What we lose when AI creates art

Or, it's not art if it is made by AI.

Narcissus By Caravaggio - Self-scanned, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25450745

In 1889, W. B. Yeats, now considered one of the most influential poets of the 20^th century, met Maud Gonne. Yeats was 24 years old, Maud 18 months younger than him. Smitten, he proposed to her. Maud rejected him. Over the next few years, he proposed several more times, each time facing rejection from this unrequited love he so pined for. The love that he would carry with him for several decades. 

At one point, Yeats confessed to Maud that he wasn’t happy without her, to which she replied, “Oh yes, you are, because you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness, and are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry. The world should thank me for not marrying you.” 

8 years after Yeats’ death, a Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, wrote his masterpiece in 1947. “Do not go gentle into that good night” was first published in 1951, just two years before Dylan drank himself into a coma while visiting New York City, his chronic chest illness exacerbated by the burst of air pollution in the city. He died on November 9, 1953. When his wife arrived at the hospital, she flew into a drunken rage and had to be put into a straightjacket and committed to a private psychiatric rehab facility. 

“‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ is a rapturous ode to the unassailable tenacity of the human spirit,” writes Maria Popova on her wonderfully timeless blog, The Marginalian.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

This “unassailable tenacity of the human spirit” seems to be under attack lately by another creation borne out of human ingenuity: Artificial Intelligence or AI. If you have not been living in an igloo in the Arctic wilderness for the past year or so, then you must have heard about AI and the seemingly techno-optimistic promises of the tech industry regarding how AI (and eventually Artificial General Intelligence or AGI) will be the benevolent savior of all humanity (or the malevolent destroyer, depending on who you ask).

Obviously, there are questions about Large Language Models and their suitability toward achieving the goal of AGI, questions about the singularity,  questions about the ethical and social impact of AI over the global society, about the impact of such models on climate change and resource allocation. There are also questions about anthropomorphizing AI technologies. But, let us put all these concerns aside for now. 

In this essay, I want to focus on a very specific issue, which is AI art. Or, AI and art. In the past two years, there has been a rise in offerings by the tech industry that sell a seemingly innocuous yet insidious dream to us. Tools that reduce the artistic process to a few sentences being entered into a text box and an algorithm generating art for us to use and enjoy and marvel at. With a few sentences, we can instantly generate novels, poetry, paintings, and videos using tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Sora, DALL-E, and others. How easy and simple, right? It has never been easier to create art. Not just easier, but faster as well. The entire process has been optimized. We can achieve peak productivity. On demand. So what’s the problem? 

When we name outputs of a probabilistic model as “art,” we are at risk of reducing human creation and suffering to a state of data processing. 

This is where it becomes important to make the distinction between art and content. And between the people who make art and the ones who make content. The distinction is important, yet we somehow miss this in most conversations on this topic. 

I think intuitively we know the difference. No one would ever call the Mona Lisa content, just like no one would call Homer’s Odyssey content. Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Spielberg’s Schindler’s List would never be branded as content. Shakespeare’s plays are not content. Yeats’ poetry is not content. 

Yet, there are a lot of people who do create content daily. Whether it is photographers doing photoshoots for a travel agency, or copywriters writing blog posts for companies, or influencers creating videos on different social media platforms. Intuitively, we know what is content and what is art when we see it. But somewhere along the way, we forgot to make this distinction. 

It is beneficial for content creators perhaps to be able to optimize their workflows. To be able to quickly generate some graphics for an ad company, to be quickly able to write a 1000-word article for a company blog. The more they can accomplish quickly, the more they can earn. These generative AI products become tools to optimize their productivity in their jobs. All is good. 

But artists, on the other hand, do not want to optimize their productivity. They have different motivations. They think differently about their art form, about their craft. To them, it is not about making deadlines, not necessarily. But instead, about taking time with the process itself.

One group is not better than the other. The two groups simply have different motivations. In many cases, the same person might be part of both groups at different times. A writer might be working on her novel, her art, while also working as a freelance copywriter to pay the bills, her content. And she would feel differently about AI and its use depending on what she is working on. But again, making that distinction is important. But left to their own devices, companies will blur this distinction if that means higher profits.

Art is not about optimization. There is a certain “humanness” in art that cannot simply be replicated by an algorithm. Art and humanity are interconnected. Being human is not just a function of inputs and outputs.

Being human is to contend with the reality of death. We live our lives with the impending doom of death yet we live a life filled with various emotions. We feel love and hate, joy and grief. We suffer and we see suffering around us. We feel. And our art is borne out of those feelings, be it rational, illogical, or esoteric feelings.

When Edward Hopper paints the Nighthawks in the lightless loneliness of New York City during World War 2, that loneliness is reflected in his art. When Yeats writes about his love in his poems, his heartbreak carries over to his words. When we expose ourselves to these artworks, be it paintings or novels or poetry or movies or music, they resonate with us because, at a fundamental level, we know that the artist must have felt the same emotions we are feeling at that moment. We are two consciousnesses suspended in two different moments in time and space, having a conversation. We both know that we are human. 

Anything generated using AI, no matter how objectively good or subjectively beautiful, is devoid of all meaning and emotion. AI never had to lose a loved one. It never had to struggle with anxiety nor did it ever have to question its self-worth. AI has no regrets, no compassion. There is no suffering in AI, something humanity has been facing since the beginning. 

That is why, I believe, there is no such thing as AI art because if it is generated by AI, it is not art. It is a piece of text, image, or video. It is content. And it is important to make this distinction because art is a deeply human endeavor. If we forget this, we might forget entirely what it means to be human.  

