Tag: art

AIs Don’t Learn Jack Shit About Art

While people may continue to debate whether robots dream of electric sheep, let us please stop entertaining the notion that AIs “learn from artistic works the same way human artists learn” to make art. In a recent article solidly arguing that Big Tech is going to win again for exploiting creators to develop AI, Peter Csathy concludes:

For those of you who push back and argue that humans “train” on pre-existing copyrighted works all the time when they create works inspired by (or even “in the style of”) of others, let’s be clear. They typically aren’t plagiarizing or making actual copies. But generative AI is when it “scrapes” each and every word.

Csathy is right, of course, but even his counterargument still accepts the premise of the analogy. And that’s part of the problem. Because the analogy is dumb and should be rejected as dumb, or at least useless in the broader discussion about machine learning and generative AI. The comparison of AI “training” to human artistic “training” fosters a legal, moral, and cultural equivalency that should be dismissed with prejudice, if only because whatever we call the product of generative AI, it ain’t art.

A child finds a shell on the beach she thinks is pretty. She takes the shell home, cleans it off, and places it on a nightstand or other surface to decorate her room. The shell is fun to look at, and its texture, shape, and color inspire the child to hold it in her hand, study it for long periods of time, and perhaps even make new discoveries about it. The shell shares many qualities with art, but it is not art for the simple fact that no human made the object. Likewise, autonomously, AI-generated works are just pretty sea shells on the beach.

The essential anthropic contribution to artistic expression is not merely a doctrinal principle of copyright law (i.e., one cannot own rights in the “works” of nature), but it is axiomatic to the nature of art as both practice and experience. Whether good or bad, high or low, decorative or provocative, commercial or non-commercial, art, by definition, is made by humans. In fact, it is the only enterprise I can think of—other than religion—that entails an instinct or acceptance that something ineffable and profound is inherent.

Art is talismanic much like an autograph, rare book, or historic artifact. The value of an original Van Gogh is not merely underwritten by its uniqueness but by a metaphysical—perhaps even spiritual—sense that the canvas, paint, and expression are all imbued with eidolons of the artist and his place in the human continuum. The instinct to perceive meaning in objects or to form personal relationships with works of expression may be ineffable, but the phenomenon cannot be denied any more than the element of faith can rationally be stripped from religious ritual. With a little practice, I could correctly perform a religious rite, but because I’m an atheist, it would be a meaningless act. An observer might not know, but I would, and so (according to the faithful) would God. Likewise, “art” without the undefinable ingredient (call it what you will) is as empty as a prayer without faith.

Whether readers agree with any of this, perhaps it is enough to simply understand that artists do not merely “learn” to make art by studying the mechanics of prior art. Yes, that is often part of the artist’s education but not necessarily the most important part. And many artists are autodidacts without any kind of formal training. But whatever training, methods, or media may be cited to describe the journey toward art-making, what the artist fundamentally does is synthesize experience into expressive works that both comment upon and alter human experience. And since AI’s can’t have human experience, they really can’t learn shit about art.

Image source by: ipopba

AI “Art” is Boring

Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille; then the population of the world increased, and the peoples were bored en masse. To divert themselves they conceived the idea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens. This idea is itself as boring as the tower was high, and constitutes a terrible proof of how boredom gained the upper hand. – Soren Kierkegaard (1843) –

I had not thought about Kierkegaard writing on the subject of boredom in years. The essay from which the above quote is extracted was a favorite in college for its biting humor, but something about Rogers Brubaker’s excellent article about democratizing culture sent me in search of my 38-year-old (ouch) copy of The Kierkegaard Anthology, and I think it was this paragraph of Brubaker’s which triggered the thought:

But the question is not just how many people engage in cultural production — it’s how people engage. The AI music company Amper promises to help customers “create your own original music in seconds.” The creativity involved is rather attenuated, amounting to editing and tweaking the music generated by the AI, but that didn’t stop Amper co-founder Drew Silverstein from evangelizing in a TED talk about how AI can “democratize music” by enabling “anyone to express their creativity through music.” 

