Art in the Age of Digital Intelligence
Will AI kill art?
Will AI kill art? Will “AI art” kill “human art”? Many artists have been asking these chilling questions as generative AI gets better and better at replacing the roles of designers, screenwriters, illustrators, and all other creatives. But here’s the thing: these questions assume that what AI produces can actually be called “art” in the first place. They assume that art is just about the final output — the painting, the sound, the design — rather than something deeper and more fundamentally human. I believe this assumption is wrong, and that once we understand what art actually is and why it exists, the fear dissolves.
AI cannot kill art because AI cannot create art. What it creates may look like art, may even be useful like art, but it lacks the essential human soul that makes art meaningful. Could AI kill human creativity? Certainly, yes, but only for those who allow it to, rather than using it to augment their own creativity. When one realizes that art is derived from human creativity, and henceforth loses its essence without its humanness, he will fight to protect and support the integrity of human agency and taste that make art, art.
what why is art?
When I thought about how to dive into the questions posed in the introduction and address the debatable topic of AI art, I realized it was imperative to actually define and understand art. If you couldn’t quite deduce what art is, whether an abstract or strict definition, there’s no way to even begin reasoning about the possibilities of a world with AI art.
When trying to jot down my own interpretation of art, I realized actually how hard it is. “Art”, like “love”, is one of those words that, in any language, encompasses an idea often times too challenging for simple terms to describe. I realized that the essences of such things are not well represented in dictionary definitions, but are best understood through an analysis of the purposes and effects of those things; specifically, their human purpose and their effects on humans. Love and art are not concepts of science nor math, and thus really only have relevance in human contexts. Here, you will begin to see a trend in this essay of addressing art as a human concept, which will differentiate it further from algorithm-generated replications.
You might be wondering what I mean by saying it’s best to analyze the purpose and effects of art rather than defining it. Here’s what I mean: don’t ask what art is, ask why it is — art is not a static concept. By asking what art is, you delineate it to boundaries and characteristics. When trying to answer the question, you’ll find yourself breaking it down into smaller questions that inherently limit the scope of art.
Is art limited to specific mediums? E.g. painting, sculpture, and short films? Can other things not be artistic as well?
Is art an object or phenomenon that can be defined or measured?
Is art meant to be beautiful, or can it be ugly as well? What is beauty and ugliness?
You see how defining art leads to its limitations in our minds? The truth is that art is fluid and dynamic.
Why is art?
Humans have made art since pre-historic times. This indicates the inherent truth about art having purpose and meaning, but informing that purpose and meaning is a very challenging task.
Switching to the question “why is art?” is an existential formulation that has you truly ponder about what makes art purposeful and meaningful. Why have humans made and experienced art for so long? We know the truth is that art has always been a thing, but why is it?
Trying to answer the question yourself leads to a plethora of answers that expand the scope of art beyond the conceptual rigidity of asking “what is art?” This suggests that art doesn’t exist simply as objects or performances through some medium that incites some entertainment that was achieved through some skillful imagination blah blah blah… It actually suggests that art happens as experiences and interactions, fulfilling profound social, emotional, and spiritual needs.
The shift to view art as a why rather than a what shows us that art is a human function. Through the function, art allows us to:
Explore human conditions: Identity, joy, love, pain, and grief
Make sense of reality: Capture truths that rationality cannot explain
Express the ineffable: Communicate complex emotions or experiences beyond explanation or discourse
Transcend: tap into or create other realities or worlds and the synergy between them and our lived experiences
So, as us humans make and experience art, we also realize that art is a human thing. We can make and experience art as depictions of stories or imaginations, but we can also experience art through nature. When art is human-made, it is a portrayal of our human consciousness. When we feel like we experience art in nature, this can be viewed as the harmony between natural phenomena — which are inherently metaphysical — and human consciousness.
what is art’s purpose?
We already deduced that art certainly has a purpose given its presence in human history. We already explored the “why” behind art — finding out why it is actually purposeful and meaningful. But what about that purpose itself? How does art serve us, and keep us humans in a perpetual pursuit of it?
This argument will be philosophical in nature (if this whole essay hasn’t been already), but is not well explored enough. This argument could be its own article entirely and one could dwell on this thought for weeks, leading into philosophy on new domains, into a never-ending rabbit hole of existentialism and absurdism. It’s almost because asking about art’s purpose is like asking why the universe, nature, and our psyches are the way they are because, as I mentioned above, art is the bidirectional experience between the human consciousness and spirit and the things around us. Here’s my shallow, bullet-point take on art’s purpose:
Human consciousness exists, we exist. “I think therefore I am”.
Via consciousness, humans have the conception of free will. Free will leads to not only good, but also suffering. Suffering induced by both natural occurrence and the evil of human nature (or the devil, if that’s what you believe in).
Suffering needs benevolence as a counter force, where we sacrifice for and empathize with others, striving to fight all roots of suffering in the world.
