Machine-Learned Art

As I write this, I am accompanied by this music: Sines of Exquisite Pleasure - Modular Systems (1982 Cassette). There is nothing like ambient synths to get you in the mood for discussing machine learning. Anyways, there have been a lot of discussions this year surrounding media generation through artificial intelligence, and I am definitely late to the trend. Still, recently I was thinking about one question for this movement: is AI-generated media art? I want to know why we choose our answers to this question and examine the preconditions of how we think about machine-generated art.

Before we get into that though, let us first examine humans and their relationship to art, and more broadly, the relationship between nature and art. Are we familiar with what is art in the first place? Conceivably, art is difficult to define as objective truth. In circles made up of fans of art, it seems like the definition of art is undefinable - naturally lawless and turbulent. This is made exemplary by the famous Marshall McLuhan quote:

Art is anything you can get away with.

On the other side, some circles define art as only a part of a more orthodox, strict approach to creative expression. The argument is that true art will always be able to inspire awe from the general public due to sheer complexity and/or high standards. For example, a band whose individuals follow sheet music exactly to put on a perfect performance underlying the original author’s grandiose vision. This idea has been fairly common up to recent generations in the western world. During the Renaissance, and various other shifts in our collective consciousness, more freedom was given to artists to create what they wanted. However, only the most popular techniques during these time frames prevailed as being labeled as art.

That begs the question from both sides: what can be labeled as art in our world today?

We can first look at what we all agree to be art, and drawing from another post from James created here, he mentions that writing is a work of art. Certainly, it has the capacity to be, and both perfectionists and free thinkers would agree. Writing is an expression of the way we feel and is a form of communication for other humans. You can’t be skilled at writing necessarily, but you can be skilled at a process that defines a set of rules for writing in its particular biome. An example of this is grammar. Grammar is not writing, but a set of rules applied to writing that defines a common structure for maximizing communicability. Writing falls between the spectrum of a painting and a piece of code, and we can control the balance between a grand story and a technical work. Writing is programmed art; a creation based on variable definitions of creativity and structure.

Applying this generally to all works, it is interesting to see what people can think is art. In my opinion, art is an expression of an idea or feeling. From the example before, most would commonly accept the idea of a painting as art and dismiss the possibility that a research paper on how algae can be an alternative food source is not art. Though, I kind of disagree with this sentiment. From what I see, you can still express your feelings and ideas through many different outlets, and their complexity seems to distinguish the audience, similar to the idea of targeted writing. If a complex idea or work is in your scope of reality or interest, and you see it as having no emotion attached to it, is it really art?

I would argue that a good example of art is the first bowl to be made by humans. I think this is a good example because it highlights the feeling of a need for something, in this case, a simple container to carry things, but very relatively technical nonetheless. This is why artifacts are some of the most valuable pieces of art as they communicate so much to our current generation implicitly. The artist (or creator) doesn’t need to try to influence others to give any feelings for the people that the creation interacts with - that connection is completely random. Does art need an agreeing audience, or rather more generally observers, to exist? Would you consider a natural occurrence to be an art piece? These are questions that must be contemplated to determine if AI has the potential to create art.

Artificial Intelligence does not have the ability to reason about its surroundings in a free-thinking way, but only relies on the input of the machine to produce an output. It is a tool that our generation has become increasingly familiar with - recommending content to consume, helping us drive cars, assisting in robotics applications, simplifying individualistic tasks in business, and much more.

To me, AI art is a good metaphor for our ever-increasing metamodernistic way of thinking. From the perspective of machine learning, everything is structured only in terms of reason within the bounds of mathematical computation. However, the human side of the equation is the one interested in the output and the one responsible for the input to this machine. Considering a person who wants to create art with a computer program, I see it as an allegory of the ironic progression of our collective culture and society. We take all the data on the complexities of the human condition and mix them into the rigid, scientific structure of the computer to produce a creation that no one has seen before.

This makes me believe that AI-generated media is art. I can see how you would disagree though. That being said, I know very little about art and its history, but I couldn’t help but contemplate this. I will leave you with an image I created with Dall-E: