No no no, AI “art” is not Art. If you think it is, you don’t understand Art
Let‘s finally explain what Art is, and most importantly, what it is not…
I just read this article by Stella Sky, here on Medium, where she explains that she creates art, using Midjourney. Under “her” pictures, the little words “made by Stella Sky”, made me cringe a lot. I feel a lot of people are confused about what art really is. It’s normal, it’s a vague concept, that can cover a lot of things, for different people and different times. But I still believe we can try to define it. And especially define what it is not.
I’m going, after, to explain why AI artists are not artists (as an artist myself), even if they can “imitate” artists. There is a big difference, that I am going to try to explain. And then, why AI art is not Art.
What is Art, in the end?
Originally, the word “art” comes from the latin ars, which means “skill, trade, technical knowledge”.
Modern definition:
To put it simply, art is a human activity that requires practical skill, and theoretical knowledge, to create a product or activity that appeals to senses, emotions, intuitions and intellect.
What art is not?
Art is different from nature, because art is a human activity, it needs human intent. Art is different from science, because its goal is not pure knowledge. Its “goal” is centered around producing emotions, at least mainly. “Making you think” is a good but finally secondary and “optional” byproduct of a good art piece.
An art piece that would ONLY make you think (without trying to produce any emotions linked to aesthetics in any form), would probably not be pure art, but closer to philosophy. But, conversely, a philosophy book that intends to produce mainly emotions, rather than to simply explain (like Thus spoke Zarathustra, by Nietzsche) is closer to art than to philosophy, in my opinion.
Those concepts are of course subject to a little bit of personal interpretation, I admit. But the most important thing to understand is that…
Art is NOT an idea.
Now the most important thing to understand: ART IS NOT AN IDEA.
I’m going to say it again: an artist is not (just) someone who has ideas.
ANYBODY has ideas. Having ideas is one of the most simple thing in the world. And yes, good ideas too are not that difficult to get.
It’s not ideas that make the world, it’s their execution. So…
Art is about EXECUTION.
I’m sure you know at least one person who once told you that they have an amazing idea, to create the next big startup, or to write the next big novel… Maybe you’re the one who had one of those great ideas. I’m SURE they do. Most people actually do have amazing and crazy and creative ideas. Just look at your dreams. You ARE creative. Being creative doesn’t automatically makes you an artist though. Scientists can be incredibly creative people. But they are not necessarily artists.
What makes a good art product or activity, though, is not JUST the idea. It’s mainly the execution.
An idea is only as good as its execution.
It’s true for most human activity by the way. Sure you can have the idea to connect friends on internet, but that doesn’t mean you are going to create something as successful as Facebook.
You can have the idea of a story with a scary clown, terrorizing and killing children. That doesn’t mean you are going to write a good book. While a good writer like Stephen King can write “It”, and it becomes a masterpiece, not many people could write a masterpiece with the same idea. Stephen King is a good writer not just because he has a lot of original ideas, but mainly because he can write in a very skilled way. His writing abilities are the main ingredient for his books, it’s those who give life to his ideas.
You can have the idea of a lot of things, as long as you can’t execute those ideas, they have no value.
And it’s not the idea that people love, it’s the final execution. That’s why some Batman movies are good, and some are really bad.
It’s exactly the same “idea”, of a superhero dressed as a bat fighting bad guys, but executed very poorly or very well, depending on the movie director (and the movie team, and actors…).
So, why AI “artists” are not artists?
Because they lack “creative control”. AI is an “art” of “accident”. It is not “reliable”, or consistent. That’s why it doesn’t really have a “style”. I mean it does have a style actually, we can immediately recognize the style of Midjourney compared to Dall-E for instance. But it’s not the style of the person who creates the “prompts”. It’s the style of the software.
If you look at Stella Sky images for instance, you could tell they are from Midjourney if you know the software. But you could NEVER tell they are from Stella Sky in particular, compared to all the other images produced with the same software by other people.
It’s impossible to tell which person wrote which prompt, by looking at the final picture.
When people type prompts, and think they “create” art, they are extremely wrong.
They just ORDER “art”. Like they would if they hired an illustrator.
If you hire an illustrator, and you tell them what to draw (the prompt is like the brief), then you are a CLIENT of an artist, not an artist!
If you hire a music composer, and tell him to produce a “sad, melancholic music, to listen to at night when you are alone”, and he creates a masterpiece like Chopin’s mazurkas, you can’t say that YOU created this music. It’s not because you give the order, that you are the artist.
Finally, why AI art is not art?
What AI do is to randomly, but with a pattern recognition, put pixels on a screen to look like a picture made by an artist. But it has no intent, and doesn’t understand what it is producing.
The person who writes the prompts is a client. The prompts are not art, like would be a poem, because they are not the “final product”. We don’t read the prompts, we look at the pictures that the software made.
The AI is a machine, a random generator of pixels.
There is no artists involved in this process (other than the ones who produced the billions of pictures stolen to be used in the softwares data base, with no regard for copyright claims by the way).
It produces something that can look like art. That doesn’t mean it’s art.
It’s like saying that a word generator is an artist.
But it creates beautiful pictures!
Yes, Ai can create beautiful, moving pictures. Not a lot to be honest, but I have seen a few online, that really made me stop and admire.
