why art will survive AI
Time and time again, I have gotten up and pushed, sometimes in the same direction, often reinventing from scratch. I have felt like the ultimate creativity for my species is making something out of nothing,whether it is myself as a person, a product or a completely wonky piece of art that only a handful of people will get to see, yet one that will make them feel something.
How many times have you made people feel things via a channel other than yourself ? Given death is inevitable and beautiful in how close and real it is, these other channels are ways to tell your story, besides the memories you leave with people that have limited RAM and limited time too.
So in order to be you need to make, to interpret and translate your own observation into a tangible outcome for everyone else to experience.
I was at the Guggenheim today and I was never more sure that art is going to be one of the few things that survives AI and us humans, as banal and far from it as we are in our day to day. Why?
It’s a simple calculation. Art is not perfection or beauty or even relevance, often it does not have a message either or a significance of any kind. Yet it is an artifact of transmission. A format through which you take a very human experience of the moment, the day and the century and scale it into the masses, potentially, if they are open to it.
Now if you were to replicate exactly the same via silicon intelligence, you perhaps would create the effect and the artifact, without the transmission. We only feel things strongly about what is close and familiar to us and very rarely empathize with others. There might be a human or two that feels for trees and even more people who have strong emotions for dogs. However, most of what we feel is directed towards us or some form of us living in the other, whether it is a parent , a spouse, a child or simply a loved one. We love ourselves amongst others and see our pain in theirs and feel it even more acutely if it is around the corner and if the sufferer looks, talks and even suffers just like us.
This makes me believe that AI art will only take off morphed into a human experience rather than as a standalone output.
I walked over to the steps of the curvy stairway in the middle of the museum and realized how much I miss the physicality of creation.
The random music in the background was hitting my ears and I was fantasising about a sandwich , a Celsius can and lying in the sun reading analog novels from those before me, who wrote about those ahead of me. It all seemed like a beautiful blur, an indulgence, a hedonistic escape from my screen and its algorithmic attacks on my attention span.