I make collage art. You can see one of those pieces above. I take parts of an image and mix them with parts of other images to create something new. It is simple. The artwork shown above though, is different than usual. Every element of it was made by artificial intelligence. I asked for them - the pianos with smoke rising out of them and ghost-like faces to rest in the mist - and I put them together. To make these you need editing skills and good taste. This is art via curation.
Here is my point in a nutshell:
AI cannot replace the art that humans make because you can always remove or subtract something from the artwork.
An AI might paint the modern day Mona Lisa, but you want her to frown instead. No matter how good the work is, it can be altered by us. After it is altered, it becomes our own creation. So this is all good news then? Well, not exactly…
AI won’t replace human artists, it will replace the entirety of human art. The risk is not that individual artists will be put out of business, although in some cases that will happen, but rather that new forms of art will be created that outmatch ours in ways that we can’t yet conceive of.
Most likely we won’t know what this paradigm shift looks like ahead of time - that is a feature of them after all. Maybe it will be art that engages unexpected senses such as taste (although I guess that’s what food can be?) or touch. Perhaps even weirder, such as art that taps into our dreams or triggers déjà vu or induces drug-like hallucinations during the period in which we engage directly with it.
It could be anything, but whatever it is, we won’t see it coming, and we won’t be able to stop it.
This landed in my inbox just as I was heading to bed with my insomnia so it feels the right moment to discourse. Personally I'm not all that interested in the technique of art, whether it looks sophisticated, 'perfect' etc but whether the artist had fun making it. To see someone's joy on a canvas means so much more to me than a perfect rendition. There's also a concept called 'The Beholder's Share' which states that art that says too much is less engaging for the viewer than art that is a bit ambiguous and unfinished. When the viewer's brain can fill in the blanks it becomes a lot more imbued with personal meaning. I don't think AI can recreate that, but I do like the exciting possibilities you mention of art becoming more sensory and interactive.
Well that is pleasant. The human species has an astonishingly creative store of brain juice to find solutions to problems. Artists embody this in one of the most distinct ways. It will put people out of jobs but we will find ways to not be pushed under. As a traditional artist and inexperienced person I think I'm qualified to say that it will probably be better than we think, but not in the ways we can predict. Who know, the next Lenonardo might emerge to help.