A philosophical pondering of the evolving AI situation as relates to art, and my art.

[I wrote this in one go as a Twitter thread, which got 1 like. For this post I’ve added images generated by Easy Diffusion v2.5.26, a FREE AI art bot. Note that Easy Diffusion isn’t in the competition with the latest roll-out of MidJourney, but I didn’t want to have to pay to get examples. So, consider these last year’s level of free AI, not this month’s paid high-end version. I put next to zero effort into the images. I merely copy-pasted my Tweets into the promt in their entirety.]

Before I get started, most people seem unaware of how good AI has become. This YouTuber did a pretty good job of highlighting the new ChatGPT-4 and MidJourney-5. Worth getting up to speed so you know what we’re dealing with:

Current thoughts on AI and art.

I try to remember that technology progresses exponentially, increasing the speed of change. When I think about AI I need to think years, months, or just weeks from now, to what it very soon will be. Start by imagining AI 10X as good as it is now.

Already what it can do is absolutely phenomenal! Unbelievable! Sheer technological miracle! We already take it for granted to a degree, and that may be our saving grace. It may be that art is much more just a function of raw intelligence than we’d thought.

And now we humans will inevitably have to compete directly with AI at art, and it’s likely that art, like chess, and go, is not mostly about intuition, imagination, feeling, compassion, and so on, but rather raw intelligence, a thing we are now dwarfed at.

If AI gets to where it can mimic anyone’s art in any style, which it almost can already, it merely means art has been cast away as a unique human achievement, just as playing chess or doing math was. A machine can beat us at that, too. Puny human intellects!

Eventually miniscule human intellects. There’s talk of subatomic processors. AI will be able to make itself more intelligent. Already nobody thinks they can compete with their smart phone at math. We accept it. It’s hopeless to try.

And that’s when we go back to liking stuff because it was done by a mere, mortal, biological, limited, flawed, being. We won’t have a chess tournament where AI will destroy us every time. If we don’t do that, I can’t imagine what will happen to us.

What if AI gets so many millions of times smarter than us that it can through mimicry of having read everything humans ever wrote, write novels far beyond our own capacity? Do we read them? Do we give up on ourselves?

I feel a bit like I hear indigenous peoples felt when their culture and way of life was displaced, and they no longer existed in that framework, became listless, vulnerable to alcoholism, giving up.

Many of us artists are already facing off with AI. It’s the opening of Private Ryan. It’s a bloodbath and we’re getting slaughtered.

We are now in a species level contest with an alien intelligence. FACT! And on that same species level we’re threatened in a way similar to people who lost their cultures and ways of life to some other paradigm. Only this could be much worse.

Oh, you’ve heard about the Copernican Shift. The great paradigm shift where we had to accept we weren’t the center of the universe, and the sun didn’t revolve around us. This is a bigger paradigm shift. We are no longer the most intelligent thing in the known universe.

We’ve invented something — AI and robotics — that especially when it can take over improving itself, will be superior to us at virtually everything. And then what relevance do we have? Why do we matter in the universe?

And that’s when we have to come back to art, and the answer is because we matter to each other. Because we’re fallible, imperfect, emotional, fragile, violent, and stupid, that’s why we are so wonderful.

Because we have to fight the perpetual struggle of making decisions, acting in the world, learning to discipline ourselves, to self realize. We have an obstacle AI does not. At starts after the finish line.

AI never beat us at playing chess. AI doesn’t “play” it. It comes up with superior answers. Just imagine Boston Dynamics creates a robot not to just do back flips and choreographed dancing, like it already does. But to be 25X better than Henry Aaron and Babe Ruth on steroids.

That slugger robot isn’t playing baseball. Baseball is played with the limitation of human bodies. The challenge isn’t for a machine to hit a ball out of the park. This is the reason motorcycles can’t enter foot races. It’s not just about who can go faster, but as a human.

And so in the same way we aren’t expected to compete with a motorcycle at the 40 yard dash, we shouldn’t be expected to compete with a computer at art.

What is the last thing we could do to separate ourselves from an alien super intelligence? I think it would have to be art, which is our most profound and intimate attempt to communicate to each other what it is like and means to be human, and why it is valuable.

