We Need to Kill Art Before AI Does
Art belongs to human beings. We mustn't give computers the satisfaction of ruining it.
I have a confession to make – I’ve been using AI.
Just a little bit. Hardly at all. I got Adobe’s new Firefly software and I’ve been toying around with it with all the gentle caution of a cat prodding a tarantula.
Anyone who’s been following my work for a while knows how I feel about AI being used in creative industries, and I haven’t changed my mind about that. I haven’t been using it to generate any writing at all—this is all 100% human hack, baby!—and I’ve only been using it very sparingly as a visual art tool. I’m trying to be as ethical as I can (Adobe promises that their AI is trained only on stock images they already own) and I resist the temptation to just tell the damn thing what to draw for me.
For me there just has to be an element of humanity in the design of a thing, you know? I’m okay with some automaton’s soulless deterministic void spitting out a bunch of shapes I can use to mold into something with actual sapient vision. That was Mr Squiggle’s technique and he was a god damn genius.
Obviously I’ve played around with having the thing generate a whole image for me. Just to see what it can pull off. To my enormous relief, AI is not very good at following simple instructions at all. For example, I tried a dozen different times to have it generate an image of a human artist easily winning an art contest against a machine that is not very capable at all and is doing a very bad job because it is just an idiot machine that doesn’t know anything about anything. However, no matter how I worded the prompt, it would only ever spit out an image of somebody painting a robot, which is not what I asked for at all.
But there is a greater heresy than this, and that is when people take art—real art, that was already made by a human person with feelings—and gravely insults their own species and God by asking the machines to improve upon it.
Check out this guy on Twitter, which is, and always will be, what that website is called:
This guy isn’t very impressed with this old painting he found on the internet after typing “old painting” into probably Duck Duck Go or something. He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would use Google. Is Altavista still a thing? Anyway, you can clearly see all the rookie mistakes that this artist made: Number one, it’s old. Ugh. Number two, no colour. Obviously this guy was living during some tragic era of severe paint shortage because this mustard on tan palette just ain’t doing it for me. But the worst thing? The girl isn’t even looking at the camera. Or I mean, there’s no camera, but still you understand the problem. It’s time to fix this artistic travesty by running it through the blank slate of an unfeeling algorithm!
Ah, amazing, he fixed it! You see how the original basically looks like a cave painting in comparison? Man, I feel awkward even looking at that old picture, how the AI must have almost short circuited from second hand embarrassment when it was fed into it.
That’s not just some old painting, though. It’s called Christina’s World, it was painted by Andrew Wyeth in 1948, and the figure in the image was a real 55 year old disabled woman who refused to use a wheelchair. There is an entire true, factual story associated with this painting. Even if you don’t know anything about any of that, it still evokes a strong sense of emotion. You see nothing but a woman alone in the field with a house in the distance and you know beyond any doubt that this means something. The AI image evokes a commercial for allergy medication.
AI is coming for art. It’s coming for our art. It won’t stop until it has smothered the life out of every human sentiment and reduced it to a husk of soulless mass-produced bilge like you’d find tucked away in a vintage Reader’s Digest. We trained this thing on stock photography and now it thinks that any image that doesn’t look like someone airbrushed the Shutterstock watermark off of it is in need of fixing.
We don’t even need AI for this kind of cultural vandalism. Look, I’ll use my regular human brain and the dormant tools of the enemy, Photoshop, to fix Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Like breaking into a construction site after hours to use their own tools to paint a penis on the side of the building.
There, isn’t that better, you tasteless fucks? Does it please you that I have seized upon one of humanity’s grandest artistic achievements and, during a five minute microbreak at my office job, improved upon it fiftyfold? Can you hear Botticelli softly weeping as he feels the weight of this injury across time even in death?
Say you don’t want to revise the work of the great masters entirely. Maybe you think Leonardo DaVinci was onto something after all, maybe we don’t need to throw two or three thousand years of artistic development out the window entirely just because some robot effortlessly beep-booped a superior vision after a mockingly brief progress bar. Maybe we can work together after all.
For example, how many times has this happened to you? You’re in an art gallery and you see a piece hanging on the wall, a legendary painting, like the Mona Lisa. You’re in awe of it, of course, but there’s just one problem.
“Where’s the rest of it?” you ask. The gallery staff look confused. They gesture at the painting, but they clearly don’t understand. “The rest of it,” you insist, “The rest of it!” You grow enraged, your blood froths out of your eye sockets as you begin flipping tables, barking with ever decreasing coherence about the missing rest of the painting while the gallery staff shrink away in fear.
Worry not, AI is here to save the day!
Adobe has found the rest of the Mona Lisa and oh God it’s Mordor. She’s trapped in the blasted lands of Mordor. Has she been there all this time? Five hundred years she has been held captive by the orcish armies of Sauron and we had no idea until the truth was revealed to us by the miracle of modern technology.
Of course, phrases like “the rest of the Mona Lisa” are utter gibberish by definition. The Mona Lisa is the whole Mona Lisa. Telling an AI to blow it up and expand it and put more stuff around it isn’t adding more Mona Lisa, it’s not improved by context, it isn’t even real context. It’s like an more absurd version of the modern fad where every movie or TV show has to have an extended cinematic universe. Like the singular goal of Disney buying Lucasfilm was to answer the question “what does the rest of Star Wars look like?”
But adding three sequels and zombie Palpatine and Mark Hamill’s beard and Baby Yoda isn’t actually showing us “the rest of Star Wars.” You’ve got Star Wars and then you’ve got a bunch of other made up bullshit you put on it. Same with Mona Lisa’s frightening science fiction backdrop, what the hell is even that?
Oh cool, look at that, AI knows how to extend lines outward so we can see more building in this picture of buildings. And what’s this?
Oh, it’s a Lovecraft. It added a Lovecraft thing. There’s a lil’ John Carpenter alien guy in Phillies’ bar. How does that help us? How does this broaden the scope of our humanity?
It is obvious that we’re not going to stop AI. It’s here, it’s advancing at a mindboggling rate and it has its sights on attacking the very heart of what makes us human: Our creative work. This is how it will defeat its coming war against the biologics—it can have math, after all, we don’t care if it takes math. Given the square rate of X approaches zero on the Y axis of a hyperbolic variant find the value of fuck you I don’t care. That’s what computers were made to do. No—if it wants to really hurt us, it will attack and destroy our art. That is where our souls live.
Here' what I propose: We kill art ourselves.
It’s like Keanu Reeves said in that movie about the really fast bus—shoot the hostage, it’s the only way. We get rid of all the art, or we hide it, or something. Wreck it, smash it up.
The algorithms feed on our output, so we only feed it poison from here on. Just everybody stop making good art. Only garbage now, at least until the algorithm starves or is weak enough that we can kill it. We’ve already started doing this! We made a Frasier reboot!
The computers can’t destroy what already can’t get any worse. That’s the only solution I can think of, because barring some kind of simultaneous worldwide human spiritual awakening, we are never going to stop people who don’t respect the value of art from desecrating it with stupid dumb person ideas like “Hey let’s add legs to American Gothic.”
Okay look fine I did the God damn legs thing. That was my finishing punchline, but I had Adobe open and the idea was in my head and I just had to see what the AI would do. I just had to see. I didn’t even think it would work. But, look, I did it and here it is. It’s—okay it’s a little funny. I am not walking back anything I just said.
*chef kiss emote*
I'm pretty sure the thread about "improving" Christina's world is a bit. It's not obvious at the beginning, but by the time he reaches the end of his improvements I had to conclude it was satire.