Doesn’t that assume though that the majority of art is being made within corporate structures?
Human beings are, by our very nature, creative. It’s just part of our DNA, who we are - we’re driven to create and to use that creativity to make sense of the world. It’s not like art started with capitalism and will die without it… I’m guessing that the thing that changed us and made us “human” as we understand it was when we started being creative… that helped us to not only express ourselves creatively, but to think creatively about the environment and how we might use it in new and interesting ways… Making tools was an act of creativity. Language is an act of creativity. Religion, community, cooking, family, etc, etc… these things all came out of acts of imagination.
I sincerely hope it does! But that’s not related to what I’m saying I don’t think.
I mean that there is always an undercurrent of “If we artists don’t get paid for what we create - we’ll quit! And then you’ll be sorry!” But the cosmically sad thing is - we won’t be sorry because we know that what Ai Weiei calls “real” artists will always do their thing.
Honestly, the one case where I can imagine most art dying is because of it. Capitalism has a long history of trying to eat or crush anything that isn’t made within corporate structures. If it’s not a side hustle, something that someone can make money from, then you should be getting back to work…
In the first example, the artist develops their own brush technique and creates an image based on their imperfect perception and recollection of the original artist’s style. We can debate how much originality was added, but there was some and the end result is a new work.
In the second example, the algorithm stitched together a bunch of people’s works based on how closely weighted they were to the tags associated with Seurat’s work. Small pieces, and maybe not pixels but shapes, proportions, and transitions. All it can do is interpolate between points that it perfectly perceives and recalls.
The artist in the first example is sometimes not considered much of a “real” artist because of the amount of mimicry, but only of Seurat and only ultimately in technique and composition, maybe palette.
The algorithm in the second example derived from hundreds, perhaps thousands of works encoded in its database. It’s the Superman 2/Office Space gambit - take pieces that are small and hope no one notices.
I don’t think that’s the message, though… I think the message is that creating art is labor and should be respected as such. It does take work to make art, and treating it like a cheap commodity that we can turn over to automation isn’t showing that respect.
We are all capable of being creative and making art. Artists who do it professionally work for years to improve their craft and deserve fair compensation for that. I’m not sure why that point is controversial?
That’s a good point, but ultimately, I think people driven to create will still do so. I think more of us than realize it are driven to create, too. It’s just that the ideology around art is centered on the capitalistic “great man” theory of art, that the artists is some special kind of figure, a genius, who did not “work” to get good at his craft, but was born that way… But so much of making art takes time and effort. Someone might have a proclivity for creativity, but some of the greatest artists got where they are by working at their craft…
Right… just look at what happened with punk when punks started to build their own structures… the entertainment industry did literally all they could to discredit punks. The whole “punk panic” of the 80s was precisely trying to do that.
I think I have more thoughts on this… but let me think a bit more…
I think that’s a red herring. How much work should art take? Is art twice as good if it takes twice as long? How about half as long? Do these values change throughout the life of an artist? Should older artists be penalised if they’ve learned to work more efficiently? Too many questions arise when art = effort.
As to the “AI art is part of a corporate structure/capitalism thing” - I surely agree on that, but again, I don’t see how it’s relevant to the basic question of “Is AI art art, or is it stinky theft?” I mean, yes right now gen AI is in the hands of a tiny number of rich oligopolies, but it could one day also devolve into a FLOSS fedarated non-profit ecosystem of syndicalist anarchy - and still they’d be prompting things into exitence.
How? The “red herring” is that the only people who make good art are individual geniuses and that is the lie told us by capitalism… Great art times time, effort, and space to work… That’s just the facts. Of course, some people might be more inclined to make art, etc, but good art takes work.
Depends on the art, of course. No one starts out being a painter at the level of a genius. No one. That’s not how things work. It takes time and effort to hone the skill, time to find an audience, time to find your voice, etc, etc. No well known artist arrived on the scene without having put in that work. It IS indeed work, often unpaid work…
It’s relevant because this is part of the larger question about art under the capitalist system… Walter Benjamin was asking these very same sorts of questions way back in the 30s…
I mean… exactly.