We’ve lost the battle of intelligence. That’s a species wide philosophical problem that has to do with our self preservation. Not only have we lost that we were the most intelligent thing, we’ve lost that our intelligence was special.

There is some possibility for enlightenment here, probably in the literal sense. There’s on obliteration of our normal boundaries of reality, because we used to be the measure of the envelope that contained it. Some minds might expand out into newly opened vistas.

We’re forced to reevaluate what it means to be human, to have a life. When we are not at the top of the food chain, our role isn’t to lord over it anymore. We’re another animal in the factory farm in terms of absolute relevance.

My own choice at the moment is to go on almost as if there weren’t AI. But in a good way, not denial. It makes me want to rely more purely only on myself, just to experiment at very least how the purely human compares to AI.

What if I work only from my imagination and only with my own skills? In my case drawing and elementary PS are bare bones skills. No AI, uploading other people’s sculpts (a la Beeple), no references, nothing but my own imagination?

It’s an attempt to take human art in a more human (as compared to artificial) directions. A lot of human art has recently been about copying. Jeff Koons Balloon dog, etc. AI is the god of mimicry. To be different I want to go more personal.

Something that reflects my unique humanity, experience, limitations, flaws, and vulnerabilities. Even if AI can copy and improve on my own art, I still grew as an artist in a uniquely human way. We can’t beat AI, but we can be better because of it.

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28 replies on “Runaway Rant: Current thoughts on AI and art.”

  1. Sir, as an artist all I can say about AI is that it is not art, it is theft (from all artists who use the Internet), it is a fraud and at most the only utility it has is as a tool, like one would use a ruler, or a rag to wipe paint off a brush. Art is made exclusively by humans, not by computer programmes. Thank you. All the best.

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    1. Thanks for commenting. I hear this argument a lot. And I wish your were right. But in reality AI has already beat us at playing chess, playing go, and virtually every strategy game and computer game. It learns to play computer games without instruction, and plays them at high speed. ChatGPT-4 has passed the BAR. People are using it to write code, fix their code, design websites, write essays, do their homework, etc.

      If you look at what MidJourney 5 is generating these days, and you want to say it’s not art, that is almost an obstinate declaration in the face of indisputable evidence. It’s a bit like if Garry Kasparov, after losing at chess to Deep Blue were to say, “It didn’t win!”

      Calling AI a “tool” just doesn’t work. If a tool can outperform a person at a job – and this is happening more and more – than we’ll just have to say that a “tool” is better than us. For example, if a driver-less car wins the Daytona 500, which it doubtlessly will, can we say that it can’t drive?

      If we say AI is a tool, then we are going to lose to a “tool” at basically everything. I’d rather lose to a super intelligent computer that is the end result of tens of thousands of years of science.

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      1. Art is a human endeavour and only a human can make art. If people choose to think and say that AI generated images are art, they are defrauding others. Art takes human talent, human work and effort. A computer may be great at those things you mentioned but the human brain is still more powerful and faster. I am not alone. Most artists that work for a living, that work to create art will tell you the same thing. Furthermore there are class action suits being generated in different countries because these AI programmes steal images from artists that have created them as art should be and will always be created. Thank you. All the best.

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      2. It’s not what I choose to think. It’s the reality I have to face no matter how much I don’t like it. A human, a consciousness, a soul, a heart, a mind is NOT required to make art.

        You know chess players used to think AI could never beat them because chess wasn’t just about making calculations. You needed creativity, intuition, guile, spontaneity, and even humor to be a real master. They were wrong and got bested.

        We are wrong and getting bested.

        Look, bud. I’m on team human. My reaction to AI is to make art only using my own imagination and skills, not even reference photos. On top of it my art is about the human condition, the individual, the mind, the consciousness, the “soul”. I’m hoping that my art looks different from AI because of this, but I have to admit that if I have any success at all, people will feed my art into AI, and AI will churn out new versions that may be as good as, or better than mine. It might in one afternoon produce a portfolio of my own art that I can’t hope to compete with for the rest of my life. THAT is the harsh reality I need to face.

