Paint, Digital and AI: A Meander Through the Changing Face of Art

When I was a kid, I remember art being something that was definitely very tangible, and it invariably seemed to imply either painting or sculpture. I have been in the art business several times in my life, and for the most part we handled paintings and photographs, although occasionally we would also do some 3D sculpture.

Even while we had our galleries, we saw the changing face of art slowly starting to take hold, as art became more and more digitized. That opened up a bunch of questions: How do we define what art is? What constitutes art and what does not constitute art?

In time, we reached the point where we started working with digital artists at one of the galleries. The thing that was always the interesting part of the discussion there, was the question of what constituted "an original." If the original work is essentially nothing more than pixels on a screen where does the "original" reside?

This, of course, gave rise to the next issue in the discussion which was whether or not originality was becoming a completely obsolete.

Or is it just the case that originality is becoming more of a fluid idea?

Consider this in the digital world: somebody can create something and somebody else can very easily make a copy of it. Does that mean that originality gets ascribed to the first person who came up with it and that becomes how we determine what's original and what is not?

A couple of the artists at our gallery took their own approach to originality, in that they would finish a digital work, get a very high quality printed copy made on archival paper, add a little bit to it by hand, then hand sign it and thereby we declare that "this was the original," at least in physical form.

However, this did not address what the original was in digital form, nor whether originality mattered.

Is the importance of "original work" just an outdated way of looking at art?

The AI Explosion

Now we stand at the threshold of a veritable explosion in the development of AI and how AI will influence the art world.

The presumption behind Art so far — whether it is digital or physical — has been that there is a human being who has a vision and through some combination of skill, creativity and work manages to turn that vision into an output that other people can see and interpret and appreciate. The common thread here is that there is definitely a human being undertaking the creative process.

But now AI can create art in a matter of seconds. All you have to do is use one of the AI digital art programs out there and say, for example "paint me a picture of a windmill on a sunny day with tulips in the background" and the AI creates something.

You may have give the instructions, but you didn't do the work.

Questions Abound!

Originality aside, does this even constitute "art?" Or is it simply "a design?" And does it have value? Moreover, does an artist actually get to put their name on it just because they told an AI program to create it? Or is "created by AI" something different, maybe akin to simply pressing a button to have a printing press running on somebody else's original creation?

I use the printing analogy, because in essence the printing press doesn't create anything new nor does AI — at least as we know it at this point. AI draws on what has already been created; what is already on file and in existence within its database, however huge that database might be. The AI output is not actually created from an ostensible "creative spark," so to speak.

This brings us to the next possible nuance within this discussion which is whether the "thing" we are valuing when we are purchasing art (or acquiring art in some other way) from an artist or creator is their vision not the actual art? Is what we're really buying their Creative Spark? And is this Creative Spark — or whatever you might call it — of an artificial intelligence representative of the same type of creativity as that created by a human?

Personally, I am not a fan of AI created art. I think AI is a fabulous thing for anything from medical diagnostics to doing simple repetitive graphics and repetitive work that otherwise would be painful and boring to do. But as a tool to put front and center to represent originality and creativity, it becomes a bit sketchy.

We humans are interesting creatures in the way we develop consciousness and view the experience around us.

Let's take a sidestep from art for a moment, and instead turn to the field of music. Is it the same thing to go to a concert and experience actual humans playing actual instruments, as it is to sit in your living room and listen to a piece of music — however good it might be — that basically was machine generated in ten seconds, five minutes ago?

Which brings me to my ultimate personal level conclusion about AI and what matters to us.

My worry is that with AI becoming more and more sophisticated we are gradually going to lose our ability to care about anything. We will increasingly — as everything becomes easier and easier to create — slip into a place where we will simply say "who cares" whether a great artist created this 500 years ago or a machine created it 5 seconds ago.

I don't think that level of apathy and indifference will serve the human species well in the long run, across all sorts of fields of both creativity and not so much creativity.

Let me know what you think in the comments below! And thanks for coming by to visit!

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