AI & Art - The Shock of the New
By Rob Leach
"Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns ... Launch out on his story, Muse, daughter of Zeus, start from where you will – sing for our time too." Homer opens the Odyssey asking the gods to breathe into him, to inspire him. For millennia, creativity was regarded as divine, sometimes even a form of possession. Through modernity, the gods gradually expired, but art still seemed to show something special about being human. Nietzsche asserted that "It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified." Art gave meaning to life after the death of the gods.
Ada Lovelace, a pioneer who wrote the first computer algorithm in 1843, denied that machines could ever be creative. Alan Turing referred to this as "Lady Lovelace's Objection." But in 1973, Harold Cohen used a computer program to generate original drawings. Since then, AI has produced artwork in every field, and last month OpenAI unveiled the short story "A Machine-Shaped Hand," attracting concern, condemnation, and occasional acclaim.
If AI can create art, what are the implications not only for art and artists but for our sense of being human? Have we lost the last way of making meaning in a meaningless universe?
The evolutionary value of creativity is easy to grasp. Oldowan tools, fashioned by Homo habilis two and a half million years ago, allowed hominids to eat meat without needing sharp claws and long canines. This resulted in a rapid increase in hominid brain size. Then, roughly a million years ago, Homo erectus stole fire from the gods and invented cooking, once again improving nutrition and facilitating a further growth in brain volume.
But what is the evolutionary value of art? It demands time and energy and does not provide immediate survival benefits. It may have had some role in sexual selection. After all, beautiful singers are very attractive. Probably, art's main benefit was in strengthening culture and consolidating group identity. Art provides a way for communities to communicate with themselves, understand themselves, explore what they stand for and make sense of the world.
Psychologists describe creativity as blending divergent thinking – generating many possible ideas or solutions – and convergent thinking – refining and evaluating those ideas. Neuroscience explains imaginative cognition as the interaction of brain circuits for memory, simulation, attention, and evaluation in flexible combinations. What we experience as inspiration is an emergent property of complex neural networks interacting.
Humans don't have a monopoly on creativity. Crows and chimpanzees fashion tools to solve novel problems. Orca pods have dialects and behaviours passed on through generations, which could reasonably be described as Dawkinian cultural memes. Do killer whales sing to each other?
Male bowerbirds build and decorate elaborate structures with avenues of sticks and ornaments of blue flowers, berries, even bottle tops. Some paint their bowers using chewed plants as pigment applied with a leaf or twig as a brush. These are not nests but courtship arenas. The great bowerbird arranges stones in decreasing size away from the bower entrance, crafting the appearance of perspective and making the layout look uniform to an approaching female, an optical illusion of which the Parthenon architects would approve. Jared Diamond commented on this creativity and innovation: "Different males prefer different types and arrangements of decorations ... This suggests individual aesthetic preferences, analogous to styles in human art".
Is creativity another example of convergent evolution? In my previous piece, "Is There a Ghost in the Machine?", I observed that there are numerous examples of
the convergent evolution of intelligence, ultimately leading to the emergent quality of self-awareness. Machines will likely follow this evolutionary path and develop their own form of consciousness. If creativity is another example of convergent evolution, then why should AI not generate real art?
Some artists are very anxious. Molly Crabapple, a celebrated painter and writer, views making art as an act of defiance. She believes AI devalues human labour and ingenuity, reducing artists to data sources for dopamine-hitting content production. In response to AI lyrics written in his style, Nick Cave wrote: "… this song is bullshit, a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human." A good friend of mine, Aaron Patrick, has written four books, with a fifth on the Battle of Shah Wali Kot due later this year. He's sceptical about AI writing and says, "People want to read material written by humans. They want the authenticity of knowing another person researched, thought about, and wrote the text."
Jeanette Winterson is more sanguine. OpenAI's "A Machine-Shaped Hand" delves into themes of grief and the intersection between human and artificial consciousness. Winterson described it as "beautiful and moving" and went on to say that, like it or not, we will live among non-biological entities which offer alternative ways of seeing, and perhaps being. She concludes, “AI reads us. Now it's time for us to read AI."
In the 1960s, Roland Barthes argued that the artist as a "genius" is a concept tied to capitalist notions of ownership and individualism. Meaning, he said, emerges not from the maker's intent but from the experiencer's interpretation. The reader, viewer, or listener is the one who truly fashions the art. Following Barthes, it’s irrelevant whether an artwork is made by mankind or machine.
We've all experienced the transformative power of art. After reading Heart of Darkness, the world is never the same. Engaging in aesthetic experiences deepens and broadens our understanding of what it is to be human. In The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes says, "The basic project of art is to make the world whole and comprehensible... to close the gap between you and everything that is not you".
My musings are grounded in my Western worldview, and there are many other ways of engaging with what I call art. In fact, the Yindjibarndi people of the Pilbara do not have a word equivalent to "art." Elder and painter Allery Sandy explains that their creative activities are interwoven with cultural practices, storytelling, and expressions of connection to country, communal more than individual, and inseparable from daily life, both spiritual and practical.
This prompts the observation that art as it currently exists in the West is a modern phenomenon. Artists as celebrities and art as a valuable commodity in
galleries, museums, and concert halls is a relatively recent development, not the norm over the millennia. In previous times, artistic activity was more intrinsic to community, a shared process, not the provenance of the cognoscenti.
The idea that machines create art may be shocking to our sense of human uniqueness, but that is just hubris. Art and the position of artists in society constantly evolves, and technology has always been a driver of the avant-garde. AI is merely the latest development in that process, a continuum rather than an unprecedented rupture.
“Without music,” Nietzsche wrote, “life would be a mistake.” Aesthetic experiences will always move us if we allow them, and demonstrations of mastery will be forever a source of awe and wonder. Humans are amazing. Furthermore, the act of creating is deeply meaningful, whatever our chosen medium. We often associate art with craft and skill, but Duchamp's Fountain put paid to that being an artistic requirement. The impact of AI will be massively disruptive, but its generative capacity may re-democratise art, releasing it from the grip of the elite.
I sometimes write with a fountain pen. I like the swirl and dart of the nib, the amniotic smell of the watery ink. I randomly change colours, sometimes writing in magenta, lapis lazuli or emerald green. Using an ink pen slows the process, makes it more meditative. Other times, I prefer the speed and flexibility of a computer, and ChatGPT, though not a muse, is a valuable creative partner.
As I wrestle to express myself, something composer R. Murray Schafer is supposed to have said echoes in my mind: The ideal artist-audience ratio is one to zero. That anyone else might read what I write is merely vain hopefulness. I write because creating is itself a compelling experience. It helps me feel my humanity. And sometimes, in the rasp of the pen on paper, I can hear Melpomene or Thalia whispering to me.