AI art and culture

I’m certainly no fan of AI art.ⁱ To most concisely capture my opinion on the matter, you can borrow the sentiment I’ve repeatedly seen circulating on social media, attributed to one Joanna Maciejewska: “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes,” but there’s more to it than that. The very existence of AI art and the intent to use it suggests deeper problems to me, problems that extend beyond AI art, that serve to explain something about us. From my perspective, there are two main issues related to the growth and proliferation of AI art that most urgently need to be confronted: (1) AI art’s negative impacts the quality of art and the skill of artists, and (2) the use of AI art to reduce financial reimbursement to artists. Both issues, as I see them, are intimately tied to the push for AI art, as well as to the resistance to it, but both issues are bigger problems than AI art itself. Expanding on both ideas and better understanding them should show us that they are indicative of greater cultural and societal issues, which I’ll attempt to demonstrate are the real issues to be addressed if we truly wish to support artists and the arts.

Why do we create art? Although I suspect there’s a multitude of reasons that I won’t be able to touch on when I explain my perspective, there are a number of reasons that come readily to mind for me. A significant good that I see in art is entirely about the process, the learning and growing, and how we change as we gain the skill and experience that comes with creation. In this way, art enriches us—mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—when we create it. The best art, from my perspective, serves to communicate rare and difficult things and, in doing so, it helps us make better sense of the complicated, intangible, and confusing things we’re bombarded by in life. An audience is similarly enriched through skill and experience, not from the direct process of creation, but through learning and growth that comes from thoughtfully engaging with different types of art, exposure to widely different perspectives, and actively challenging oneself, attempting to untangle and witness even brief pieces of things that are hard to understand. To me, the audience’s learning and growth is the process of becoming cultured.

While I see the draw in viewing AI as a tool to help someone unskilled in a medium to make something that they envision but lack the ability to create, the very act of creation in this way stunts the learning and growth of the artist. While it’s probably true that the AI user can still become cultured in the way of the audience member and thereby still direct the tool toward something of substance, they still fail to build themselves up through creation. In this way, these individuals lose not only skills but even ideas, for there are certain concepts that we arrive at as we work through the process of creation—concepts that we fail to find when we approach any other way. But AI art isn’t the only way artists lose this benefit of art. The enrichment that comes with creation has so much to do with learning and growing, and so the artist who doesn’t believe they have anything more to learn, yet continues to produce their art, will fail to feel enriched at a certain point. This is one of the pitfalls of art as a business: When art becomes less about becoming the better creator and more about sales, art and the artist both have the potential to stagnate if their art ever successfully sells without difficulty. And this isn’t the only way art as a business harms art and the artist. Learning and growth in part require freedom of thought and action for success. While constraints in art can assist creativity in a narrow sense, they serve to limit art’s potential in a greater way. Art as a business drags a number of “practical” considerationsⁱⁱ into art to constrain it: shaping it into something saleable to buyers and sellers of the product, something with appeal to a specific audience. To step out of the constraints that are demonstrably saleable harms the value in the eyes of potential buyers. This changes the nature of the artist’s growth, where they learn to create something constrained only.ⁱⁱⁱ And targeting a wider audience frequently leads to the creation of something unchallenging, the proliferation of which serves to stunt the audience’s growth, remembering that becoming cultured requires being challenged.

But the stunting of artists and audiences does more harm to us than simply limiting how much we are able to be enriched in the process of creating or engaging with art. When we fail to become experienced or cultured, we also lose our ability to judge the merits of art, to judge art’s quality. We begin to either arbitrarily assign value to art regardless of merit, or we fail to even understand what gave art merit in the first place. Bringing things back to my idea of art at its best, art that poorly communicates something common and simple becomes viewed as just as valuable to everyone involved as something that expresses something rare and difficult. Or worse: Without becoming experienced or cultured, the former starts to become viewed as more valuable because we lose our ability to comprehend the latter.^iv And, similarly, art created by talented and skilled humans no longer appears particularly different from that produced with AI, just more expensive.

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A number of difficulties arise when thoughtfully approaching the problem of financial support to the artist, and the cleanest way I can find to break them down well is through a comparison of society as I believe it could or should be versus how things work in practice, in the real world. Even in a more idealized version of society as I view it, artists wouldn’t simply be paid to solely produce their art when they felt they deserved it. Enriching as art has the potential to be, it also ranks far down the hierarchy of things that people actually need in society, and society would still require some amount of aspiring artists to labour in more needful ways—through the provision of food or shelter, for example. But financial support shouldn’t be the prerequisite for creating art. There are separate, sometimes intangible, things that drive people to create art, such as a burning desire to understand or express something. However, for society to be fair in this regard, there must be equal opportunity for people to follow these drives even in the absence of financial support, which requires something resembling equality of conditions. Equality of conditions would mean everyone is reimbursed fairly for their labour, those unable to labour are still supported, and everyone has the potential for some amount of free time or leisure. From here, society would still benefit from the financial support of some artists so that they can solely produce their art, specifically because it will better allow the artists to learn and grow and perfect their art in order to create something more enriching to society in the process. But the public ultimately would be the decider of the art that holds the value or potential to deserve such financial support, and members of the public become better judges of this value as more of them become more highly cultured. Keep in mind as well that an artist need not be wealthy to be reimbursed fairly for their art; to support even the most talented artist in creating art that greatly enriches society in a way that maintains equality of conditions without being unfair to the artist would cost society little.^v

However much or however little readers agree with my above assessment, it hopefully will do a lot to explain my perspective around how all this actually works in the real world. Not all artists in the real world are financially supported in order to create art. I don’t see this as a wholly bad thing, but unequal conditions complicate this because not all artists have the same opportunities to create art when lacking this financial support. Who decides which artists are entitled to this support and why is also problematic in the real world. Far from a cultured public choosing to fund that which is deemed most beneficial to society, on one side wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of the few while, on the other, various forces hinder a mass audience’s ability to judge art’s merit.^vi In either instance, funding decisions become either biased or arbitrary, and it becomes necessary for the artist to warp their art in appeal to whoever they can obtain enough funding from in order to simply survive and continue producing their art. This doesn’t lead to better art.

