AI can now be used to produce an endless line of fast-food of meaningless & shallow aesthetic pleasantry - but it can also be used to create something with a purpose. The role of the artist will always be to instill that purpose into the thing that's being created - the "intent", or the "soul", something that a machine still cannot do. At the turn of the year, thoughts inevitably return to past accomplishments - or lacks thereof. When it comes to evaluating "artistic productiveness", it is always difficult to judge what can be deemed as suitable progress. Certainly the field of visual arts was shaken by the introduction of AI arts - well, its emergence wasn't entirely novel, as I (and many others) had been using AI-experimentation for quite some time already. No, it was the speed of progress, the appearance of more intricate and accurate models that shook the artistic world. When before the models were quite crude in their approximation of the human form, now, even lacking a base image input they can produce uncannily accurate depictions, oftentimes surprassing real-life artists. That's not to say that these AI models are perfect, of course, as more often than not they still introduce unnatural distortions and artifacts that normally have no place in a - supposedly - realistic image. Nevertheless, the models keep improving, and traditional artists continue growing increasingly more alarmed of this progress.
Such concern is understandable, if one has spent their lifetime honing the skill, and suddenly some cold machine comes out of nowhere and conjures breathtaking artistry in seconds. Yet I differ in my view from the traditional artists when it comes to this topic. In my mind, the most important trait of the Big Five for an artist is the trait openness, and this should include openness to change, particularly the changing landscape of tools. In other words, I see the AI "aid" as an intriquing new tool to experiment with, especially with its numerous differing models and their combinations thereof, both of the models themselves, and in conjunction with existing artistic pieces. The possibilities are, as they say, endless, and it is up to the artist to experiment and value the products of this new phenomenon, and create something new that - hopefully - ends up representing their intented vision. For, after all, what is an artist without a vision - no artist at all, and thus, since AI itself lacks the Soul & Spark needed to instill meaning into the works it conjures, it will still be up to the artist to breathe in that Spark, such that the "seemingly soulless" AI creations will end up emerging as something unique, with some purpose or meaning - beyond the simple aesthetic pleasantry. *** Now, as the AI arts' "fifteen minutes of fame" phenomenon is slowly dying out, it will be interesting to see what will follow. Will it be as with the invention of a camera, when artists feared being out of work? I think the future will look like something akin. There will be not much need for "quick and easy" art, as it will be done by the AI. However, portrait painters still exist, albeit in a novel form - and why is that? It is because the camera fails at the same job the AI fails - that is, it being an entity entirely existing in the Objective realm, it cannot capture the subjectivity of human experience. As a portrait painter brings his lenses (lived experience, skill, signature, etc - the entirety of their "personhood") onto the frame, so will the artist in a more broader sense bring his or hers personhood to any art piece. The camera captures reality "as is", without a will on its own, its lenses cold and devoid of emotion (other than what the human editor contributes in choosing the settings), and so, too, will the AI image creator create the image without a will, soul, or intention, and these aspects can only the human "editor" instill with their editing and choice of models & combinations. So, in essence, the AI-artist is akin to a photographer, using a device from the objective world to "capture" something without a pre-existing will, but as the editor-artist tinkers with the product, the end result will be a combination of both these Subjective-Objective endeavours, thus retaining the original intention needed, such that the resulting piece, can, in the end, be called true art. Well, at least that's my view on the subject, as I continue to tinker with these AI experiments. -For Sophia.
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