Sterling Crispin

@sterlingcrispin

The 'problem with AI art' stems from deep rooted cultural, psychological, and educational differences.

Some key issues:

- Most people mistakenly conflate craft with art.

- Most don't know the last hundred years of art history, or intentionally reject it outright.

- Most people fear change, and adapting your model of the world to a new world that's rapidly changing through technology is repulsive to many. Especially if it challenges too many closely held beliefs at once.

- And generally, we all live with self imposed limitations, rules for thinking, how we're allowed to behave, boxed in by our own habits. Being confronted by someone living outside of that can shock people into anger. People would rather condemn different ways of thinking than question their own boundaries of thought.

- Related to that last point, most people have a narrow set of rules for what is and is not art. Asking "Is this art?" is a dead end question. You're left with no deeper understanding of whatever it is you're looking at. It's better to ask: who made this, why, and how? What cultural forces might explain this? Can I understand this from a different perspective? But questioning an artwork and trying to understand it more deeply is something most people have never done with serious effort. It's easier to label a challenging artwork as 'not art' and run away from it. An open curious mind is the best way to experience art.

On the topic of craft and art, there's a very popular school of thought that the more physical labor goes into creating an artwork, the better it is. Especially if the artwork is hyper realistic, and large. I think this is one of the most commonly and closely held beliefs about art, and people hate being challenged on it. If you showed most people two similar photorealistic paintings side by side, and then revealed that one had been painting using the aid of a projector, they'd quickly respond that using a projector is 'cheating' and might even say its no longer an artwork.

It's worth pausing and questioning that for a moment. Why is it 'cheating'? Who created these rules you have to follow? Why are they 'the rules' and not some other rules? Or no rules at all? What rules do you personally have for art? Did you come up with them, or find them, or did someone tell you them?

Back to projectors and 'cheating'. Realistic paintings from the European Renaissance period are often cited as examples of Art with a capital 'A'. But tracing projections was a technique used during the middle ages and renaissance periods via early optical techniques that eventually lead to the camera. People have been tracing projections for over 600 years, it's a core technique that helped the advent of perspective and realism in paintings. Its no more 'cheating' today than it was then.

It was also common for these renaissance era artists to lay down the sketch for a painting, and then have an assistant do the actual painting. You'd be labeled a heretic and art-criminal these days if it was revealed you worked the same way.

Sometimes, the way an artwork is made is a core part of its meaning, other times its not. Again, it's better to be curious and ask if it really matters for that piece, rather than to judge an artwork on a set of rules that may not be relevant to it.

Eventually those early optical techniques and tech improved and we got the camera. Some people still don't think photography is art and it's been over 200 years. Photography directly challenges this idea that suffering for countless hours dedicated to the craft of realism is a fundamental part of what art is. If you can 'just' point and click for a realistic image then the definition of what art is and isn't has to change. How you understand quality changes. You have to expand your own self imposed limitations and rules.

But if you know any photographers, you know they work just as hard as any other artist. But, generally, it's not the amount of labor that's important. Sometimes you can create an artwork very quickly, serendipitously, as if it was always there and you just had to reveal it. And that's just as valid.

The art of photography, in part, is about curation, editing, and creative decisions. You start with the entire world and edit away everything you don't want to depict until you arrive at a singular image. You could let a million photographers loose in NYC and they'd all find something different. None of them created the city, the people living in it, and all the moments happening. But they'd each found a time, place, and perspective to capture and present as an artwork.

Similarly, creating art with generative AI is a process of curation, editing, and creative decisions. Most artists working with the medium aren't training their own models. Like the photographers, they didn't create NYC. It's a similar creative process of navigating a huge space of potential images and narrowing in on something very specific. And if you know any artists working with AI, you know that it can take countless hours, generating thousands of images, to come across one or two you really truly like. And then there's the post process of editing and altering those images. But again, it's not the amount of labor that's important. The art is.

That all being said, I can sympathise with artists, especially illustrators, whose name has become a prompt into a machine able to replicate their style quickly. But generative AI didn't create the phenomenon of being inspired by another artists work, or 'borrowing heavily', or plagiarism, or any other point on that spectrum. It's just changed what's possible and the speed of what's possible through new tools. And like the camera, it's going to force us to adapt ourselves to these new tools and expand our self imposed limitations and rules.

Artists have largely already worked through questioning all of this over the last 100 years or so. But like I said most people either don't know this history or reject it outright. Some people reject the more free form and flexible notion of what art can be and say, "if anything can be art than nothing is art and the word loses its meaning." Again I would say, it's more important to question and understand something, than to see which mental box of yours it fits in and then move on. It's fine to have preferences, but walking around labeling things as 'art' or 'not art' is a fruitless endeavor.

The world gets more interesting, not less, as you increase the space of possible thoughts you allow yourself to think.

Art is liberation from constraints.

Art is radical freedom.

Art is an infinite game with flexible rules, the goal is to continue play, not to win. An open curious mind is the best way to experience art.

Sterling Crispin • Tweet

The Best Essay

Taste for Makers