The Artist’s Role in AI Creation
/imagine prompt Manifesto, Artificial Intelligence, future of artists,“fear of obsolescence”, low level of detail, exclamation points, style of Italian Futurists
Why do we leave art in the [ever patient/careful/ancient] hands of self-professed “artists”? Schools and adult-ed programs churn them out by the dozens. Some make ceramic bowls. Some paint with watercolors. They are trained to be exacting, precise, predictable. They establish their style through repetition and press releases. They can transfer what is in their minds directly into the world losslessly.
Like the accountant who can always add five and twelve and come up with seventeen, the guitarist can move her fingers over strings to produce flawless Pinball Wizards or Comfortably Numbs. Need five more primitive-style signs that say “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere”? Get the painter to churn those out. THAT IS NOT WHAT AN ARTIST SHOULD DO!
An artist has two roles: Inspire and Curate.
The first is what you think of when you consider your favorite artists in any medium. They built their own style. They changed the way people think/feel/see. Their ability to reach into their souls enables them to reach into the souls of others. You never admire the copycat, the coverband, the lip-syncer. Don’t forget that “Inspire” and “Be Inspired” are two different things.
When the artist curates, they separate the wheat from the chaff. They look at what they make and say “Eh….” Their contribution to the art world is to chuck their junk into the trash. Press the delete button. The real action performed here is identifying any beauty [or horror, depending on what they want] they see in their creation and exposing it more fully (“Exposing” here meaning both to bring it forth from the background — chip away anything that doesn’t look like an elephant — and also to present it to the world).
Not a role of the artist: Physical creation. Rote mechanical movement. Leave that to the accountants. Be the choreographer and not the dancer. There can be beauty in the spreadsheet, but never in the data entry. You can’t poo-poo the athlete’s control of a football while celebrating the artist’s control of a paintbrush/awl/stylus.
Let’s use ‘inspire’ as shorthand for ‘agitate’ or ‘inflame’. When you read ‘inspire’ here, it does not necessarily mean ‘inspire to produce’. One can be inspired without an end result.
In the second half of the Twentieth Century, pop music was becoming boring. The cure for this was in bands like the Sex Pistols and Throbbing Gristle. They changed music for the next fifty years, but they were never considered masters of their instruments. Nobody ever pauses the YouTube video of these bands to watch their fingers move so they can practice the songs to perfection (and if anyone actually does this, they are missing the point entirely). It’s all about the passion, the fury, the diabolical cutlery of “this is so great, and maybe I can do it too!”
Dada did much the same for the staid art world of a hundred years past. Without that poke in the eyebrain, we’d be bored by water lilies and Côte d’Azur landscapes still. A sea change in the visual arts inspired by a gang of poets? People who never held a paintbrush altered the rules of painting?
You got it, yeah. You know where this is going. Ride that!
Like the Industrial Revolution took over for knitters, new technology is taking kinesthetics out of art. Tools like Dall-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion (among others, according to Jim Clyde Monge) have been exercising the artistic side of non-artists (and oooh, that term should really bug you! Who decides who is a non-artist? You know who it usually is? The ones who say they are artists just because they practiced in a formal manner and can operate their tools of art creation effectively. You know, like mossy accountants use spreadsheets. I’ll keep saying that. When people say “I’m an artist”, but they never inspire or curate, you should hear “I’m an accountant”.)
Not familiar with these new Artificial Intelligence tools for art creation? Here are the basics:
- They convert your text into artwork. Unlike a Google Image Search that matches your terms with existing images, these tools use artificial intelligence to build your images from the ground up.
- Realistic or abstract, alien or classical, the machines can imagine your topic. Want the singer Lux Interior painted by Caravaggio? Your stapler built by aliens, but lit by bioluminescent lampreys? Ambiguity, Angst, and Avocados with the Ally McBeal baby? Tekashi 6ix9ine with the Chicago skyline as teeth, trending on Artstation, Studio Ghibli style, Unreal Engine render, cinematic lighting, wide angle, yeet, 16:9 aspect ratio? Go nuts. (and no, I’m not linking to these examples. First, imagine it in your brain. Then go to your favorite AI art program and try it out yourself!)
- They are often free or at least very cheap.
- The people who write the code also supply the processing power, allowing you to use these tools on any device.
- They are upgrading themselves constantly. The tools you are using in August 2022 will be outdated by November.
- The results can be horrific, comical, thought-provoking, commercial, or any combination of these. You will almost never get the result you want. You can tweak your inputs and try again or get variations on previous images.