Why do we feel what we feel when writers bare their hearts and souls into their writings? When Sylvia Plath writes about the fig tree in The Bell Jar, when William Wordsworth writes about daffodils, when Dickens writes about human relationships and morality in his Victorian stories, or when Rumi writes “Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?” every reader feels what the writer felt in that moment.

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar 

In his wonderful and poignant book, Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar writes beautifully about language.

“I have heard people say smell is the sense most attached to memory, but for me it is always language, if language can be thought of as a sense, which of course it can be. Compared to even the dullest dog humans can smell nothing. But compare us with—what?— a monkey who can say "apple" with her hands?—and we are the gods of language, everything else just chirping and burping. And how fitting, too, that our superpower as a species, the source of our divinity, stems from such a broken invention.
It was invented, of course, language. The first baby didn't come out speaking Farsi or Arabic or English or anything. We invented it, this language where one man is called Iraqi and one man is called Iranian and so they kill each other. Where one man is called an officer so he sends other men, with heads and hearts the size of his own, to split their stomachs open over barbed wire. Because of language, this sound stands for this thing, that sound stands for that thing, all these invented sounds strutting around, certain as roosters. It is no wonder we got it so wrong.”

Language, a human invention, is an imperfect tool that allows us to communicate with each other, to scream at each other, to laugh with each other. It is imperfect just like its creators. Imperfections in art become a feature, not a bug because we see ourselves in it. The imperfections arise from us and dissolve within our creations. There is beauty in our imperfections and our transient nature.

As Fitzgerald wrote, “That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”

In a 2022 interview with the Louisiana Channel, a non-profit website based at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, poet and author Ocean Vuong says, “When I write, I feel much larger than the limits of my body. There is a mystery you tap into that is much bigger. And the poem becomes just a glimpse into what you reveal to yourself.”

To him, poetry gives us power, a way for us to deal with the uncertainty of our lives, and to save ourselves. He says, “I think no one saves us in this world, but people give us the tools so that we can transform towards our own rescue. And I think that is true of poems. We write them, and they're good enough, and then we let them go. Part of the act of writing is abandonment.”

“Art is where what we survive survives,” Akbar writes in Martyr! And I think it perfectly encapsulates the humanity and the human need in and of art. 

“We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs,” writes Anthony Doerr in All The Light We Cannot See. Such is the beauty of art. 

Am I simply romanticizing art and humanity? Maybe. 

But is that really a bad thing? We want to find beauty. We are not mere productivity machines stuck in an endless optimization algorithm. Life, and humanity, are not just about shareholder value and efficiency and productivity. It is about breathing, about beauty, about sunrises and sunsets, about the smell of soft mud after rain, about love and grief, about joy, about death.

I feel I do have an obligation to say a few words in support of AI, lest our future overlords take offense at this essay which will ultimately end up being ingested by some AI algorithm somewhere. 

AI is a tool. It is a piece of software to be used. It is not inherently bad, just like a hammer is not inherently bad. A hammer does not replace the human hand, it is a tool that is to be wielded to make certain tasks easier. 

AI is used in many different domains today to improve our lives. It is used to predict weather patterns with higher accuracy which can save many lives, and lets us decide a few days in advance if Sunday would be a good day to wear that new suede jacket outside. It is used to optimize energy usage in data centers that power the internet to make them more efficient and save energy. It is used in computational biology to identify cells in human tissue so we can better understand their properties, which can help improve our understanding of disease and aging. It is used to identify contrails with satellite imagery so we can better understand air pollution caused by flights. It is being used to unravel the mysteries of damaged papyrus scrolls from Pompeii that were buried when Vesuvius exploded centuries ago. The list goes on but this list should not include the creation of art. And that is a choice we collectively have to make. 

Here’s Nick Cave talking about ChatGPT creating a song.  “Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend. ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become.”

We all suffer in our own ways. Art helps us understand our suffering. At the very least, art enables us to make a feeble attempt at making sense of our sufferings.

Here is Nick Cave again, since no one has said it better.

“ChatGPT is fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanising the imagination. It renders our participation in the act of creation as valueless and unnecessary. That ‘songwriter’ you were talking to, Leon, who is using ChatGPT to write ‘his’ lyrics because it is ‘faster and easier,’ is participating in this erosion of the world’s soul and the spirit of humanity itself and, to put it politely, should fucking desist if he wants to continue calling himself a songwriter.
ChatGPT’s intent is to eliminate the process of creation and its attendant challenges, viewing it as nothing more than a time-wasting inconvenience that stands in the way of the commodity itself. Why strive?, it contends. Why bother with the artistic process and its accompanying trials? Why shouldn’t we make it ‘faster and easier?’
[…]
As humans, we so often feel helpless in our own smallness, yet still we find the resilience to do and make beautiful things, and this is where the meaning of life resides. Nature reminds us of this constantly. The world is often cast as a purely malignant place, but still the joy of creation exerts itself, and as the sun rises upon the struggle of the day, the Great Crested Grebe dances upon the water. It is our striving that becomes the very essence of meaning. This impulse – the creative dance – that is now being so cynically undermined, must be defended at all costs, and just as we would fight any existential evil, we should fight it tooth and nail, for we are fighting for the very soul of the world.”

What do we lose when we let AI create art? We lose a part of our humanness. And ultimately, when all art becomes a mere commodity, we lose ourselves, banished on this floating rock without any beauty, only to be swallowed by a dying star one day. The choice rests with us.