Opinion | AI is no artist
While artificial intelligence (AI) has the ability to create media meant to emulate art, what it produces should not be considered artistic. Photo courtesy of Unsplash
Artistic expression is the cornerstone of a society where creativity and new ideas thrive, with the human experience as its backdrop. Whether humanity manifests itself in a painting, book, movie, song or any other creative medium, it always finds its way back to the person who made it and their life story.
It is hard to define what ‘good’ art is, but to me, it means anything that somebody created with the intention of representing something that matters to them. This could range from describing a beautiful flower to delving into their trauma to writing about their love for another human.
There tends to be slander for things such as abstract paintings, with some people saying that it doesn’t take much work and has no real meaning. But even the act of attempting to be creative is a crucial part of the human experience. Even dance and other athletic activities can be art forms because they involve the expression of the self through movement, whether intentional or not.
The one thing that I will never call ‘art’, however, is anything that was made with artificial intelligence. Whether that is generated images, the written word, parodies of songs or movie scripts, nothing that AI produces can be considered artistic. Even though it draws from the art of real humans, a machine program cannot experience life, and therefore, cannot create meaningful art.
Take painting, for example. Most of the well-known and renowned painters of the past 200 years drew on the life they lived to make their art.
Claude Monet, who lived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, created over 300 paintings of water lilies towards the end of his life. These were inspired by the water garden that he would see daily at his estate in Normandy, France. This series included some of his most famous works made in the impressionism style, which focuses on creating the illusion of movement to represent humanity.
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Another painter, Georgia O'Keeffe, lived through most of the 20th century and is known for her paintings of flowers and animal skulls. A lot of her art was based on where she lived. Early in O’Keeffe’s career, she would paint New York skyscrapers and then, when she moved to New Mexico, she shifted her style to portray regional scenes of her home and the places she visited. Her art also represented her feminist ideals and was used to portray female sexuality in a softer way. She also explored themes of morality through the animal skulls.
The point is, painters such as Monet and O’Keeffe drew on the places they lived and their view of life to create art. They used their understanding of style, color and movement to not only create lovely images but also to represent what mattered to them. That is something that AI is incapable of doing. Even if a human being creates a well-written prompt, the AI program can only generate an image based on a collection of images from the web. It cannot draw on its own experience at all.
AI cannot live near a beautiful pond in France or travel the world to inform the images it pumps out. Art cannot exist where life does not flourish.
Another common use for AI programs is to have it generate the written word. That could be asking it to write a poem, a song, or even an entire essay. For me, there is no heart or soul in what the AI produces. The product is not only bland, unoriginal and sometimes flat-out filled with lies, but it also requires no thought and no effort, both of which are key parts of meaningful written work.
Author Nora Roberts, who has had 68 of her romance novels appear on The New York Times bestseller list, once said that you have to love the written word to be capable of good writing. AI does not have the capability to feel emotions and to love what it writes. Therefore, how could it ever create good writing?
Think about the effort it takes musical artists to craft their lyrics to perfection. Some artists wait multiple years between releasing albums so that their work holds deeper meaning to them and their fans. When an AI program can generate song lyrics in under ten seconds, how much value can that song truly have?
There is inherent worth in the struggle it takes to make a good piece of art.
AI systems can be perfected to create life-like images, entire coherent albums and countless novels but it will never contain the soul needed to represent the human experience.
The beautiful thing about life is that we all go through it differently, and art has the ability to bring us together with how our experience is portrayed.
AI cannot replicate that, nor should we make it try.
