AI Art Is Inferior To Human Art...

But most humans can't master the subtle exceptions that make our art special.

So, the subject for this week's Middlebrow was going to be that the HBO comedy The Righteous Gemstones is the redneck equivalent of the HBO soap opera-comedy Succession and that anyone who misses our departed familial-corporate satire about a family fighting for control of a media empire that resembles News Corp should take up watching Danny McBride’s comedy about a family fighting for control of an evangelical megachurch and media empire.

The reason I’m not writing an entire Middlebrow about that is that my next paragraphs will basically repeat the argument of my lead. Gemstones and Succession are just a lot alike and if you like one, I think you’ll like the other. Meanwhile, we’re not getting any new series or movies for a while because the unions representing film and TV writers are on strike, and so are the unions representing film and TV actors. A reason for the strike (but not the prime mover) is that artificial intelligence threatens to replicate the work of human creatives, driving many out of their fields and devaluing the contributions of many. Art and creativity has long been considered the big signifier of human exceptionality. In so many iterations of Star Trek, smarter and more powerful forces accept human creativity as a grace that makes our species worth saving, despite our other flaws.

I say “other flaws” because creativity is also behind the sins that humans are judged for by alien high intelligences in Star Trek. Sure, you can argue that our burning the carbon created by the lifecycle of Earth to create energy to unleash things like AI at the expense of our environment is crazy. But, you can’t say it’s not creative. War might be nuts and self-defeating, but the people who organize them? Very creative.

But that’s not the creativity that saves humanity from annihilation when it’s cited by Captain Picard during his arguments with a godlike being from LA Law. No, that creativity is the type celebrated by The Middlebrow: Shakespeare, Hemingway, Moby Dick (though, nobody’s actually read that, right?). What Picard will successfully argue is that the beauty of creative art redeems the species.

The Middlebrow more than agrees. Andy Warhol also died for our sins, in that he left us the gift of a lot to think about. Recently, we lost Milan Kundera, who artistically documented the contradictions of his own life in ways that have freed so many other people who he never met. But, AI still challenges us. Are these achievements uniquely human?

The National Gallery of Art has some thoughts on the subject, and thanks to them, so do I:

And:

Time. Blew me away. Wonderful answer. The problem is, what if I can’t tell? There are more artists in Heaven and Earth than I will ever know and Alma Thomas is new to me, though not, of course, to The Scholar Wife, who in a profile of the artist Imani Bilal, included quote that cited Thomas as an influence. Because I don’t really know anything about Thomas, my response to the National Gallery’s question would have been random. No matter how much I pondered which was human and which was AI generated, I was not going to budge much (to or fro) from a 25% chance of getting it right by accident.

To the experts at the National Gallery, the distinctions are clear. They see the time and effort and result in ways that I cannot. I did not even know that these images had anything to do with the artist’s observation of flowers. This is not a problem with the art or the artist. It’s just a gap in knowledge that jewels like The National Gallery exist to help remediate.

But it creates a conundrum for anybody who wants to use the standards of excellence, attention and effort as signifiers of humanity in an AI world. What does it matter if the audience doesn’t know enough to see the difference? Education is an answer, but imperfect knowledge is the a defining characteristic of human being.

Like industrial manufacturing, AI will quicken capitalism to produce more goods that are “good enough.” A factory-built Toyota is no hand-built Ferrari, but for most people, the Toyota is good enough. An AI replication of a Van Gogh is not a Van Gogh, but for most people, it might neb good enough, too. In these cases, “most people” includes a lot of experts. In realms of taste, where subjectivity reigns, the fake stuff will have value. Heck, billionaires with sommelier advisors buy bottles of vinegar thinking they have something from the secret stash of Thomas Jefferson, fraudulent paintings by masters are bought and sold by trained, practiced and qualified people all the time.

Let us hope we never lack a National Gallery to employ professionals who can separate the real from the contrived, but that will not save us from the emerging fake art era. When I first saw images from Dall-E, I was reminded of cheap corporate posters from stores of the mall era 80s-aughts in America. Thing is… those stores made money. Sometimes, people like that stuff. Most times, they have no idea there’s something better and, even if they do know there’s something better out there, they lack the discernment to ferret it out. That’s not elitism — I work on my taste and I still get so much wrong.