How To Make Beautiful Art (That People Will Utterly Hate)
Are artists losing their jobs to automation?
A mere quinquennium ago, if you showed a robot a picture of a traffic light next to a portrait of Nicolas Cage customizing a Chipotle burrito and asked it to find the seven differences, you'd be relieved to learn machines couldn't quite crack the Captcha to your HBO account just yet.
But those times are gone.
AI-generated art has started to come out of Beta testing and it's evident that crosswalks, fire hydrants and mailboxes aren't challenging shapes for them anymore. Honestly, when I first heard of this I thought the artwork would be so ugly I'd want to perform a Van Gogh cut on both my ears just so that I would have something to cover my eyes with — but they're not! They mostly feel human-made, not random and meaningless like, say, a smear of tomato sauce, or a Jackson Pollock:
I don't wanna call this a robot apocalypse, but the art world has never been shaken this hard since the first cracked Photoshop copy to ever hit The Pirate Bay. Save your talent and Skillshare coupons; now you only need a Discord account and a free trial to Midjourney to start snatching art contest prizes away from real people:
Naturally, this has sent some real artists into a flying rage of artistic integrity.
I mean, I thought Nickelback would have to drop an NFT collection to get them this riled up about anything, but I get it — it's gotta be annoying to compete against something that isn't restricted by circadian rhythms, food ingestion, or the childhood-born imposter syndrome of having none of your Magna Doodle artworks receive critical acclaim from your parents.
AI pumps out content as it is told, and it has already shown online art communities that it can ramp up the daily upload enough to find an answer to the question "Exactly how much furry porn can the internet handle?"
Still, I think humans are exaggerating a bit.
Sure this tool is a giant leap from Snapchat filters and Photoshop’s Liquify tool, but the only job that automation has managed to kill in 50 years is the elevator operator (they are missed though; weather small talk has never been the same), so you’d have to display Back to the Future 2 levels of techno-optimism to be legitimately threatened about AI yet.
Besides, what is art anyway?
As much as the next man, I like to think of it as the only industry that lets you empty a pickle jar, piss in it, put a Will Smith action figure inside, title it "Pissed Will Is In A Bit Of A Pickle," put a $2.4 million price tag and still convince Gary Vee that he can flip it for a profit — but for the sake of argument, I'm gonna go with Leo Tolstoy's definition of art and say it's when "a person, having experienced an emotion, intentionally transmits it to others."
And if AI art has taught us something so far is that art is not so much about the emotion as it is about the person transmitting it.
Otherwise, there’d be no reason for people to want Elvis Presley to marry them, or for potterheads to hold their breath every time J.K. Rowling tweets something opinionated. If art was purely about the quality of the work, and not about the social element, the term “bored ape” would only invoke images of apathetic monkeys in your mind, and not a yacht club full of tech bros who think Ethereum should become the new world currency.
Art without humanity is like the junk food of nutrition; all flavour, no substance. Like the Tinder of romanticism; all fluids, no intimacy. Like the social media of relationships; popularity without belonging.
Of course, artists may find it annoying that I can whip up a decent artwork without spending the money they spent on Udemy courses. They may find it irritating that anyone can render a portrait of Nicolas Cage customizing a Chipotle burrito, in the style of a 1990s cartoon show.
But still, I think it’ll be a long while before your Roomba behaves human enough to create its own DeviantArt portfolio and start giving Banksy some healthy competition.
Fantastic read