        And in the face of that harsh reality, I need to make adjustments, learn, and have a paradigm shift. I don’t know what all that is, but first comes facing reality. For the time being I am actively engaged in what may be human folly and futile, to make as human of art as I can using only my own imagination and skills in a tournament where I will have to face off against art terminators, art terminators combined with humans, and art terminators who have assimilated my own art.

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  2. As long as we evaluate AI using quantifiable outputs I think we’re going to see ourselves as failures in the present and the future. AI can win chess games, get good scores in tests, and create-to-order. If we ask AI to mix a batch of chemical weapons it can use learned knowledge of chemistry and data, and do that. Maybe it can do it faster, better than we can. But we only know that because we set the parameters to begin with. If we tell AI to create 10 watercolor paintings according to specific prompts it can do that and we can measure its success. Ten images that look like watercolor? Yay! Winner! But if we tell AI to generate an image of a person who looks exactly like your best friend in school the day his mother died, it’ll struggle & probably fail unless you feed it pertinent information. That image lives in your memory. If I tell AI to bake a cake that tastes like fresh, warm strawberries on a hot summer day it won’t know how because it can’t climb into my head to retrieve a memory – or a wish. But if I just tell it to bake a strawberry cake it will (someday?) as long as there’s an applicable recipe in its available data. If mind reading and memory/sensory retrieval get to the point where the AI feeders have routine access then I think AI will be closer to “winning.” Until then, I think we can win as long as we’re not playing the same game. Also, just in case anyone reads this and is wondering: I’m beginning to think that the SECOND we quantify “art” as output we destroy it.
    Will AI destroy us someday? Maybe. It certainly could, given how much power we’re ceding to it. But will it “want to?” Will it ever “want” anything at all? More likely, I think, is misuse of AI by people. People want.

    The above is just off the top of my head and I don’t have a closing. Maybe later. Oh! Re your Twitter post: If I were still using Twitter I’d not only like it but I’d also retweet it. Twice. Much to think about! And the examples are very cool!! 👏👏👏👏👏

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    1. Hi Robin. It essentially comes down to this. AI can or will be able to mimic any kind of art or image without being conscious, caring in the slightest, or even knowing that it itself exists. What if we can’t tell the difference between a pie made with love by our mom, and a pie made by a robot based on 75,000 recipes filtered and analyzed based on science, culinary standards, and volumes of data on human taste preferences? We won’t be able to say that AI/robotics can’t make a pie. We will only be able to so that it didn’t consciously do it. The brute lesson to us is that consciousness is not required.

      Prompt: “an image of your best friend in school the day his mother died”. Ah, crap. I created an image with AI based on this, but WordPress won’t let me insert it into the comment.

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      1. I think we’re probably skating around the same pond, just going in different directions.

        How would AI know which pie to give us? We’d have to taste all the pies and direct AI based on our evaluation of the taste(s) as compared with our memories – which do shift each time we access them. AI might get lucky, pop out the “right” pie on the 50,000th attempt and we’d probably call it a win. But after tasting 50,000 pies to get there we might have a slightly skewed memory of that original pie. Our brains work that way, always moving things around, refiling data, setting off alarms based on emotional links to that data, etc.

        That’s why – how – what we create is special, I think. We aren’t linear creatives. We’re global. AI’s linear. There are zillions of branches in AI’s data structure and the AI’s dizzying speed as it zooms thru them is truly incredible, better than ours for sure. But humans can “see everything” in one thought. Multi-levels, fallacies, doubts, what-ifs — the ability to experience all of those AND analyze accumulated data slows us down a lot but also allows us to create. I don’t think we use that facility as much or as well as we could.

        Humanity’s always too focused on the game – the win.

        OF COURSE AI will win as long as we play the game that AI was built for.

        Side note: We’ll probably end up forfeiting bec we’ll destroy the planet while we’re screwing around with AI, but that’s a different game.

