Art without People

Dear Jack,

If the purpose of life is to produce evidence of its minutiae — if we make food in order to post a picture of it, or meet up with people just to tag them on some app — then gen AI makes perfect sense. Because the actual having of an experience is an incidental and outmoded formality.

There are a couple folks in my life who seem to have this perspective. They will interact just long enough to get a photo before descending back into their empathy boxes. I have written before about the intersection of technology and addiction (and I’m sure I will again), so I’m going to avoid that subject here; instead I want to talk about generative AI specifically as the natural outgrowth of our current online culture.

Much hay is made on Bluesky, ArtStation and elsewhere about the evils of gen AI, not just in terms of plagiarism and resource consumption, which are of course legitimate enough faults on their own, but about its sheer pointlessness. And that is because the hay-makers view images as a means of storytelling, i.e. one has a point of view and shares it by creating an image, thereby making the picture a form of communication. And this leads me to wonder if it’s actually possible for a human to create an image without narrative. Even “non-representational” art has some perspective baked in, doesn’t it? It exists within a context, and is often experienced as some kind of reaction to “figurative” art.

Jack, I hope you won’t, as I did, go into debt for some kind of fine arts degree. But if you spend a few years discussing philosophy in an old brick building surrounded by trees and people in sweaters who have never held real jobs, you will doubtlessly participate in these conversations. That was where I realized art is indivisible from narrative, Mondrian be damned.

However, that was before we built software which predicts pixels from noise until it renders something which our brains can generally comprehend.

This is more akin to Aleatoric music than it is to Abstract Expressionism, except without a composer to determine the rules by which a score is created or performed. Gen AI is beyond even Allison Parrish’s solar-powered poetry generator. Its inputs are suggestions and its outputs, to borrow from Allison again, are ransom notes: inscrutable amalgams of the compressed renderings of a billion viewpoints. It is, in short, finally “art” which has been severed from human intent, a product without a designer. It is whatever remains of an experience when you remove the one who experiences.

And to look at it this way, gen AI is the inevitable intersection of two unholy urges:

1. The ivory tower’s obsession with dissecting art as if it is a mechanism
2. American capitalism’s obsession with the performative curation of life