Humans need love for this benevolence — the desire to survive under the assurance of mutual destruction is not a sufficient force for good in a world without rational actors. The desire for good needs to come from within, from a source of love.
Love is something we cannot describe, only feel or depict. Love is something we cannot put a finger on, only express — express through art, as art is the only way to express the indescribable.
Art is the only true way to send a message of love into the world, to counter realities so ridden with suffering.
That’s my napkin-math version of a purpose of art. Now, onto the beef of the AI topic.
can a machine find the same purpose in art? can machine-made art serve the same purpose as human art?
So, if arts purpose is to express the human condition, the ability to love, then it must be that art serves no purpose to machines, unless you believe they are conscious and can love. It comes down to this, which is another debate entirely. However, what you believe on this point doesn’t matter.
In the first scenario, where we say that machines are not conscious and experience love, sacrifice, death, etc, then art must serve no meaningful purpose to the machines at all. What expressed experience has any value to a machine that is simply computing over an objective function, not living similar experiences? This argument is easy.
Let’s take the second scenario where we say that there is a hypothetical machine that could feel, love, and experience. This machine, no matter how capable it is of consciousness, can never be a human. Humans will always know that it is a machine, and for that reason its experiences and interactions with nature will be viewed as such. Art to a conscious AGI may be art to other machines, but it won’t ever be human art that matters (as much) to humans, which is exclusive to the human experience: the emotions, flaws, finiteness, and fragility of human life, with the ultimate human truth — death. Even if a digital intelligence had those experiences, would we view them the same, without bias?
Ultimately, there is something important in art about the human stories that we can relate to, and that’s why it moves us. A lot of us wouldn’t love Whitney Houston without knowing about her story, life, suicide, and the sheer human emotion expressed in her artwork. On the contrary, if we thought “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” was AI generated, we wouldn’t listen to it for generations and consider it to be timeless music. The music depicts her story and struggle with sexuality, love, and addiction. Whitney is a human, like us, and her story is a little bit like all of our stories. In this way, I don’t believe machine-made art can ever serve the same purpose as human art.
The diamond analogy — art isn’t art without a human story
I recently stumbled into a discussion on AI art and someone brought up a very interesting analogy to frame the rationale that AI art and human-made art don’t deserve any distinction. The analogy went something like this:
”I disagree that the distinction between AI art and human-made art should matter. A lab-grown diamond and a rare mined diamond are both the same rock.”
I think there are two perspectives on the diamond analogy:
You’re a utilitarian. The lab-grown diamond and the mined diamond are the same rock, and you don’t really value the millions of years Earth took to form the mined diamond (the “story”).
You value the portrayal of the story, and the mined diamond’s rarity and magnificence comes from that.
But first, I need to go on a tangent and address the diamond analogy’s usefulness. Diamonds don’t analogize art at all. Why? Even a rare mined diamond doesn’t depict human experiences and interactions. Even in the case of seeing art in nature, the diamond by itself doesn’t represent the interaction of the human psyche and nature itself — it is just nature itself. While a rock may not incite human emotion since it doesn’t depict human experience, art does. Art incites a human connection vis a vis the artist who created it and/or the story behind it. It’s how we depict our world and communicate very relevant narratives about our reality.
So, to get the train back on its rails — even for a utilitarian who sees a diamond as just a rock, the value of art lies in the human aspect of it. A story, feeling, sound, or visual that makes one’s heart shudder is not the parallel in an analogy of a shiny, rare rock. Economic value and emotional value are not the same, and the former may be derailed by artificial creation, but the latter can’t. Artificial things don’t incite emotion in us the same way. They are, to our perception, artificial after all.
That’s why art must be human-centric, because when you remove the humanness from art, it just becomes “design” or “drawing” or “sound”, and so forth*.* Thus, “AI art” is a misnomer — it is not art without the human involved. and it never will be. Art is for us and always will be, as it represents the human reality, experiences, emotions, and spirit.
This would be a good place to bring in Google’s definition of art, where human skill and imagination are specified:
art moving forward
With the onset of AI, I do not believe that human-made art will lose any value. If anything, sincere and genuine art may gain value amid the sea of AI-generated slop we see on the internet on a daily basis.
It is becoming increasingly easy for humans to create with the new AI tools coming to market every day. This is a crucial change that will hopefully allow the best of human creativity and ingenuity to shine, as creation will become less about skill and more about taste and agency. AI tools will level the playing field for creators, enabling those who previously didn’t have the capacity or resources to create. The optimistic view is that this leads to a “Cambrian explosion” of human artistry.
We must be very careful that human creation and human stories remain priorities, and that the credit and integrity of people’s work doesn’t get destroyed in the long run. Right now, we are at a turning point for art, where art might be the only thing we have left after AI replaces all of our jobs in the long term.
Art is the only way to depict the beautiful and the horrid in their true emotional senses. The only way to take the realities we live and communicate them in the ways that they touch our souls, rather than imprisoning ourselves with the grayness of literalism and mundanity. We can’t let it lose its relevance in our society.