Some of these tools use Discord, a chat engine popularized by gamers, as the interface to their tools. The user can log in and watch hundreds of mindbending creations, a feverish insomnia, scroll up the screen, effectively curated (in the sense of NOT seeing any good in it) by other users who are looking for something specific (the cyberpunk Cthulhu obelisk in the style of HR Giger, usually. Or Naruto/Ironman/LeBron James smoking a blunt). However, you might see SOMETHING there that the other user does not. You can pull that art out of the trash if you’d like. To take this a step further, there are people who use the AI to try to create something that already exists in their heads. They have an image in mind and want to recreate this. They will never be happy. Instead, they need to recognize any unintended beauty — the happy accident — and celebrate that. You can waste frustrating hours trying to get an image of Robin Wright driving a purple race car around the Roman Colosseum or do it up in Photoshop in half the time. Don’t use a screwdriver when a hammer will do. Instead, focus on finding art where it exists. The artist curates.
Style and Attribution
Above I mentioned Caravaggio. The name evokes the singular style of the artist. Even still, you know that four hundred years ago someone muttered “A severed head painted on canvas using oil paint and a brush? It’s been done to death! Why won’t Carawhatshisname acknowledge the artists who had done that in the past?” In other words, the critic asks why the world takes inspiration from artists whose job is to inspire.
Side note: When a sports team wins a major title, the fans go nuts. Sometimes there are spontaneous parades or riots. But when you think about it, that’s the ONLY JOB of the sports team. We don’t have such low expectations of other service professionals. I don’t throw confetti when my appetizer order arrives correctly.
Why are we surprised that art inspires? That’s its function. Why do we look down our noses at art that is inspired by other art, as long as the new work also inspires? The answer is that we are accustomed to second-generation art that is uninspiring, that doesn’t even perform well in homage functionality. The Sex Pistols inspired waves of forgettable bands, and we only remember a fraction of these acts. That memorable fraction contained bands that added something new, that built on what the Sex Pistols did. And even way, way, way back then, as the shock waves of punk spread out from London, people asked “But what about The Ramones? Iggy Pop? MC5? ? and the Mysterians? The Monks? Why can’t people see that the Sex Pistols are no-talent ripoffs?”
An argument made by art purists against AI art is that by choosing prompts that call on the style of earlier artists, the AI artist is effectively stealing from predecessors. One thing that the AI tools do very well is mimic the style of popular artists. That is, you could see Lizzo done up in the style of Klimt. Some people are opposed to this.
If you’ve been reading along and are generally agreeing, you might find this objection laughable. I mean, are you taking food out of Klimt’s mouth (Gustav died in 1918)? Are you devaluing his existing paintings? Are you preventing Klimt from painting Lizzo now that it’s no longer an original idea?
We like the mixes that make us look at the world in new ways.
Add some Indian spices to Cuban food and you get Fusion cuisine. Whether it’s cultural appropriation or not, it’s delicious. Pineapple on pizza is perceived as delicious to some, nauseating to others, but it’s still an interesting combination. Avocado on toast triggers some people still, but it evokes a reaction nonetheless.
We devour mashup videos by Bill McClintock, stylistic adjustment videos by Andy Rehfeldt, and genre bending by Babymetal.
Simon Stålenhag’s paintings of stray robots roaming the countryside tickle that part of us that digs juxtaposition in the same way that Dalí’s burning giraffes did.
When our brain makes new connections, associating heretofore foreign ideas, it becomes stronger, resilient (Disclaimer: Not a neurologist. Assertion completely invented). This is the raison d’être of Surrealism.
With this in mind, it’s no surprise that the results of AI art are often described as surrealistic. That’s how we process exotic combinations of visual ideas. A malachite bull with a flashlight for a head? Sure, why not? A malachite bull with a flashlight for a head featured in Picasso’s Guernica? Somehow that rates worse on the not-cool spectrum?
As long as the new version also inspires, it is art. This is a wholly subjective measurement. Get your kicks off an original Mondrian on the wall of a museum or the same work printed on a coffee cup. If you fall in love with an AI-generated QR code in the style of Georges Seurat, great, ‘cuz Georges ain’t makin’ any more art.
AI Art and Commercialism
The surge in AI Art is coming at a time when a good deal of art created electronically is being sold via blockchain technology. This is simply the international, location-fluid version of a regular art gallery. The mere existence of galleries tells us that art and commerce go well together. For every purist who says “That belongs in a museum!” a horde of auctioneers fights to sell it. Van Gogh probably wished he was able to sell just a little bit more of his production. If the Internet existed, that would have increased his chances of finding just the right audience somewhere.
