"An A.I.-Generated Picture Won an Art Prize. Artists Aren’t Happy"

 

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Though many magazines posting "An A.I.-Generated Picture Won an Art Prize. Artists Aren’t Happy" are tech and crypto sites, this story has seen traffic on more reputable world news sources like NyTimes and Washington Post as well, which is where there starts to be a problem. This "arts competition" was exclusively a digital art-category competition, and it was also at the Colorado State Fair. (As far as I know, not an arts establishment.) One of the judges holds a MFA in creative writing, and the other is a freelance indigenous artist from Colorado.

By far the worst thing is that it's clearly intended as sensationalist and immediately paints all artists as reactionary.

 

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Not only is this extremely discouraging towards a potential collaboration between artist and AI scientist, but it does nothing to build upon or support the quickly diminishing world of arts. The ability to conjure images, creative narratives, and connect with our emotions, which was really the starting point of our history and humanity, is now arbitrarily transposed to a contest or a contest in how quickly works can be produced. You would never trust AI to become better than us at personal psychiatry/therapy, at loving, or at experiencing and understanding pain. It doesn't create new ideas - the idea "is" because we perceive it.

 

4 Whitney

The potential for AI in art is so confusing, compounding-ly abstract, and completely novel for the artist. Yet, there are definitely examples of thoughtful integration. At the Whitney Musuem 2022 Bi-annual: Cargo by Andrew Roberts, provides gruesome social commentary on the "zombification" of their country alongside ever-normalized violence in media. Through ai/ar face-tracking technology, they appear as zombies wearing various company logos(amazon, apple, etc.) on an enlarged iPhone screen in front of a typical but notably eerie city backdrop. And then, pieces like Long Low Line by Danielle Dean, show us that technology is never art in itself. The universal sense of our environments and the transformation of our planet are presented with a direct relation to the history of "Fordlandia," a corporate tragedy you'll have to read about yourself - the scrolling gives us a sense of walking and serves to create a uniform motion through the experience of time and color. The many layers of the environment appear cartoon-ish, ambivalently crude yet vivid enough to make us consider upon the slight discomforts that begin to affect us.

5 Tangent on art

Every aspect of the form and presentation of Dean's piece was a conscious decision and served a function. In order to form anything, an artist needs a motivation, a vision and a genuine effort - it is a becoming of the self through creation, the stamp of life confirmed through oneself without the slightest doubt. Only through yourself can it be understood through others, resulting in a network of concepts, faith, and mutual agreements and/or disagreements as to the reality of society and the things we deem important. Art isn't a product or a job, nor is it a competition, nor is it a branding or a showcase. And most importantly, a work isn't art just because it successfully made us feel something. 

 

No, there have been, and will always be an infinite variety of cheap ways to do that; colorful, shiny, over-dramatized sounds and images. The bass from a speaker quite literally makes your body vibrate and your heartbeat rise. The ephemeral, invisible, yet continuous process known as self-consciousness, our self-criticism and journey through learning and changing, our hard work and the bursting need to be alive in this moment - they all create an equation to output something into the world, that has no power over how others might perceive or be affected by it, but over time, sometimes over millennia, will eventually be seen, known, forgotten and re-remembered, as the real thing.

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At the end of the day, articles like these do nothing to express the nuanced developments in art and technology. It fails to agree upon a basic definition of art, perspective, and value, and only raises a few fair points about copyright issues and ethical concerns with what resources/datasets are being used to train the AI. Moving forward, we can only hope for the day when collaborators regularly address the roles of technology, human creativity, and craft in proper synergy and structure.