This I Believe
Embracing humanity's evolution from creator to curator
[In February 2024, Palm Beach State College's Palm Beach Gardens campus will celebrate "This We Believe: A Celebration of the Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences" through a series of lectures, exhibitions and activities. We invite all PBSC students, faculty and staff to submit artwork that conceptualizes this year's theme: “This We Believe”]
I am responsible for the reimagination of Michelangelo’s Pieta depicted above, but I produced it in a matter of minutes using words rather than through many hours of skillful effort using traditional artistic media.
Is it “art”?
That question is not new. It was first posed long before the era of Generative AI, all the way back in 1917 by an artist named Marcel Duchamp with his best known work, Fountain.
Duchamp took a porcelain urinal, rotated into a different position, wrote the cryptic text ‘R. Mutt 1917’ on the side, and submitted it to the prestigious Society of Independent Artists exhibit, of which he was a cofounder and director. Initially rejected under the pseudonym, it eventually kicked off the Dada movement and became one of the 20th century’s most influential pieces.
But why? It didn’t take any particular skill to write on a manufactured item. What’s so great about a toilet?
Well, since I’m not an art historian, that’s exactly the kind of question I like to ask ChatGPT. Here’s an excerpt from its response:
Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain," which is essentially a standard porcelain urinal, is considered one of the most influential pieces in modern art not because of its physical form, but because of the ideas and conversations it sparked about the nature and definition of art. Here are a few reasons why it's held in such high regard…”
It goes on to list out in detail many different reasons why Fountain was such an important piece and what exactly it was a rebellion against. It’s beyond the scope of this article to go any deeper down that particular rabbit hole, but you can definitely talk further about it with ChatGPT, it has a lot to say.
For now, I merely wanted to establish that the decoupling of artistic value from artistic skill, at least as traditionally conceptualized, was accomplished long before any of us were born.
It happened also with photography, which faced tremendous opposition to being considered as a legitimate art form. This article from studiobinder.com does a good job of setting up each side of the debate before asserting:
Whenever a new art form comes into existence, there is a hesitancy from the industry’s gatekeepers to recognize the new with the same reverence as the old.
Over time, barriers to artistic acceptance have been eroded and the pretentious protection of “traditional art” has lessened. These days, the general consensus is that photography is, in fact, an art form.
I am quite certain that over time, the very same thing will happen for AI art, although because of some tragic ethical choices along the way, it will always come with an asterisk.
Thoughts on the Ethics of AI Art
The data used to train these incredible AI systems was not obtained ethically. Artists have every right to be furious that their life’s work was scraped from the internet “for research purposes” and then laundered into the for-profit tech companies that funded the research.
For a while I declined to engage with AI art generation because of my objections to these and other practices.
What changed my mind? I remembered that everything in the world is ethically tarnished, including the disturbing sourcing involved in the supply chain for the devices we are using to communicate with in this very moment.
That’s not an excuse to mistreat people or ignore ethics in my own personal life, but I see it as a reality check that we can’t hold consumers responsible for the misbehavior of suppliers. If everyone else is going to be freely using these models to generate illustrations, then my self-imposed righteous stand is just Quixotic and silly and doesn’t even do the artists any good.
So I’ll use these tools. However, I’ll also express to whoever will listen that I think the artists, such as Steven Zapata, whose masterful essay is provided below, are unambiguously in the right. Once the dust settles, I have no doubt that artists fully deserve whatever restitution and consideration the courts will decide is appropriate.
But can we change the reality that AI art is here to stay? No. I don’t think we can. So we have to simply adapt to the new environment, as humans always do.
Curators, not Creators
I’ve spent 20+ years tutoring mathematical material that hasn’t been commercially performed by humans since long before I was born. If you need to find out what log(25763) is, you never ask a human, no matter how brilliant they might be. You ask the machines.
It wasn’t always this way. The movie Hidden Figures does a legendary job of capturing what the transition period was like when we switched from human calculators to digital calculators.
By contrast to the women at NASA who used to compute by hand, modern mathematicians have both mind-boggling computational power at their disposal as well as a nearly infinite set of possible problems to compute. In that context, their role has become less about manually performing the brute force technical process of finding answers, and more about deciding which answers are worth finding, and interpreting what the answers mean.
Similarly, I believe the impact on art, writing, marketing, content creation, coding, and many other fields impacted by AI is that the repetitive tasks originally done by hand will all be automated, but humans won’t disappear from the equation. We didn’t lose the field of mathematics just because computing machines came along, and we’re not going to lose art, writing, or the other humanities either. These will simply change.
Just as computers created new realms of mathematics that we couldn’t comprehend prior to the invention, so too will we soon be making new artistic, spiritual, and philosophical discoveries that I cannot yet begin to imagine, let alone predict. We’ll reinvent ourselves with a focus on sifting through the massive number of possibilities and deciding what content is worth sharing. We’ll contextualize it in a way that audiences find interesting and compelling. And just as a calculator democratizes access to accurate computations to everyone, so too does generative AI democratize access to articulate and skillful expression to everyone.
The power is in our hands right now. Democracy is a gift, but it is also a burden. It falls to us to bear that burden with responsibility, and with respect for the danger of the fire we’ve stolen from the gods.
So in conclusion, this I believe: with the mechanical layers of every craft now abstracted away and handled by machines, it is only by fully embracing and trusting in the strength of our humanity that we will figure out how to successfully navigate the perilous yet promising future that’s already here, just as we always have.
