The web page has a lot of information
The web page contains a wealth of information. ast a mistake or a chance event into something new and exciting
**Big news: Seinfeld is back after quite a sabbatical and boy, does the reboot look different! A gummy bear that’s hilarious - you know what they say, if you don’t laugh you’ll cry. The AI generated never-ending Seinfeld episode is just one of many artificially rendered art pieces making the rounds today. Much like Donald Glover or Seth Rogen, there’s no medium AI isn’t ready to take on.
Thinkers have long fretted about what’s going to happen to the labor market when AI technology starts replacing administrative assistants, senior managers, and everyone in between. But with the advent of tools like Dolly, Deep Dream, and Chat GPT, new questions keep cropping up: will AI replace artists? Will AI art ever stop being…well, kind of bad? And could one boring piece of music technology - the MIDI synthesizer - provide the answers? Let’s find out in this Wisecrack Edition: will AI make good art?
At first, this question seems to demand a two-part answer. So first, of course, people will try to use AI to replace existing workers across the spectrum of arts and entertainment. If you need to publish an article to your news site, why would you pay a human to create a cover image or snap a photo for it when you can simply input an image prompt into a free AI portal? The results might be a bit weird, but hey, it’s free. Also, for that matter, why’d you pay someone to write the article in the first place? You idiot, we don’t do that anymore - we hate humans and we hate when they work, because then they get money which they can use to do things like, I don’t know, eat food, pay rent, and live.
Similarly, if you’re putting together a children’s book, why pay an illustrator when you could get an AI tool to create art in the style of an already successful artist?
Secondly, on the other hand, AI can’t actually replace existing artists right, because the images are sometimes creepy and often weird and basically replications or mashups of pre-existing artistic styles. People can’t be satisfied with crappy facsimiles of the familiar forever, right? After all, there’s not only an innate human need to create art, there’s an innate human need to appreciate it.
AI art is indeed novel for the moment, but it’s also…let’s face it, pretty bad. In summary, people are definitely going to use these tools to save money on artistic labor, and this is going to suck for people who make their living as graphic artists, illustrators, writers, composers, voice actors, or YouTube hosts, because many of us will be out of the job, or we’ll find ourselves earning half what we used to to babysit machine learning programs and ensure they don’t make anything too weird.
Still, we suspect the demand for quality and original art will still exist, so the more complicated question becomes: can AI ever do that? As in, could AI art ever actually be genuinely novel and good? To answer that question, we first have to ask why is AI so bad, and what if that badness could actually be its even grace?
Today, AI image generation has all sorts of problems: human faces are rendered with uncanny amounts of teeth - it’s crazy how scary it is just to imagine a normal human mouth but with more teeth; human hands have too many fingers and feel really slender.
Manny of course, mistakes don’t inherently make for bad art. For example, 18th century English painter Alexander Cozens was quickly sketching a landscape image for a student when he realized that pre-existing marks on the page had contributed unconsciously to his rendering. He wrote: “The stains, though extremely faint, appeared upon revisal to have influenced me insensibly in expressing the general appearance of the landscape.” They continued to experiment with organic mistake making in his work.
When elements of chance or mistakes enter art, the artist is able to adjust their process. An accidental red splotch in a landscape can become an escaped balloon, completely altering the meaning of the work. In contrast, AI simply fulfilling its programming merely pulls and consolidates images to fulfill prompt. It can’t recast a mistake or a chance event into something new and exciting.