A Simple Answer to the AI vs. Art Problem

I was having a debate with a friend who argued that eventually, AI will get so advanced that no human artist can compete with it, like what happened in chess. I disagreed, at first claiming that good art has a “soul” and AI art cannot reproduce that.

He countered that it doesn’t matter whether the art has a soul as long as it can trick the audience into thinking it has a soul. It simply has to pass the Turing Test, and even now, the newest AI models have successfully passed that on many occasions.

So, what defines art? Is the artist behind an AI-generated work the human who inputted the prompt, the AI itself, or the coders behind the AI? Can AI art replace human art?

Why AI art cannot replace human art

I’m firmly in the camp of “No, AI art cannot replace human art”, but not for the reasons people often mention. I think what we think constitutes AI “art” can pass the Turing Test and surpass the audience-perceived quality of human art, but I believe that what the AI produces is not true art regardless of how its audience perceives it. What AI produces is entertainment, not art.

Art is often created as a way of sublimating the artist’s feelings. The artist feels something but cannot put a name to that emotion and finds the creation of art a way of processing and manifesting those emotions. Art is the artist’s personal journey and actualisation into gaining spiritual and emotional clarity.

On the other hand, entertainment is a project whose creator aims to appeal to an external Other, considering what the Other prefers and finds pleasurable. AI is thriving at the latter, as evidenced by Dreamworks laying off a team of animators to replace them with AI.

That is not to say that all culturally essential works of art are “purely” art without entertainment or consideration of the audience’s point of view. Many professional artists constantly balance between expressing themselves or the internal enjoyment of working on art while considering business goals.

For instance, take a fashion designer who loves designing for the runway but has to tweak and restrict their creative process to create designs that sell effectively as ready-to-wear.

This point does not mean that their ready-to-wear is not considered art. I would argue that there are different degrees of what work is more artistic than another, being conscious, of course, that this is an intuitive opinion of mine with little factual or data justifications other than what “feels” right.

But I can explain it by arguing that the fashion designer would agree that their runway pieces feel more “authentic” and that they “put more of themselves” in them than the ready-to-wear.

Where do we put AI-generated media into this?

They are pure business, with very little self-expression. Of course, the person writing the prompts is expressing themselves, but it is different from the process of how an artist expresses. When starting an art project, the artist usually has a vague idea of how they feel about the eventual project. Artists often begin a project thinking they will do a tragedy, only for the product to end up as a comedy, and so on.

On the other hand, the “prompt engineer” already knows what to write; they are closer to rhetoricians than artists. They are not doing much self-actualisation or achieving a higher intellectual or spiritual realisation, unlike how an artist experiences the process of creating their art.

The AI vs. human art debate echoes the kitsch vs. fine art debate. A kitsch is often described as art that is produced purely for entertainment and to sell, whereas fine art is defined as art that says something solid and personal about the artist behind the work.

AI, as well as humans, can create kitsches — in fact, AI is damn good at it. However, AI cannot create art. Only humans create art.

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This post was previously published on An Injustice!

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