There has been a scramble among artists, both students and professionals, in the last two years. This mad rush has not only been due to passing experiments such as NFTs (non-fungible tokens) which posed a considerable threat to the art industry for a few months before dying down and never to be heard from, but also due to generative AIs. Unlike NFTs, Midjourney, DALL-E and their predecessors are seemingly here to stay for a while. Conversations about the ethics of AI art being inherently “uncanny and off-putting” have not deterred their rise.
Generative art systems work quite simply. Like a Google search, the user “prompts” the AI with the art of their “need”, and usually an image is produced immediately or after a few seconds, depending on the particular software. However this is where the discourse stems from - is art a need? Is it anyone's “right” to own art or have art made to suit them? The immediate production of art on an action as simplistic as a prompt not only causes the mental effort of artists null and void, but also their physical exertions.
Fruit of Labour to Low Hanging Fruit
The complex interactions between artistic expression and generative AI has also led to conversations about plagiarism and copyright. Copyright is a topic whose waters constantly seem to only get muddier, and generative art seems to have tarred it once and for all. Research reveals that generative art functions solely on art that has been posted by art accounts or admirers of artists, therefore ultimately, this sort of image generation cannot exist without human artists.
However, such realizations have not led to the fair valuation of human art. With superstars such as Nicki Minaj using AI to generate her latest album cover, AI art has a group of powerful and influential supporters. She is sure to reach peaks on charts all around the world with the AI generated cover being its instantly recognisable face, but will the artist whose works were non-consensually stolen ever receive even a hundredth of that recognition?
However, another group discusses how using AI art as a way of promoting can be interpreted as self-aware and self-referential. There is an attempt to use the six-fingered hands, hazy lines and bland, repetitive style of AI as a certain form of “camp,” and fans defend their idols with such narratives. There are self-proclaimed AI artists, who have apparently mastered the art of prompting and therefore perfected their “art”, and are pioneers of this camp movement. There is also an increasing propensity of replying to art being created or posted with the fact that AI could have done that in minutes, and then posting that art in the comments of the creator.
We still speak of a time wherein Michelangelo was commissioned by the Church, a ridiculous sum of three thousand gold coins to paint the Sistine Chapel. However, in tandem, we also speak of a time when Van Gogh can be recreated a thousand times over by a single prompt. Where do we go from this point onwards?
Hyper-Realism, Patronage, or their lack thereof
One of the main points of contention against contemporary artists is abstractness of form. If one has been on social media for any amount of time, posts demanding that sculpting excellence from the Greek and Roman times be brought back, or comparing a Matisse with a Rembrandt with a distasteful comment towards the skills of the former. The rationale behind such “degradation” goes undiscussed : artists are still just as capable and skilled, but they are not being wholly provided for by rich patrons.
The slew of internet rage towards Klein’s Blue, with the common thread of “anyone could have made this.” is telling of this mindset. While the materiality of the painting is blue paint on a canvas, the story behind it is of a man who invented a color that was thought impossible to be produced on paper. Klein’s Blue, to this day, is easily produced on the screen and is infinitely harder to produce on paint. One may even reduce it to the common saying that the making of that pigment is art, just like one’s mother’s recipe that cannot be replicated. Thus, to preserve human art, we must begin following Schröter's advice in his essay on the same topic : we must critically investigate efforts instead of outputs.
In the world where technology is able to duplicate most mediums, the process and undertaking of art should perhaps come to the forefront.
The End of Art as we know it?
The twenty-first century has brought equality and egalitarianism on several fronts, much of which was desperately needed. However, one of those arenas does not need to be art, especially AI art. Art should remain an elitist preoccupation - not in the sense that the ones behind it should be relegated to positions of privilege, but those who sought it should pay for it in its weightage. This is not a bombastic statement made in favor of the rich and powerful, but quite the opposite, as AI art is the easy way to own art without having to pay a dime.
Hito Steyerl writes in his essay ‘Mean Images’, AI-generated art revolves “around the average, the median; hallucinated mediocrity”. Art faces the same dissolution as any other object when it becomes the public domain, which DALL-E or Midjourney attempt to. In this unique case, returning it to its private space in ivory towers may be the best for its own sake.
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