I recently gave you my definition of art. In that post I suggested that I might discuss AI art in that context, so here we go. Keep in mind that the following is based on my definition of art and that anything I say here might not be true for you, if you have a different definition. Still, if you want my take on this highly discussed subject, feel free to continue reading.
A central aspect of my definition is that art is created by an intelligent being with the intention to do so. So the obvious question is: can an AI can fill that role? My answer to that is: definitely not. I know quite a bit about AI. While I don't work with it directly anymore and certainly don't have all the details, I have a good foundational understanding of the mathematics behind it. I can't explain everything here, but I think artificial "intelligence" is a big misnomer. All these new technologies are, as intelligent as they seem, is a lot of statistical trickery. It's a new way of filtering and interpolating information created by actually intelligent beings: humans. AI would be worthless without all its training data.
So it's settled then, AI generated artifacts are not art? Well, not so fast. While AI cannot create art itself, there are many humans involved. Most obviously, there is the person running the AI, often even providing a prompt for it. It's most obvious that this person is able to turn it into art. Like in the fire extinguisher example, you can turn anything into art via the way you use it. That is a simple case, but it's not the whole story. Imagine someone just wants to look at a funny cat picture and thus tells the AI to generate one for them, which they then look at and laugh about. The process really isn't much different than using a search engine to look for a funny cat picture. The user is the consumer of the art. In both cases, they get an art piece, that contains the required features to cause the desired reaction from them. In the case of a picture created by a human, that human is clearly an artist by my definition. But who is the artist in for the AI generated picture?
Well, maybe you've guessed it: it's the people who created the training data. They did not intentionally create this art piece, but they intentionally created other art pieces that incorporated the features that produce the desired effect, i.e., laughter about a funny cat. The AI filtered and interpolated all their works of art to create something new that has the correct features. But is it art then? To illustrate how tricky this question is, let's look at an analogy. A shopping list is a list of items that communicates this list of items to someone, often themselves in the future, who visits the grocery store, so they know to buy these items. This is all pretty simple. But what happens now, if you keep all your shopping lists and cut them up into slices containing only one item each. You put all those slices into a hat and draw some of them, assembling them into a new shopping list. The new shopping list contains items that you've bought in the past and items you buy frequently are much more likely. It might even be very close to a shopping list you would actually write. So is it a shopping list?
I don't know about you, but I'd find it strange to say it is not a shopping list. It may not contain the toilet paper you desperately need, it may cause you to buy yet another jar of peanut butter although you have two already, but nevertheless it works as a shopping list. You could go to the grocery store with it and buy everything on it. It's one of those "if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck then it's probably a duck" kind of situations. But more important than the question if it is a shopping list is the question who wrote it. Would you say it was the hat? I think that'd be crazy. The hat cannot make decision. Neither can a random process, an algorithm or whoever is executing the algorithm that led to the creation of the shopping list. No, I'd say it was written by the person who wrote all the initial shopping lists. It's their handwriting after all.
So where does that leave us? Are the paintings generated by Midjourney, the photographs generated by Dall-E or the poems written by ChatGPT art? My answer to that is: yes. But it's not AI art. It's human art. It's just a bit tricky to say who's the artist. But if you put a canvas and paint in the corner of the room at a party and there is a painting there after the party, it is just as difficult to figure out who the artist was.
People sometimes think of generative AI as a tool with the potential to replace human creativity. I think "generative" AI is a misnomer as well. In my view, it is a tool to explore human creativity. It is a way to pull from the whole corpus of all the art made by humans in a way that was not possible before. It can take features contained in its training data and combine them in ways they have never been combined before. It cannot create new features. If you suddenly bought an aquarium, there'd be no chance that the grocery list you pull from the hat suddenly contains fish feed, since you've never bought that before. So either your fish will starve, or you'll have to add fish feed to the list manually.
It's actually an old story. It happens every time when computers suddenly enter domains that were previously thought to be exclusively human. It happened with chess, it happened with go, and now it happens with art. Everyone is shocked, people think humans are done for, and then a contender emerges that is better than the computer: a human with a computer. Imagine what great art humans will create once they realize that they can use AI for all the features that have been done countless times before and focus all their attention on the exciting, new, unseen features that make the art piece special. I can't wait to see it.
So if you're an artist, don't think of AI as an opponent. Think of it as a tool that could be in your hands right now, to create something the world has never seen before! It's an opportunity to create a piece of art in collaboration with all of humanity.
