All art has always been both artificial and intelligent
Thoughts about the advent of AI generated art
All art, everywhere, has (always) been generated by artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence image generators, and other relevant technological innovations in the field of representational computing, are only just another step in the natural evolution of cave paintings (and any other art-form presumably, including music and writing)
Arriving seemingly without explanation and always perceived as radical, the shock of the new, as disorientating and taxing as it might first seem to be, is one of the most recognizable forms of progress for the collective conscience of humanity.
Text generators like ChatGPT are able to produce convincing dialogue and quite well written text – but could they ever come up with a Balzac or a Proust novel? Could they produce text that comes from the hell of personal subjectivity, that is: are they able to write honestly, confessionally and uniquely since they do not possess personal experience but only exist as proxies of borrowed memories?
Some scoff, and call AI-generated art just a glorified Google search. But is there anything more glorious than a Google search? The entire knowledge of humankind, and quite a lot of its ignorance, always available at the tip of your fingers. It is the most democratic form of enlightenment humanity has ever known.
Α repetitive impulse is once again exercised, both by the public, gatekeepers and critics, when faced with the revolutionary advent of text-prompted Artificial Intelligence image generators, or AI Art as it's de facto come to be known.
Some of the reactions are legitimate, like protests against complex and often politically charged consequences of art produced in reference to authors who never see any of the potential profit created by their imitators.
In this case, it seems that AI is provoking and re-contextualizing older, preexisting debates and discourses concerning authenticity, intellectual property, limitations and creative remuneration
On a more philosophical, and perhaps metaphysical level, there are worries about the spiritual implications of machine-assisted creativity, continuing a long-standing debate about the nature of the work of art in the era of mechanical reproduction which question the aesthetic value and ethical standards of AI generated art
This exact same reactionary dismissal, along with more legitimate critiques, has been observed every time that art has undergone a deep evolutionary change, necessitating perceptual adjustments and the re-evaluation of methods that define thorny subjects like authoritative attributions, traditional conceptual definitions and steadfast meanings about what art is
After all, up-cycling, remixing, appropriation and recycling have always been methods familiar to artists who are all aware, or benefit, from the practice of creating a work of art by directly including extrapolations, quotations or even tangible material elements, literally pieces culled from other artists, like collage, sampling, cut-ups and pastiche
It must also be said that art is not merely an image-making process. Especially in the last century, other forms of art, like conceptual, installation, land or performance art are mediums that have little to do with constructing images.
As of writing, some of the image-generating AI software is still glitchy, producing distorted results far beyond any intentional abstraction, a failure of computational imagination which happens for algorithmic and database reasons understandable only to tech nerds.
Simultaneously, applications like Midjourney V4 are breathtakingly capable of simulating images captured from real life, rewarding their users time and time again with stunningly convincing renderings illustrating accurately or even imaginatively the most complex of prompts
One needn't be reminded that even early photography suffered from unpredictability, producing unreliable results unless the artist using the newfangled cameras followed the strictest protocol.
In the nascent days of photography, during the last half of the 19th century, any decent image needed absolute stillness by the subjects and obvious lighting to capture anything like a recognizable form, view or face, because the long exposures tended to document the slightest movement as a blur.
Similarly, a lot of AI Art programs, particularly any of them producing images that aspire to look like a photograph or aim for results that proclaim a respectable verisimilitude to an implied original, seem prone to erratic renderings of not-quite convincing approximations of reality – perhaps a distorted face is paired with rubbery, odd hands, or any other of odd “mistakes” might appear in the final image which is rarely glitch-free.
Remixing, augmenting and evolving the iteration seems to mitigate these digital accidents, but not always. However, once again we need to be reminded of the old adage: mistakes are nobler than art, meaning that failures are steps on a ladder leading to success.
As for the elusive goal of authenticity, one only needs to compare any two artists working with Midjourney or Stable Diffusion as tools to see clearly that the algorithmic influence is strong but not decisive: the outcome, always prompt-defined, is still very much personal, and the artists are all clearly distinguished from one another, perhaps all sharing a method, but neither an aesthetic nor a common identity.