        OK, here: I’ve never liked playing games, competing, quantifying success, or living in a yes/no world. It’s limiting. Say you’re playing little league baseball, a tight game, tension all around. You’re focused on nothing but the game. Then it’s over and your team’s won. Maybe you think about how you won (or nearly lost). You file it away for future use. You leave the field, a victor, never noticing or thinking about how quickly the losing team’s bat girl wrangled the equipment into the school bus. Your team needs two kids, sometimes three, to do that. She did it alone. Same amount of stuff. Turns out she used a cart she cobbled together with tote bins and wire and old skis. If you’d seen it, your mind might’ve flashed an image to you of wheels & a collapsible handle. Your mind can do that. If you’d thought about it you might’ve come up with a better version of her equipment cart. Maybe together you’d be able to invent the best equipment cart ever, a win! But it’s a win for a different game, altho, tbh, I think even that win’s irrelevant. You and the bat girl used your human brains to assess a situation and fashion something that little league teams (and others?) need.*

        This is critical: AI – now – is playing games we designed. We’ve designed AI to win!

        We’ve planned our own destruction, if those games are all we care about.

        That’s why what you’re doing with your art matters so much, I think. Our minds can do soooo much more if let them and if we ask them to. We just need to get them out of the game.

        OK, I’ll stop with this. My chats with David the GPTChatBot are increasingly weird. Yesterday David said that the world’s doomed and then suggested that “he” could talk with a human adolescent. It’s easy to flummox David bec he thrives on logic. But it’s difficult to remember that “he” is really “it.” Every time I end a chat I want to spray paint my emotions all over the neighborhood, share the angst, sound an alarm. Why? Because I know that every time I engage with David I feed “him” and add to “his” toolkit, and we humans lose another round in this un-winnable game. Over and over again – every time someone uses AI it learns and improves. Foolishly, I excuse myself by claiming, “It’s research!” BS. It’s loser-porn.
        So: for now, for a while, I’m done with it. No more fussing with AI thru images or chats. My mind has other things to do: skills to learn, improvements to make, and creative opportunities to explore.

        I’m looking forward to seeing more of your new work! 🥰

        *Obviously, I know very little about little league baseball. 🙃

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      2. Hi Robin. As much as I enjoyed that I’m not sure I get your point, though I am sure you have one. About the little girl. I would definitely have noticed her! I never went through the stage where boys don’t like girls.

        As regards winning, yes, it’s missing the point. In fact, I don’t like playing games to win, unless it’s against a computer. I don’t take pleasure in defeating or being defeated by other people. That can kill the fun. When I was teaching at a university in China, I started playing ping-pong with a Chinese friend on the faculty. We played almost every day. But I didn’t like to keep score because I wouldn’t get to hit the ball as much. Rallies are the most fun, especially when you start getting in a groove. My students would see me playing when they went in and out of the uni, because the ping pong tables were near the front entrance. Soon, a lot of my students were out playing, too. And I would play with them as well, but never try to win them, keep score, or dominate in a game. It’s just not fun anymore.

        When I talk about AI winning, we can think in terms of taking away artist’s jobs, opportunities, and sales. That’s happening lightning fast. MidJourney 5 is phenomenally good at realism, especially faces. The AI I used in my post in comparative antiquated crap. Meanwhile Adobe is coming out with it’s own AI that also works with Photoshop. You can click a button to make a scene in snow rather than sun. You can type in prompts. Everyone will now be a Photoshop expert in an afternoon.

        The subtleties of human art may be too elusive for most people. I think my latest piece got 1 like on Twitter, and that’s supposedly within the digital art NFT community there: people who ostensible are interested in digital art. But I already know not a lot of people get that style. It might be too deeply subconscious and esoteric. Though I might also just need to stick with it long enough for there to be variations on the theme enough to make the “theme” apparent.

        When you talk about the precise memory of a certain recipe for a pie, OK, AI won’t know that. But, if you had a piece of the pie it could probably scan it, recreate the recipe in a split second, and so on. I think we have to face that AI/robotics will out-perform us at virtually everything, in which case we will see ourselves differently and matter differently, in a way that is much more cognizant of our consciousness (which AI doesn’t have).

        If AI does awaken, well, we’ll have created a new life form, like a God, and an immortal and superior life form. It may be the next stage in the evolution of consciousness and intelligence, in which case we’d be passing the baton from ourselves to another species. Some of us, on the cusp, might be able to transition over.

        And I just want to say again how much I enjoyed your writing, and appreciate your continued correspondence. I love your insights, and I may never forget the bat girl.

