There's a lot of stuff I want to say and put out there about art, the philosophy of art, and genAI and just kind of want to encapsulate it in a small little rant of mine, so here we go.
As a theory of what I think art is- at its rawest core- is stimulation. Humans have one of, if not the most complex pattern recognition of any creature. Our ability to both create and recognize incredibly nuanced details in stimuli and cognition has allowed humans to create many things- most of all language and art.
It is stimulating to our minds to create these patterns, and we pair that with our desire to communicate and we confer many complex ideas from information to emotion through art alone- music, oration, writing, performance, play, etc. Art is what makes us human, and art is inherently human. It doesn't have to be good, it doesn't have to be a commodity, it just has to be.
This is where genAI comes into the discussion. It does not create art, it creates a facsimile of art. A mimicry. An "ai artist" isn't truly an artist, they aren't speaking through their expression, they are asking a machine to generate "something" that resembles what art looks like and calling it theirs. As an "artist" it's no different from asking an artist to make a commission for you, except there's no engagement or feedback. As expression, the closest it can resemble is picking a reaction image or emoji.
But then, what is it for? Commodification. Profit. GenAI is built specifically to displace artists, to try and steal their influence, to devalue what they create. No matter how "good" it gets, all it ever serves is to deceive others in thinking what it creates has some meaning. To deceive others into thinking "someone made this".
A great example of what this is represented by making an AI voice of toad sing bohemian rhapsody vs hearing a person really attempt it on their own. It's not as funny or meaningful if a machine does it, it's that a person- a living person- went out of their way to strain their vocal chords and expose themselves to the potential embarrassment to do that.
The trend of AI is really only harmful and follows a long line of scam culture. Much like how dropshipping blighted online selling and content farms ruin social media, AI intends to leech off of artists and devalue their work. It is a part of a machine that will only ever succeed through deception. It can become very good, it can become nearly imperceptible, but it will never rise above the very nature of that. That it only exists to deceive others (largely for profit). Because art is made by people, it is made to express, it is made to communicate, it is made to connect.
A bad artist will always be better and more of a true artist than the best that any AI can put out.