That promise to “create your own original music in seconds” was the portkey back to Kierkegaard. “In the case of children, the ruinous character of boredom is universally acknowledged,” he writes, and, indeed, I maintain that boredom is the inevitable outcome of AI toys promising to make music, visual art, poetry, etc. We have all experienced as children and witnessed as adults that transition between playing with a new toy and rapid disenchantment because the toy fails to engage the imagination. I am not the only Gen-X parent, for instance, to notice that when LEGO began selling kits to build branded objects like Star Wars spaceships, my own children would usually complete the assembly once and then be done with the toy forever. By contrast, my contemporaries and I spent hours with sets composed of bricks and no predetermined design.

Kierkegaard proposes that the plebian bores others and amuses himself while the aristocrat amuses others and bores himself—a dialectic perhaps well suited to describe the inevitable use of AI machines to “make one’s own music or art.” At the current state of the technology, the input of the human user is barely creative—little more than dropping a coin in a jukebox—and thus, all users similarly situated are plebian bores for the time being. The works resulting from their prompts may amuse them (for a while), but they will mostly bore others who will only be interested in “making their own music” with the same toys. Before long, a million individual users of the music generating AI will achieve a collective homeostatic boredom—a two-dimensional Babel leading nowhere.

Perhaps one of these accidental works will reach escape velocity, break through the gravitational force of mass boredom and “go viral” for a fleeting period. Some AI-generated ditty might be next year’s “Baby Shark” or even share the apotheotic luminance of a “Gagnam Style.” Someone will choreograph a short dance to accompany the tune, and TikTokers will fall in line to perform their versions, and Big Tech will look down and see that it is good, and their disciples will proclaim, “Behold the new culture! The human songwriter is an anachronism.” And it will all be as boring as it is ephemeral.

It is possible, of course, that generative AIs will become sophisticated enough to be collaborative tools wielded by the human artists—that the human still selects and arranges the creative elements to achieve her vision while the AI “helps” in some way. If and when we get there, we shall see. But in the meantime, it is clear that AIs do not need to be more sophisticated to replace some creative human work right now. My good friend Marco North writes on Facebook to me, “A full roster of AI voice talent costs less than $100 a month, works 24/7 and [will] do endless revisions….Voice work is perfect gig work for actors, say goodbye to lots of that.”

A gifted polymath in film, photography, music, poetry, and prose—Marco writes a weekly blog called Impressions of an Expat. Initially written from Moscow, he now writes from Tblisi, and in his latest post, he describes a happenstance encounter with the statue of Georgian poet Vazha-Pshavela (Luka Razikashvili) and his feelings about AI “art.” He asks:

Who will be the subject of the next statue? An algorithm? Will there be streets named after TikTok? Will we name a playground after a Spotify playlist curator? These are the people that tell our stories now. Midjourney highway will take you there. Take a left at ChatGPT square, you can’t miss it.

Yes. That is a vision of a possible future. Of course, if the tech giants can make the world just boring enough, then certain humans will do what certain humans do. They will disassemble the unengaging toy and turn it into something else—something called art. And then, the world will start to be interesting again.

Art is Human

A few months ago, I attended a local event, where photographer Doug Menuez spoke about his project “Wild Place: The People of Kingston, NY.” The description on his website begins . . .

Wild Place is the English translation of Wiltwyck, the original name given to Kingston, New York, in 1661 by Peter Stuyvesant and the Dutch who were facing fierce resistance from local Native Americans. My wife Tereza and I recently moved back to Kingston after a decade away and can see lots of changes, with more to come. It seems like an important moment.

Combining portrait and documentary in both photographs and short video interviews, “Wild Place” presents contemporary Kingston through Menuez’s view of its artists, activists, entrepreneurs, community leaders, and—not surprisingly—people who fit all those descriptions. While listening to Doug talk about the project, I was reminded why I care so much about artists and their work:  because through art and artists, we renew profound, even cathartic, connections to what it means to be human and, in turn, reinforce the reasons why humans bother to make art. My schedule does not permit frequent attendance at such events, but listening to Doug’s articulate, thoughtful, even spiritual discussion about his work was as close I come to listening to a sermon.

In my last post commenting on visual works generators like DALL-E, et al., I reiterated the view held by many that the notion of “AI art” is oxymoronic—as devoid of meaning as having a machine perform a religious rite for its human owner. Whatever creative work without humans ought to be called, it is not art. As such, I maintain that nobody will be interested in works made exclusively by machines for very long and that the current buzz about these generative algorithms may ebb quickly into the sea of trends to swirl in gooey eddies of crypto and NFTs.