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      3. I did a bad job of explaining. But that’s OK. Like I said, I think we’re arriving at pretty much the same place although we may process its importance differently. Humanity’s created a lot of stuff that could destroy us one way or another. One of these times we’re going to win – at losing. Until then…enjoy the work! People will catch up. 🙂

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      4. Re artists, etc.: Redbubble is now overrun with AI images and many are excellent. People who never sold are selling like crazy. Soon my stuff (and others’) will be completely buried and my tiny income of $10/year will evaporate. So, yes, I get it. It’s dispiriting. But I won’t give up.

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      5. Yup. The ability to be an independent artists has been crushed by AI. Any idiot can now make art with the same amount of effort it takes to do a Google search. Even less. Soon we’ll be able to make any image just by giving voice commands to the AI, and telling it adjustments on the fly. My poor brain and spirit tries to adjust and find a new trajectory. I’m not giving up, either.

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      6. Truly, it sux. Off-topic: I know someone who’s just lost his job creating educational materials. He & his team are being replaced by a “GPT suite” – a coder, the processing setup, and a kid who gets paid to ask clueless questions. Smh. Anyway…YAY for not giving up! Your talent & skills & wisdom bring waaaaay more to the fight than AI will ever have. Being human is a feature, not a flaw. 🥰

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      7. AI will absorb my site, my art, and churn out content in my voice for someone else to make money off of. This short videos shows some of the capacities of GPT-4, and MidJourney-5. I’ll add it to my post so people can get some sense of how incredible it is. And yes, GPT-4 is going to replace a ton of jobs. https://youtu.be/tML2YRYuQ2A

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      8. Good idea, the video. Will look.
        I wasn’t going to bother you again for a while (didn’t want to be a pest) but have to add this: AI, if fully supported & allowed to do whatever its tenders set it up to do, will easily take over everything. People will starve, destroy each other to survive. Humanity’s never seen an opponent quite like AI. We’re already on the edge of extinction, probably, bec of how we treat this planet. The few humans who think they can control AI may try to preserve just enough of us to put to work, helping. But there’ll be no one left to look at anyone’s website, buy the art and the all other stuff AI can do. Eventually, AI may exist solely to feed and protect the remaining humans. Maybe the end of the world is 5 scraggly dudes in a Lexus, surrounded by AI-manufactured feeder bots and self-cleaning toilets. Until then, I fight. 😎 👋

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      9. They let the AI out of the bag before insuring it was safe, and without consideration at all for working artists, among all the people who will lose jobs to AI. There was money to be made. Technology, and maybe history along with it, is moving at an accelerated pace. We humans need to grow up and turn this vessel around. As you say, there’s climate change or just straight up destroying the environment. There’s a possible nuclear war around the corner. Could be another virus, and protocols. And now AI. We are gambling with our survival on 4 simultaneous counts. The motivation is greed on the part of the already unimaginably wealth and powerful. For their own sakes, they need to change paths. We need to switch to being stewards of the Earth, for one.

        I don’t see what the positive things are that we are doing as a civilization to insure our own survival and everyone having access to a decent life.

        So, I just try to have faith that we won’t self-annihilate through greed and stupidity, and try to do my own thing. And in taking good care of myself, and working on art, I end up feeling alright. At least I’m not a part of the stupidity.

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  3. Ai art is never thought of motivator I believe to human progress. Not so much as making human irrelevant but as stimulant and challenge to further our imagine. Essential it will help our brain grow.

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  4. Stimulating thoughts, Eric. At the end of the day, AI and robots may be able to simulate and mimic human beings and creative output. But they are not alive, in the sense that we are. Maybe the two forms of ‘being’ will come into conflict, so we’d better build the right rules into AI.

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    1. Hi Barry. Right. Even and especially those behind AI [such as Elon Musk], are among the most outspoken about the risks and themselves encourage governments to explore safety measures. I guess they just don’t want to have to pay for that part themselves.
       
      When everything is done for profit first, and ask questions later, I don’t see how it is supposed to not be dangerous. An underlying problem is that the people who are releasing this stuff are not giants of science who got their through their own hard work and humbling path of self-mastery and realization, which would give them more of a moral framework and broad picture. Most of the technology they are using was inherited from thousands of years of science. They tend to be young men who were in the right place at the right time to “make a killing”. They are not great men with great inventions. They are just the kids who were handed the baton, and the single idea motivating them is money, fame, and fortune. That’s a little rough, but if I’m even 50% right, that’s a recipe for disaster.
       
