Strange Art: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bots
AI continues to generate prose and artwork. Say what you will about the impending professional demise of graphic designers and content writers, the output these algorithms generate has the capacity to amuse, entertain, and delight. Moreover, every 1950s middle-manager could only dream of the productivity displayed by an app that receives neither overtime compensation nor health benefits.
Aspiration
If you happen to be a technically-competent human being lacking in artistic gifts, these tools are real-life magic. Suddenly, the capacity to express oneself in art is gated neither by time nor talent. We’re all, potentially, artisans and snarky art critics. High art is no longer the exclusive property of the aristocracy and their patrons.
Integrated with brain-computer-interfaces, human beings are now capable of generating art with nothing more than their thoughts. Midjourney, already attempting to help its users co-create art, has stated aspirations of custom video games developed without their creators penning a single line of code.
The pace at which technology accelerates is a testament to the ambitions and aptitudes of our species. Far beyond the limited capacities of our “precious bodily fluids,” AI is empowering individuals to create at a pace that seemed unimaginable only a few years ago.
But all that glitters is not gold.
Mutually-Assured Destruction
Ignoring the potential for AGI misalignment and the legitimate possibility that AGI is what will kill you, the collective accomplishments of GPT-3 or DALL-E are possible only because of the staggering totality of human accomplishment in the arts. GPT-3 is granted access to the entire corpus of human textual expression and DALL-E, the repository of all the digital images humanity has produced. It is only after stocking its pantry with this dizzying diversity of ingredients that the OpenAI cuisinart produces something delectable.
For individuals who have devoted years of education to and professional life to mastering the techniques required (until recently) to produce art, the current developments are devastating.
AI art generation is the science of constructing algorithms to recognize patterns, then reproduce those patterns with different subject material. In other words, the duplication of a particular style that artists have invested years of human capital creating. This feels ruinous to those individuals, and rightfully so.
AI art generation is disrupting the commercialization of art’s production and distribution. For those who had hoped to earn a living selling their aptitude as artists and designers, this is every bit as serious as the automation of textile equipment in the 19th-century.1
Society is only beginning to grapple with the implications of algorithms that render previously valuable human labor superfluous.2
Public Consumption
It is possible that ultimately, art becomes like so many other public services. Restricting their evolution and development is futile, and at least, through this lens, we address concerns by delivering a public good rather than simply eliminating salaried positions.3 Moreover, perhaps it creates business opportunities as it, admittedly, destroys others.
For the past two months, AE has been experimenting with AI art generation. Catalyzing the creative process is certainly aligned with our goals of increasing human agency. Bad Bot Design, which emerged in full from a company-wide retreat to Iguazu Falls in Brazil, allows creators to commission bots much as they would commission a human artist. In the process, a consistent, expressive style can be maintained across the items generated, based upon the “bad bot” the user selects.
The implications of such a tool are worth exploration, discussion, and debate. But we also think such tools are simply fun. Creating an image of your own and purchasing the image for a sweatshirt or a holiday card is (we hope!) a commercially-viable business and a novel application of this type of AI-generated artwork.
(Try it out and let us know if you have any other applications you’d like to see!)
Mutually-Assured Delight
No, we are not going to ride the AI-bomb earthward, whooping with delight as it eliminates every creative individual’s livelihood. Creativity is still valuable, just as industriousness remained valuable after industrialization.
The question is how that creativity is leveraged and delivered. An individual graphic designer may eventually go the way of a manual weaver, though every fine craftsman adds value beyond the mass-produced alternative. But a talented operator of a loom can generate a higher quantity of higher-quality textiles. So too can a clever prompt-engineer with a mix of cleverness, wit, and taste generate a line of shirts, greeting cards, or other items.
And we certainly prefer a world where distribution is automated and digitized.4
The world is changing rapidly, and the collective works of the human race are being reconfigured and reimagined. We should wrestle with the implications for those who created those works and how new styles will emerge (can AI proceed beyond the transformer-based extension of existing ideas?).
But we also shouldn’t hesitate to embrace the opportunity to explore the possibilities these technologies unlock. Creativity deserves the boost technology has already delivered for productivity.
And if you can’t think of what to give that special someone on your holiday list, let the Bad Bots come up with something for you!
1 The Luddites were those who took violent umbrage.
2 Or at least devalued to the extent that most Western professionals could not support themselves thereupon.
3 To be clear, the latter will still occur, as it did for the textile workers 150 years ago, but at least, the technological progress also brought with it, modernity.
4 Amazon’s retail business proves this point convincingly.