This is not to suggest that creators and advocates of creators’ rights should ignore current threats to human artists, or that generative AIs do not preface an even darker version of the “information age” than the present state of madness. In a Facebook post that has been widely shared, a philosophy professor describes catching the first student in his class to use a bot called ChatGPT to write an assigned essay about David Hume. “The essay confidently and thoroughly described Hume’s views on the paradox of horror in a way that were [sic] thoroughly wrong,” the professor writes. “It did say some true things about Hume, and it knew what the paradox of horror was, but it was just bullshitting after that. To someone who didn’t know what Hume would say about the paradox, it was perfectly readable—even compelling.”

That last sentence is unsettling in a world buffeted by conspiracy mongers and alternative facts. No Alex Jones or Donald Trump or Stewart Rhodes required. The next cult figure can be an algorithm producing a “readable—even compelling” restatement on any matter from the Enlightenment to the suppression of viral disease. It is intriguing, if depressing, that a college student attempted to cheat by means of an AI to avoid honest engagement with Hume’s essay Of Tragedy, which contains the following observation:

We find that common liars always magnify, in their narrations, all kinds of danger, pain, distress, sickness, deaths, murders, and cruelties; as well as joy, beauty, mirth,’ and magnificence. It is an absurd secret, which they have for pleasing their company, fixing their attention, and attaching them to such marvellous relations, by the passions and emotions, which they excite. 

Hume could be commenting on the recently announced Trump NFT “trading cards,” which appear to comprise stolen images from the internet and badly photoshopped heads in a series of bizarre portraits depicting Trump as soldier, rancher, business leader, and even a costumed and be-muscled superhero with lasers shooting from his eyes. I got nothin’ except to say that there is no paradoxical pleasure in viewing this particular horror.

On a more sophisticated level, generative algorithms like MidJourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion are all “trained” by inputting a corpus of human-made creative works, most of which are scraped from the internet without permission of any living artists who still own the rights to the works. As PetaPixel reports, MidJourney founder David Holtz flatly admits feeding his system millions of images without permission, and illustrator Molly Crabapple, in an OpEd for the L.A. Times writes:

While they destroy illustrators’ careers, AI companies are making fortunes. Stability AI, founded by hedge fund manager Emad Mostaque, is valued at $1 billion, and raised an additional $101 million of venture capital in October. Lensa generated $8 million in December alone. Generative AI is another upward transfer of wealth, from working artists to Silicon Valley billionaires.

That these AI “art” generators represent yet another example of economic destruction without the creative part is a certainty. Less certain are some of the copyright questions, for instance, whether input of protected works for “machine learning” is infringement. This will remain a theoretical/ideological debate for attorneys, academics, and copyright nerds like me until one of two things happens:  legislation or litigation, both of which move at a crawl compared to the market for new tech toys. If a lawsuit began tomorrow, for instance, it would be hard to say whether the legal questions presented will still be relevant to the market by the time the case is resolved.

Perhaps the real potential of the generative algorithm lies not with illustration or design or music composition, but with medical diagnostics or some other valuable purpose. If computer science is a true science, then it must allow for unintended discovery, and who’s to say that an experiment in “AI art” cannot be the precursor to an algorithm that helps identify genetic disposition for certain infections?

This does not mean, of course, that we should excuse models in the present that undermine the rights or value of the human artist. On the contrary, I mention this alternate history to emphasize the point that of all the things we can do with computing power, one thing we absolutely do not need are machines that make “art.” Tellingly, Hume’s essay is mostly about art, and to the question whether creative expression about tragedy can provoke a sense of pleasure for the audience, he replies:

This extraordinary effect proceeds from that very eloquence, with which the melancholy scene is represented. The genius required to paint objects in a lively manner, the art employed in collecting all the pathetic circumstances, the judgment displayed in disposing them:  the exercise, I say, of these noble talents, together with the force of expression, and beauty of oratorial numbers, diffuse the highest satisfaction on the audience, and excite the most delightful movements.

Maybe the AI cheerleaders will accuse me of anthropic maximalism, but in addition to doubting that an “AI artist” could ever express anything close to the transcendent experience Hume describes, I am certain that we do not want it to even try. Art is human. There are better uses for computers.

Photo by: Abrill