AI and Art: Imagining the Infinite
Art Can Help Us Understand What It Means to Be Human in the Age of AI
The advent of the camera changed everything for the art world. Entire categories of art were challenged — those that depicted real landscapes, people, and objects. Photographs could more quickly and accurately capture likenesses than paintings, prints, and drawings. Artists were no longer the only ones who could help the world document and share visual information.
Patrons no longer needed to commission artists, but technologists who knew how to operate cameras, complex at the time and requiring much training, to create their portraits.
But artists and mediums such as painting, prints, sculpture, and drawing did not disappear. They became experimental once again, pushing boundaries. Impressionism was born. Then post-impressionism and abstraction. Artists were free to create whatever existed in their imagination, in more vibrant color and more varied forms. And, eventually, patrons and museums and the general public accepted that and even embraced it. Art started to reflect our souls and dreams. Artists began using cameras in ways that only artists could, playing with light and shadow to reflect their unique visions.
Smart phones with digital cameras changed everything for the art world again. Photography and videography are now accessible for anyone with one of these devices, and high quality is achievable with almost no training. Filters and editing tools once reserved only for those professionals who could afford Adobe Photoshop were quickly and freely integrated into apps, becoming automated.
Photographers and video artists have been pushing boundaries —using these technologies to bring their visions to life in new, immersive ways. They’ve shown us that these tools can do way more than document or promote, they can help us express ourselves and question our reality in previously unimaginable ways. And, in many museums and galleries that exhibit contemporary art, works created by artists using their smartphone cameras can be found on display.
Today, text-to-image (and likely very soon, text-to-video) AI tools are transforming the landscape of visual art once again. It’s exciting, terrifying, and the art world is in a fit of debate. What is art? What is creativity? What is originality in this age of AI?
You may have seen recent media headlines about AI-generated art winning fine arts competitions and upsetting the judges and fellow artists. Or arts blogs questioning whether NFTs can really be considered “high art.” Or spoken with any number of arts professionals to witness a divide between those who see new opportunities and those who see growing threats.
I have faith that, again, artists will experiment and break boundaries, flying past what we once believed our limits to be.
To me, art is a reflection of our spirit as humans. The art being created by AI will stand out when it reflects universal human truths and touches the viewer’s soul in that special way.
AI cannot generate art alone — but humans can create fine art using artificial intelligence. AI is another tool for artists to use to bring their visions to life, to make real what was only existing in the imagination. And it will be powerful, creative, and original when human artists use it to bring forth those authentic visions. Looking to the future, I see artists creating their own unique ways of prompting these AI tools, and perhaps customizable “pro” versions of tools like DALL-E and Midjourney that can be trained on an artist’s distinct body of work to better reflect personal style. Eventually, and maybe not even so far down the line, AI-generated art will be accepted and on view to help us navigate our shared struggle and to explore and better comprehend what it means to have AI in our lives. And, perhaps like photography in the late 1800s and digital photography in the smart phone age, it will push us to explore new depths as artists, writers, and creators of all types.
There are certainly going to be challenges and pitfalls. Text-to-image AI tools are pulling from art and information that already exists on the Internet to help people generate images from the prompts we enter. Is this just a new way of the old method of gathering inspiration from all that surrounds you, or to, as author Austin Kleon might say, Steal Like an Artist? Are there major privacy and ownership and intellectual property concerns? Are the tools inherently biased upon their designers’ biases? Are the data sets they pull from biased and problematic? Is the potential for accessibility and democratization matched by the potential to create and exacerbate inequities? Will we let machines take over traditionally human jobs, and, if so, why? What does coexisting with AI look like and mean for humans and society as a whole? Will “humanness” shine through it all?
These are questions we need to ask ourselves. And I think they are questions some artists are already pointing to through their work.
You’re reading the “Curious Optimist,” so I’m going to leave you with a bright note: I think that art will always be there for us as a medium through which to explore truth, reality, and the major issues of our society. In times of constant change and uncertainty and invention, art will help us ask the tough questions and see ourselves for who we truly are. No technology or tool can take away what makes art art — the human imagination. And no matter how a work of art is created, it still has the capability to help us better understand what it means to be human.
Please note: Opinions are my own. None of this text was generated by ChatGPT. I will disclose use of ChatGPT if I decide to incorporate it into my work on Medium.
