When Art and Technology Collide

It’s been a while since a particular piece of technology has felt as fraught, efficient, and consequential as today’s text-to-image AI art-generation tools like DALL-E 2 and Midjourney.

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

That's an entirely plausible path by which people might use AI to excel in the visual arts, but there is an alternative scenario where the AI ends up being more like an iPad that you just use it to keep busy.

There’s a lot of speculation and rhetoric these days about whether AI democratizes creativity or advances it. However, it is abundantly clear to me that both are true.

On the one hand, humanity’s creative confidence for humanity has gone up as people of all ages are able to prompt whatever is in their mind’s eye and express themselves visually. We’... See more

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 th... See more

The easier it is to generate artworks, the more challenging it will be to generate distinction and meaning, as it ever was. Great Art, like AI, is very often what hasn’t been explored yet.