Exactly like a real life sunset is beautiful, moving, but not art (it is made by nature, with no human intent or skills involved), Ai pieces can be beautiful and moving without being art.
Infinite monkey theorem analogy
Basically, to make an analogy that will illustrate the difference, let’s think about the “Infinite monkey theorem”.
The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.
Ok. Great. Does that mean that the monkey is an artist? No. Why? Because he didn’t write Hamlet with INTENT. And he doesn’t understand it either. He did it by ACCIDENT. It is not reliable.
It’s exactly the same with the AI art generator. You can type the same prompt over and over again, it will produce different outputs. Moreover, a lot of them are totally useless.
When it does product good pictures, it is totally by randomness, not by intentional planning. It’s US, humans, who realize “oh this one looks nice”. The AI doesn’t make any difference between a good and bad picture. For the AI, they are all just PIXELS.
The AI doesn’t try to communicate something with its productions.
The AI doesn’t know what a tree is. It never saw a real tree. Never. It is not “moved” by a beautiful tree. It just knows that “pictures of trees”, in its database, tend to have the pixels of this color, right there in the picture, on average. So if you ask it to produce a picture of a tree, it will randomly put the pixels, according to the patterns of millions of tree images, to produce something random that has more chances to look as a tree, than if you type the prompt “apple” for instance.
Some of those trees images will look terrible, and some of them will look fantastic. The AI will not know why, or which one. It is random.
But some “real art” is also just about concept.
Yeah, I know, some modern, contemporary art is also just about “the idea”.
Like Malevitch “white square on white background”, or Duchamp’s Fontaine etc…
The difference is obviously that they have intent, contrary to the machine.
But it’s like writing prompts you may say, the person writing prompts have intent…
But precisely, all my point here is to show that most “average” people don’t understand, nor like, those “conceptual art pieces”, exactly for the reason that those artists give too much importance to “ideas”, over execution.
I’m not going to enter into the debate about if contemporary art is art or not. What I just want to show, though, is that when art is just about the concept, it becomes very controversial, almost “dubious”.
It is totally evident, obvious, for almost anybody, that Raphael, Caravaggio, Michel Ange, Leonardo Da Vinci, are artists. It is way more confusing for contemporary conceptual artists, that you see in the Miam Art Basel for instance (one of those who put pizza boxes on the floor, selling it for millions of dollars, I saw it, I promise…). The formers are admired since centuries, the later… I’m not even sure if they are even admired today, or just speculated on honestly...
But why execution is more valued than concept?
Because the “traditional” artists show a mastery of technical abilities. And art was originally about technical abilities, not just ideas (artists were sought to “imitate” nature in antiquity, not create). While the new “conceptual artists”… only show that they have original or shocking ideas, not always “technical abilities” of any sort.
While most people realize they could never acquire the technical abilities of a Leonardo Da Vinci, most people assume (probably rightfully) that they could have crazy and shocking ideas, like any contemporary artist, fairly easily, if they really wanted to. I’m not saying they are right or wrong. But, let’s admit it, it’s more “impressive” to see a Vermeer than an abstract painting (even if I promise that I really love Kandinsky or Rothko), or even a giant green butt plug by Paul Mc Carthy.
I’m not saying figurative art is “better”, or that abstraction is bad. I’m just saying we intuitively respect more something that takes decades to master and create, that something that can be technically done in a few hours. It’s natural. We do the same for any human activity.
If a monochromatic white (or Klein blue) abstract painting is destroyed, we feel bad, of course. Like if a giant green butt plug is vandalized, sure, it’s bad, it’s not normal to destroy art pieces. But if a Géricault painting was to be destroyed, I’m sure we would feel the loss as more severe, even if we don’t want to admit it.
Just because we can easily recreate a new monochromatic white or Klein blue abstract painting, or a giant green butt plug, given the minimum instructions about the canvas and the paint, or the material and dimensions of the plug. While it would be extremely difficult to create “Le radeau de la méduse” again, even with the best instructions, and the best painters.
Conclusion
Obviously art is subject to interpretation.
Some people will assume that a beautiful picture is art. Some will say that anything is art. Some will think that everybody is an artist. You can think what you want of course. We can think that giving a trophy to everyone makes everyone an athlete. Or we can think that an athlete is not just a question of trophy, not just “someone who does sport”. But someone who devoted their life to sport, and attained human technical excellence in their domaine of expertise.
It’s the latter view that I personally chose to adopt for art.
In my opinion, making pictures in 2 minutes by typing words in a software, with no knowledge of any art theory or history, no knowledge of anatomy, colors, or even on how to correctly hold a pencil, doesn’t make you an artist any more than playing a song on Spotify makes me a musician.
Because, at the end of the day, if electricity goes down, my internet connection is lost, or my computer broken, I can always draw on a piece of paper. The skills are there, with or without the technology. Like a good serious pianist without a piano still possesses all the technical, theoretical, musical abilities to create music differently, a good artist doesn’t need his wacom cintiq to draw.
An Ai artist is totally dependent on so many other people and things to do his “art”. On the engineers who built the software. The servers to store the billions images of the database used by the AI (stolen to real artists without respecting copyrights by the way). On the electricity workers. On the computers factory, etc…
What can an AI “artist” produce without their AI software?
Nothing.
Thank you, have a good day, don’t hesitate to contradict me in the comments, it’s an open debate ;)
