AI Can’t Create Art
Sure, AI tools can skillfully put nice lines, shapes, colours, and shades together. But that is not art.
Well, what is art then?!
In 1992 I got to see Picasso’s work for the first time in a book. I fell in love with his work. I begged my friend’s father who was a Syrian impressionist artist to lend me the book.
“I will guard it with my life” I proclaimed. After all the book was worth 5000 Syrian Pounds, an engineer’s salary for a whole month.
I took the book home and I didn’t sleep that night. I was mesmerized with his cubism partings. I drew every single one over the next few days.
I finally had to return the book. But that was the start of my love for Picasso’s work. But it wasn’t until 30 years later that I got to see his work in real life at Museum of Modern Art in New York.
I never thought this would ever happen. What are the chances that a Syrian boy who grew up in Damascus would end up in one of the world’s top museums looking at one of the most iconic paintings by a world leading artist.
I can tell you now, it’s the closest possible number to 0% that you can think of!
But I got to be there, and I got to experience what it’s like to be in the presence of art. It’s like falling in love, or listening to Separate Ways by Journey for the first time. It’s unexplainable, beyond description, pure feeling and emotion.
That’s what art is. It’s evocative, emotional, a conversation that always open for you to engage in with your senses.
What we call AI Art, is everything Art isn’t. It’s stale, non evocative, and there is no conversation to be had at all.
AI has had decided through math, equations, statistics, and algorithms which pixels need to have which colours, at which level, intensity, and contrast, to mimic what it thinks art is from crunching the mathematical values extracted from all the human artistic and creative production that it had ingested.
I don’t know how to say this in more clarity. Art is not math!
Humans are emotional beings, their best innovations and inventions are not a result of processing the information of the past.
We have evolved through our failures and mistakes while trying to reach for the impossible.
Nothing meaningful, worthwhile, or of note in human history had been reached through logic and rational thinking.
We are here because of our faulty nature, our tendency to err, desire to reach the stars, insatiable curiosity, unsubstantiated belief that we can do anything, and our need to find meaning in anything and everything around us.
This is why applying AI in a creative field is ludicrous, and a complete waste of time. AI innovations should be focused completely on fields where rational, logical, and structured thinking is needed. Like analysis, engineering, long term planning, research… etc.
These are established fields where human capacity of consuming and learning the past information is becoming a limitation to progress and innovation.
But when it comes to art, music, film, and other creative fields, knowledge, experience, and how much you know about those who came before you has nothing to do with how creative you are. Sometimes it’s the exact opposite. Those who intentionally ignore the mainstream and rebels against the norm are those who stand out.
Mr. Beast decided to read the lyrics of a song for 24 hours or count to a million on stream! There is nothing logical or predictive about that.
Dali hallucinated his way to melting clocks.
John Lee Hooker played with his fingers positioned in all the wrong way and created one of the most iconic blues songs.
Oscar winner Everything, Everywhere, All The Time is a movie that doesn’t make any sense according to the industries norms.
Mission Impossible Sequels shouldn’t be that well done or make that much money.
Taylor Swift shouldn’t be making a billion dollar on a music tour.
Nothing remarkable in the creative industry can be predicted with any accuracy. Still for some reason we try to apply logic, and tools that use logic and statistics, like AI to the one thing that is immune to logic by definition, the human state.
We are human, immune to logic, we love, we hate, we experience joy, pain, and everything in between, and it’s different for each other us.
AI Art will most likely be laughed at, or not forgotten completely, and hopefully, like NFT art, as nothing more than visual musings of interesting tools sold to us as breakthroughs!
Just like nothing can make you a YouTuber, a musician, or a basketball player, nothing can make you an artist, or make your creation art. Only you can do that.
You choose to become an artist, create art, and then create art, and then create art, until you more and more people see you as one.
It’s an unexplainable mixture, undecodable secret sauce of choice, tenacity, drive, passion, execution, experience, mistakes, luck, failure, discovery, magic, belief, and other unknowable ingredients!
Put simply there is no AI art. There just art and everything else that’s not.
Painting: Girl with a Mandolin (Fanny Tellier) by Pablo Picasso, 1910, oil on canvas, 100.3 x 73.6 cm, Museum of Modern Art New York. (Source: Wikipedia)