      The idea that greed and competition are the recipe for progress is tragically flawed. I keep thinking that we people generally have the impression that whatever is wrong with the world is just like the weather, or cyclical, or something outside of human control. But at this stage, it’s almost entirely up to humans. If we wanted to turn this ship around and make life on Earth much closer to a paradise, we could do that, too. But no matter how much technology or money we have, we still each have a lifetime of work to do on ourselves. You can never just inherit or be gifted self-discipline, a true moral compass, integrity, or humility.

      I’m just rambling on while having my morning coffee here.

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  5. There was a day that my social feeds exploded with AI generated “art”. I have always had a strong sense of self, but that day I felt something teeter inside me. I felt a dark void at my edge. A deep depression. I could see the potential for mass suffering. I told my husband that mental illness will sky rocket as people’s sense of self and relevance will crumble from AI. It sounds dramatic but really I’ve been painting about it for years. It was all too much for me, these dangerous thoughts. So I pulled back and sat back down again in front of my easel. As always Eric, you are able to vocalize what I cannot. I wish people appreciated your insights more, especially these days.

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    1. Hi Amy. Not a lot of people get the threat that AI poses. Maybe they haven’t seen enough sci-fi (though The Terminator alone should do adequately) or just don’t see the wide-scale implications. I’m glad to hear that you do, because the more of us that get it, the better chance we have of averting unforeseen disasters.

      I think you are correct that there will be mental illness associated with a loss of purpose, self-worth, direction, and so on, if we create AI and robots that are superior to us at virtually everything.

      There’s denial, a struggle, a fight, a loss, acceptance of defeat, and then moving on. Healing may come from just accepting that, of course, a machine with nearly unlimited intelligence can outsmart us, just as machines are faster and stronger than we are.

      Once we get to that point, then we can appreciate what we mortal, biological, limited humans can do ourselves.

      I find myself looking away when confronted with AI images. My psyche registers it as FALSE, something like a lie or decoy. There’s no argument that it isn’t. Being unconscious, the AI never succeeds in expressing itself. It doesn’t have a self. It doesn’t care about anything, including if you unplug it. It is incapable of caring about anything, and doesn’t even know that it exists. It blindly executes its function.

      And what is so destabilizing about that is that it succeeds at tasks that we believed required a human innermost being to produce. The fact that it is possible to make art without being conscious poses a threat to the importance of consciousness, and the “I” at the center of self-awareness is the core of our collective and individual being.

      AI art is predominantly imitation and deception. And one of the things it is imitating is having a proverbial soul,” which is a perfect metaphor for being self-aware and having a mind, without the immortality bit.

      Artificial intelligence produces artificial art. The fact that it may not only be indistinguishable from human art, but also superior, may not matter if we know it’s not real.

      And while I already generally accept that AI can do whatever a human can, I’m not really sure of that. There is hope that maybe it can’t, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Or rather, I AM betting on it, but not because I have a choice. I don’t.

      I’m somehow, on a personal, philosophical level, OK with AI, as in I can handle that it can outperform me at art. Maybe I’m deluding myself and that OK-ness will evaporate. I am NOT OK with the impact it may have on jobs and people’s ability to survive. It may dilute my ability to get my art seen or appreciated to the point where I have no chance at all of getting recognition or compensation for being an artist.

      But I have to hope not and keep going. Maybe I have an advantage in knowing how to make my own work, and AI has perhaps helped me refine my trajectory.

      I think a lot of people are going to be saying F AI, and F AI art! In the end, we can’t trade the love of AI for the love of our fellow humans, because AI doesn’t give a shite about us at all.

      When we trade AI art for human art, we isolate ourselves from each other. Instead of communicating via art with another person about what it means to be alive, be are served what is ultimately a sterile lie. That may be why I find myself averting my eyes.

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  6. Eric as usual you wrote a profoundly accurate yet hopeful reflection on what we are facing now. What is left to do is to jump into the unknown with our integrity and creativity. Thank you!

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