Like all art, so be it with artificially generated images: it's the madness, not the method that counts: from the most primitive to the most technologically advanced, art is first and foremost self-expression, and the self is a composite of its social environment as much as it is an agent of independent conscience.
Self-expression is also the starting point of an interaction which will hopefully arrive to communication: of ideas, narratives, symbols and information, of the vital transmission of culture
Since the wall paintings of Lascaux, which are the most ancient human pictorial creations known to man, the visualization of ideas, tribal folklore and abstract concepts has progressed inexorably: painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, cinema, CGI and now Artificial Intelligence have all been chapters in an undoubtedly still evolving story, with many more chapters yet to come.
Some of these stages have been revolutionary, others organic, some technical, others aesthetic – from a stone or a piece of coal to computers, from Pompeian frescoes to Renaissance paintings and then on to Cubism, Surrealism, Pop Art and beyond, the world of art is anything but static.
When a primitive artist scratched, using a stone, or a burnt stick or some kind of shell, on the walls of his cave, all of his own intelligence, cultivated by communal wisdom, guided his hand.
That process of personal testimony and collective transubstantiation is only natural, a vital way for information to be passed on and critical thinking to develop
The artificial part comes from the creative impulse itself, which is nothing else but the need to conjure something that does not preexist in the natural world but definitely belongs to it: a piece of art, which is as essential to human beings as the most basic of survival needs.
Thus, all art is a procedural edifice whose foundations are a mechanical basis (medium, technique, training, intention) upon which a creative superstructure (education, culture, aesthetics, talent) rests
In their attempt to express the world by means of a mechanical, technically frightening and regimented process which aims for an interpretive recreation of reality, even the most skilled of artists show little concern about how art is made, or where, or how: they only aspire to manifest a universal, timeless illusion, to speak a lie that tells the truth
As an artist and writer myself, since my own primitive times, i.e. my childhood spent scrawling and smudging, I have constantly, consciously and intentionally used artificial intelligence to create anything – from magazines to movies, from music to text, from images to literature
My mind has always been a vast storage of references that I am trying to represent, as I dutifully live, breathe and continue being a subject of the culture of the copy
I have always created art using artificial intelligence, way before computers made these visionary calculations easier to depict, calling my imaginarium “the stairwell of reflections”
Admiration, inspiration, or even direct references and, of course, faithful copying, taught me everything about art directly by borrowing from the previous achievements of literature, painting, cinema and all other art forms that have informed my own varied output.
Imitation was not merely my sincerest form of flattery, or even reducible to a symptom of my understandable awe, but actually a way of continuing the tradition bequeathed to me as a fledgling artist
Recreation, reconfiguration and re-appropriation were all learning methods as I attempted to make my identifiable and individual mark in a vast universe of other creators
What I know, and thus can freely invoke with my work, is my education, or, my personal algorithmic identity as a creative entity, those free associations between aesthetic flash-points which sprout tendrils of synaptic enchantment, organically grown by studying passionately anything I could about creativity but also every influence passively absorbed by cultural osmosis
My thought process remains an unpredictable equation with many potential resolutions, most of them aleatory, all of them learned from sources that predate me and will continue to live on through me.
I rarely credit all these writers, artists, musicians and other creative geniuses simply because by the time their influence has reached the eye of the beholder, or the listener's ear, these primary (re)sources have been exploited in such an idiosyncratic manner, thoroughly digested according to my own perceptions and priorities, ultimately subsumed to better serve my own aesthetic and semantic intentions.
My work owes a debt to the shoulders of giants it stands on, but it should not be attributed to them because it does not belong to the past, it merely attempts to continue the story
The results of this process of regurgitation, mimicry and transmutation willingly betray their roots if interrogated properly and aim for a moment of solitary brilliance which they will posses only fleetingly, until, inevitably, they fertilize someone else's imagination seeking inspiration and nourishment, that is, start a life of their own
This is by no means a unique personal experience – it is actually the way all artists work, either they admit it or not.
Diamond hunters excavating convincing versions of authenticity from the dark mines of aesthetics
Text written exclusively for the Psychonaut Elite by Panagiotis Chatzistefanou, Berlin 2023 | Translated to French by Ludovic Bablon