio of more traditional artists.

To me, the essence of the argument against this line of reasoning is in the level of control that the prompt crafter has over the outcome, the eventual image. Skilled painters and professional photographers have achieved a fantastic level of control over every aspect, every pixel of the image they create. Creating MidJourney prompts is almost the opposite: a successful prompt is mostly based on trial and error and statistics, and the prompt crafter has little real control over the outcome.

Seeing the result of my MidJourney prompts, I feel more like the audience than the artist. The real artists, I guess, are the creators of the millions of works of art that went into the training of the model.

So, is there such thing as AI art? I think there is, but I would reserve the term for those situations where a human being has used AI as a tool to find inspiration or to express their creativity, fully under their control, and to make a connection with others. And if that tool has been trained by the art of tens of thousands of human beings, they might deserve to be acknowleged as the artist just as much as the prompt crafter.