That doesn’t just happen. It takes organization and pushing back against entrenched interests to make that happen. The whole hoopla around AI is just another iteration of corporations seeking means to subvert skilled labor and replace it with a cheaper (or even free) alternative. This goes back to the luddites rebellion against automation to cheapen their labor. It’s really not much different…
Also, I believe, another iteration of people seeking a new & revolutionary way to get rich quick, after cryptocurrencies, NFTs and blockchain turned out to be utter failures and scams.
Yeah, that’s kind of capitalism, right, the endlessly accumulation of profits for a select few?
And the actual work that creates that value is hidden behind the concept of the commodity… Part of the value of goods comes from the raw materials (which, of course, must be extracted by human beings too, that shit doesn’t just magically appear), but human beings, being paid a wage by the capitalist, makes the good (in part or in whole)… that labor is often highly undervalued, and is constantly under attack by the capitalist class as being less valuable and in need of being replaced by automation of some kind. That’s no less true here, where artists work are being highly under-valued in order to train their “replacement” AI…
Yeah, Marx was talking about this stuff and people like Benjamin and Gramsci really brought some insights into how this works with art.
Saying the real problem is capitalism doesn’t get us anywhere because pretty much all things in life that suck are also due to capitalism. It’s like some kind of Godwin’s Law of socio-economic discussions.
What’s going to matter is how or if we work out what to do with gen AI inside the capitalist system - it’s the only system we have after all. That’s why we need to examine things like whether the value of art is in fact diminished; whether gen AI is like Photoshop plugins, the internet, desktop publishing, photography and other technological innovations in art that came before that - all of which were attacked in one way or another as destructors of “real” art.
PS:
You may be interested in this essay in that case, which implies (amongst other things) that a divestment of entrenched interests might well happen of its own accord.
Then that deflates the issues considerably if the matter at hand is simply how to pay artists for the stinky theft. No difference between that and any other copyfight in fact (eg the debates about music and book piracy, fair use, derivative works, academic publishing, etc. etc.)
What I mean by this false dichotomy is that attempts at mike-drop pronouncements like “gen AI isn’t art” or “gen AI is theft” or “gen AI is capitalism” are all distractions. Thinking about what should happen distracts from thinking about what will.
I don’t know what will happen, but I can think of a few scenarios and most of them don’t involve the death of art, or much payment for artists either, but an evolution of thinking similar to the evolution brought about by other technologies.
So, we ignore that? That doesn’t make sense to me. It makes sense to me to be specific about the problems it causes, and how we can scrap back some of our shared humanity, though.
Not really no. You just can’t ignore the elephant in the room.
It doesn’t have to be. And talking through problems and finding solutions, and imagining something different and better is part of how we get there.
That’s not how stuff works. though. There is not some systems that are outside us that put force on us. the Captialist system was/is made up by people. It works through people. That means we can change it.
And BTW, doctorow is not just accepting that capitalism exists and we should just “live with it” because “it’s the only option”… he’s spent his entire career imagining alternatives and paths forward… I’m really not sure how me bringing capitalism into the discussion is different than Cory bringing it into the discussion?
Nobody is disputing that capitalism is behind, inside and driving what’s happening in gen AI. But if you mean the solution to things like artists not being fairly compensated for their work is proletarian revolution, well yes - but I really don’t think gen AI is going to be the catalyst for that nor, frankly, do I think it’s very relevant to the conversation.
(And I most certainly did not say those things about Doctorow, nor did I imply them - he talks quite plainly in the article about a possible capitalist failure to support gen AI in it’s current form. That is all.)
What, if not the end of that system you have described (which in a far broader context than gen AI, I fully support), are you suggesting would address the issues with gen AI?
Winner of a prestigious literary award unabashedly used AI to write
…parts of her story that were supposed to be created by AI.
I have not read the story or found much news about it, but it seems to me that weaving “genuine” AI responses into a story, which is partially about a relationship between the architect and AI, is a legitimate literary practice.
I’m really not sure how me bringing capitalism into the discussion is different than Cory bringing it into the discussion?
