AI and the Beauty of Human Flaws

AI image generation is essentially a truncated exercise in taste; a product of knowing which inputs and keywords to feed the image-mashup machine, and the eye to identify which outputs contain any semblance of artistry. All that is to say: AI itself can’t generate good taste for you.

When I hear artists and AI evangelists argue about whether people who generate text using ChatGPT or images using Midjourney are truly creative, I wonder about the question behind the question.

I want to see more tools and fewer operated machines - we should be embracing our humanity instead of blindly improving efficiency. And that involves using our new AI technology in more deft ways than generating more content for humans to evaluate. I believe the real game changers are going to have very little to do with plain content generation. L

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Some may worry about whether powerful new neural-network models for generating text and images will replace workers and artists. But this can be true only if beauty and creativity are measurable by one-dimensional metrics, if art and human endeavors are static forms whose rules and objectives do not change, if we reject the possibility of meaning a... See more

“I like it when people make clear artistic decisions,” he said. “In a time of so-called A.I., personality becomes even more important.” Using technology to randomize content and narrative, he added with a laugh, “becomes a little bit garbage.”