I avoided using the term NFT in the previous paragraph on purpose. NFTs have a reputation, not wholly unearned, of being ugly, mass-produced trash that are built to capitalize on crypto speculation. That they are championed by obnoxious crypto-bros does not make them more endearing. I’ll ask you to take a step back from that perception and instead think of the utility rather than the practice. Keep the gallery comparison in your head. If I open a gallery full of old, tattered TV Guides (Some of you might need to Google what those are), it does not sully the quality or functionality of galleries around the world. Likewise, pumping out a thousand NFTs of extremely similar pixelated primates doesn’t devalue other digital art whether created by AI or other digital artistry tools. However, if the only gallery you know of is the one housing old TV Guides, you’ll probably have a dim view of galleries in general.
If an artist inspires and curates, the product has worth. That worth can be translated to currency in a gallery or an NFT marketplace. Speculation has hit both digital art and traditional art, and you cannot criticize one and not the other for commercialism. That is to say, the worth you subjectively apply to inspiration may not match the worth at which others value the artwork. It’s okay to not be inspired by a hastily churned-out NFT or by a water-stained TV Guide. Bad art doesn’t detract from good art. A price tag doesn’t convert bad art to good art or vice versa. Klimt gotta eat!
The Future of Traditional Visual Artists
Nothing changes. Do what you do.
Note that art that doesn’t inspire can still function as decoration. Your technical prowess and skill at using your tools (that is, accountant-like skills) are still valued as YouTube videos, and Google will pay you for your views. Please subscribe and share! If you create uninspiring art, you are really just a decorator. And I shouldn’t say ‘just’ a decorator. I shouldn’t minimize that. That’s real skill, just like the cover band or lip-sync ‘artist’. Someone buys art at home goods stores. Someone has to keep craft/ in business. It could be you. A crafter/DIY decorator. Whatever makes you happy! Enjoy your creation process. I mean, some people will still call it art. Some people get inspired by folks who string yarn through plastic canvas to make tree ornaments. Go for it! You be you!
Now, the Italian Futurists took a much different tone. Over a hundred years ago they railed against the established art world. Museums were graveyards (as Luis Marcelo Mendes reminds us). They argued that inspiration could no longer be found in traditional forms. The Dadaists took inspiration from the Futurists, just as Surrealists took inspiration from Dada. All of these movements that disdained ‘traditional’ art still felt that art should inspire. Yet, many of these movements were still mired in the same media as their maligned predecessors. Kahlo used paint. Giacometti, bronze.
Is AI art really competition for you? Is the gallery patron the same person as the Ethereum speculator? Do you dislike hearing someone called “artist” if they ‘only’ inspire and curate? Is the real problem that AI artists inspire where you cannot? And with less effort? If effort was valued as part of art, why not pay someone to walk on a treadmill. That’s a silly idea. We pay for the inspiration. If AI art does that as well as someone who spent hours with quill-in-hand, why shell out for the non-value-added time?
(/me gets idea for NFT’s of timecards for time spent scooping water out of a pond and dumping it back in. Do we value the actual time or the idea? Is it worth more if the scooping was actually done and documented than if the work was never performed? Did you like the sound of a Milli Vanilli song less after their scandal?)
I’ll spin this around and throw shade elsewhere.
If you are churning out AI art without curating it, you are also not an artist. If your prompt includes “trending on Artstation”, you are working hard to ensure that AI art is boring, easily recognizable, and homogenized. Stop that. No artist says “I want my work to like everyone else’s art”. While traditional artists can argue that without the work, AI art is worthless, AI artists can say that without curation, the person who uses AI art tools is not an artist. Your screen saver of Conway’s Game of Life is not generating art with every iteration unless it inspires you. Minting screenshots of your screen saver doesn’t make them art even if it does make them more collectible. Hummel figurines are collectible. Are they art?
(Okay, that last paragraph can be argued. I could be convinced otherwise. But who cares what some random person [like me] on the Internet says? Do you value my words by their content, or by how much AI artwork I’ve sold? Or by the number of retweets? Get meta with me for a moment. This article talks about the value of art. What about the value of ideas? Is this article art? Are you inspired?)
Next Steps
- Don’t write articles about how AI art is somehow ruining everything.
- Support artists that inspire you, no matter how that art is created. Many of the captions of the images in this article are links to the artists’ Twitter accounts. Explore those. Maybe you’d prefer to see a urinal mounted on the wall? Awesome. Venmo some cash to R. Mutt.
- Experiment with AI tools. At the worst, you’ll get a laugh.
- Tzara and Marinetti weren’t the only poets that inspired and influenced visual art. Are these AI art tools all about transforming poetry into images? Flex that inner poet!
- Like, Subscribe, Retweet, Share, Comment, Buff, Boost, Wag, Pierce, Uglify, Pin, Goatse, or whatever you must do for other AI artists (and for this article!) Remember that this counts as curation. It is your artistic urge that compels you to click on the heart icon! Your artistic urge compels you! Your artistic urge compels you!