No matter how well or how poorly things function in the real world, no matter how powerful or powerless we feel to bring things closer to our ideals, however, we can come away from this discussion with a couple, general postulates that shouldn’t hurt matters. Firstly, however we can, we should discourage the thoughtless consumption of art. Encouraging instead a culture of learning and growth has the potential to lead to more artists creating more consistently valuable art, and this encourages the public to better learn to judge the merits of art. In this way, art improves as we all learn and grow. And, secondly, we should be supporting conditions that are closer to equal in society. This gives everyone a fair chance to develop their art even if it isn’t supported financially, and we enter something of a positive feedback loop where it becomes easier to support a culture of learning and growth when conditions are equal, or at least far less unequal.

As of now, we still find ourselves in a place where we not only have AI art, but individuals are using it over developing their art or supporting artists financially. I maintain that these problems are symptoms that point to greater cultural problems. If we actually want to diminish the uses of AI art and better support humans and their art, the way forward is not to push back directly against AI art, but to do our best to address these other issues. The rest will follow.

Notes

i. Or Artificial Intelligence more generally, for that matter.

ii. I specifically refer to these as “practical” considerations because how practical or impractical certain decisions are depends upon our specific goals. I’ll discuss this in more detail next month.

iii. This holds for things that may not strike us as obviously. During my time working with the Northwestern Ontario Writers Workshop, being exposed to the winning entries of their annual writing contest—and especially after reading the collection of contest-winning work they put out, Twenty Years on Snowshoes¹—I became aware of a number of constraints that the contest imposed on such writing and how it served to direct the kinds of writing that won. There were writers who were quite successful in this contest, those who won repeatedly, some of whom became adept at a very specific kind of writing: writing that wins the contest. At least a few writers whose work I’d respected appeared to me to stagnate when they fell into this process—which isn’t to say that they were doing anything necessarily wrong if their goal was to win the contest. Their work, however, failed to excite me after that point.

iv. Another cultural problem that appears to me to negatively impact our ability to properly judge the quality of art is a general tendency away from criticism, especially in-group criticism. In this way, criticism seems to be commonly viewed as harmful or somehow disrespectful or disloyal, discouraging to the artist. Poor criticism can be all these things, but high-quality criticism is hugely important for distinguishing between similar types of art of varying quality, and it helps us to better judge what art actually enriches us. This is hardly a new problem; as Matthew Arnold wrote disparagingly while explaining the importance of criticism in the 1860s: “If one of us speaks well, applaud him; if one of us speaks ill, applaud him, too; we are all in the same movement.”² I’ll discuss Arnold’s views on criticism in more detail next month as well.

v. While I used to be a firm believer that an inequality of talents requires an inequality of rights or privileges, that the most talented among us deserve to be inordinately wealthy, it was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who cured me of this belief. In his memoir, What is Property?,³ Proudhon lays out arguments against unequal rights or privileges being rewarded for unequal talents that I found highly convincing. Though this was the case as I read, I’ve struggled to convince anyone of the same as I’ve attempted to repeat pieces of his arguments. As such, I suspect you have to read his words to truly appreciate his argument. Nevertheless, I’ll put forward a quick summary of the salient points as I understand them in the hopes that readers can catch at least a taste of the idea: (1) Division of labour in society allows individuals to devote themselves to a specific task without having to perform other kinds of labour necessary to their survival;⁴ (2) The combination of multiple people working together in concert brings greater value to society than each working on their own, such that, the larger society becomes, the less individual talent makes a difference; the magnitude of the impact of cooperation on productivity dwarfs that of individual contribution;⁵ for both of the previous reasons, (3) Society must be large enough to support certain specialized functions that don’t contribute to the primary needs of society, including artists, thereby ensuring that individual talent accounts for little within the society able to support these specialized individuals;⁶ and (4) Society supports the education of those with specialized functions, including artists, both by taking care of their primary needs during this period of education where they produce little themselves⁷ and by directly providing the sources of this education through the teachers and ideas that society furnishes them with.⁸ Because of all of this, the talented individual is already so greatly privileged and owes so much to society that to demand more is unjust, including for the most sublime talent. To furnish us with an example, Proudhon uses Homer and his Iliad, which he suggests society only owes its cost in time and expense: “Suppose the whole amount to be fifty thousand francs; if the society which gets the benefit of the production include a million of men, my share of the debt is five centimes.”⁹

vi. In addition to the spontaneous processes discussed in this essay, consider the effects of active manipulation on the parts of political parties or corporate advertisers, for example, on the public’s learning and growth.

References

1. Kosoris A. “Twenty Years on Snowshoes.” (4 Oct 2017.) http://kosoris.com/reviews/twenty-years-on-snowshoes/.
2. Arnold M. “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” Culture and Anarchy and Other Selected Prose. Penguin Classics, 2015, pp. 123-124.
3. Proudhon PJ. What is Property?. Critical Editions, 2022.
4. Ibid., p. 106.
5. Ibid., p. 92.
6. Ibid., p. 102.
7. Ibid., p. 105.
8. Ibid., p. 144.
9. Ibid., pp. 98-101.