In January, I published an article on The Hedgehog Review’s website on the topic of AI art. An excerpt of my conclusion is below:
Where this mechanical imagination is lacking, and what makes it incomplete as an imagination but perhaps sufficient as a mirror, is that it is incapable of the intuitive leaps that are so familiar to our own imagination. The body of human visual production—centuries of paintings, drawings, photographs, etc.—on which these models were trained was not formed in a merely combinatorial and recapitulative way. Leaps of intuition and strokes of genius produced them, of course, but also the pressures of scarcity and necessity, and the endlessly differentiated crafts and cultures that sprang up in those contexts. This humanmade corpus has accreted over time, building up a foundation that forms the strata both for our imagination and now also for an AI training set. That foundation is not made merely from the recombination of pre-existing blocks. It has been fashioned slowly and painfully. To the extent that a computer vision model might contribute to that foundation, it can only do so insofar as it unintentionally prompts reflection or consideration in a human mind toward new means or ends.
I’ve had two occasions to think back on what we miss when we make the technical difficulty of artistic production go away, both from YouTube. First, an interview of Jianoa Zhang by Lenny Rachitsky, on a mostly unrelated topic. This section was an aside, in reference to the use of Midjourney to create images for a toddler at their prompting:
Jianoa Zhang: (…) “I do believe in the future so much of what we are going to be doing as humans is literally like, “what is the creative process, what is the idea.” It’s less about executing all the pieces of it, but it’s so important to still be able to be like, “I want—like this is the idea that I want to bring to life,” and so I just think like training that is huge.”
Second, a conversation between Cherie Harder, Andy Crouch, and Jonathan Haidt:
Andy Crouch: “(…) I trace this back to the dream of doing magic. That we’ve had this dream in different forms for all of human history. In the west it particularly comes aside science in the form of alchemy, the dream if we just figured out enough about the world we’d be able to do kind of wondrous things. But I think of magic as effortless power. And part of what all these layers of technology have given us as human beings, up to and including kind of our social lives, is a kind of effortless power. And, you know, you asked ‘what effect does this have on us as persons?’ The problem is most of what really develops us as healthy human beings involves effort. It involves a kind of, certain kinds of disciplines, certain kinds of patience, certain kinds of vulnerability. And we have had this dream for a hundred plus years now of eliminating vulnerability, eliminating effort, things that would operate on their own without requiring much skill. And all that I think added up to the conditions that social media was just ripe to, in a way, exploit and distort ultimately the most important thing about us, which is how do we actually do life togetehr as human beings.”