The Work of Art in the Age of Artificial Production
AI promises personalized art at the click of a button—but is that what we really want?
I have recently heard several technologically-inclined persons remark that of the many benefits the advent of Artificial Intelligence is sure to bring us, one of the most exciting is the prospect of personalized art. Say that you are going to give a speech before a large audience; naturally, you’re nervous, you have a little time to kill, so you put a prompt into an AI tool for a short piece of music that will calm you down, put your nerves at ease, and give you the confidence boost you need to go out there in front of—oh, let’s say 20,000 people—and absolutely kill it. This tool knows your tastes, your preferences, every subtlety of the various hues and shades of your moods, and what it generates is perfectly calibrated to you, the unique and irreplaceable person that you are, in this one particular circumstance. Or say that you have an equal ardor, when it comes to all things cinematic, for Old Hollywood and science fiction—you press a few buttons, wait a few seconds, and out comes a full feature-length film starring Vivien Leigh (your favorite actress) in a space suit designed by Edith Head (your favorite costume designer), standing on Mars shaking her fist at the sky to a soundtrack composed by Hans Zimmer (your favorite film composer), speaking those famous lines, “As God is my witness,” etc., etc. Or you could have a portrait of your dog painted in a style that mates Rococo with Cubism, or a poem in dactylic hexameter that evokes the feeling you get when reminiscing about a childhood memory of your father, or a ballad (or ballet) about the events of your day.
Indeed, these are exciting possibilities, and I wholeheartedly agree that it would be tremendous fun to explore them. But the fundamental presupposition that emerges from behind this idea of personalized art is that art is some private thing, existing solely between the created object and the individual beholder. The more the artwork conforms to the unique experiences, the needs and desires of the individual beholder, the better, for under this framework of thought, art has an almost utilitarian purpose as regards our emotions. When we’re sad, art should cheer us, soothe us, give us an outlet for our tears; when we’re angry, art should calm us or purge us; when we’re confused, art should clear us up. But if art has any purpose at all, I think it must lie not in therapy but in transcendence. The true beauty and meaning of art lies in its ability to lift us out of ourselves, out of our petty concerns and our endless vicissitudes of thought and feeling, out of our smallness, our meanness, our littleness. It lies in connection, not separation.
Over the years, however, art has shifted from more public to more private arenas. We used to watch movies in theaters, but now we stream them in the comfort of our own homes; we used to have to get books from bookstores or libraries, where the presence of other people let us know, however slightly and subconsciously, that we were part of a broader reading public; to see a painting properly, we needed to go to art galleries and museums, but now you can find a high-resolution image online, zoom in, and pick out the brushstrokes at your own leisure. Once upon a time, books were to be read aloud, a jovial activity among friends, a pleasant way to pass a winter’s evening with family, but now silent reading dominates, the prerogative of introverts and day-dreamers. So it is no surprise that the next logical step is to make art ever more narrowed down to the individual and to individual consumption.
It cannot be denied that art gains its vividness and power from particulars. In Leonardo da Vinci’s “Virgin of the Rocks,” the plants are so thoroughly, specifically realized that botanists today can instantly identify them. Now, you and I may not be able to, but the power that such a level of detail lends the piece must surely be felt, must surely add to the emotional and aesthetic strength of the work. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings endures beyond the ever-widening flood of lesser imitators because it is so informed by the author’s scholarship and expertise in Old English literature and culture. But when I see contemporary poetry increasingly narrow in on particulars of race or gender, where certain writers and the people who publish them seem to think that all that is required to create a work of art is to simply describe moments of trauma or personal history that prove the special snowflake-ness of the writer, I cannot help feel a sense of dread at the idea that the art of the future will serve to cocoon people ever more in the prison of the individual self. If this is the future towards which art is being impelled, then I would sooner be a mole rat than a human being, so that to burrow myself away in darkness would simply be part of my nature, not artificially put on.
For art is meant to be shared; it is meant to be a vehicle of connection that draws us out of our confines and makes us part of a greater unity, a larger whole. The Iliad is not tailor-made for me, it takes place in a world entirely apart from that of 21st-century America in which I live, it is not the kind of story that I would have generated for myself were I to generate a story, for I dislike war and violence, but when I read it I understand—not merely intellectually, but on a deeper heart-and-soul level—that people thousands of years ago felt and suffered as we do, and that war back then, however different its rules and stratagems from war today, was just as violent, chaotic, and meaningless.
I am disturbed by this idea that art is a product like any other product—a toilet cleaner or a pair of scissors, say. In business, the needs of the consumer rule, and everything is sacrificed on the altar of product-market fit, so that it makes sense that the more—and the more easily, more quickly, more inexpensively—we are able to produce artwork that conforms to what an individual consumer says she wants, the more “successful” the work will be. Such thinking does not honor the fact that art is something that speaks to the soul, and that souls are larger than selves. Granted, art is something that we buy and sell, and I have never found the idea of the starving artist by any means glamorous—those who make their careers in art should not shy away from monetary and financial ambitions, for artists are people first, and people need food and water and shelter and to put their kids through college and save for a rainy day. Yet the forces that make a work of art resonate with thousands or millions across space and time are far deeper, stranger, and more idiosyncratic than can be plugged in with simple algorithms or calculated for the most profit.
Minute by minute, ream after ream of meaningless “content” is being pushed out, extruded like dough, churned out into a world that is already flooded with it, and one cannot help imagining it piling up like items in a landfill. AI should not serve to simply open these floodgates further and bury our aesthetic and affective landscapes under mountains of rubbish. We consume content, but we appreciate, stand in awe of, are moved, changed, inspired, invigorated, utterly transformed by art. If content is junk food for the mind and soul, art is nutritive, healthful fodder, and it is as necessary to our proper flourishing as fruits and vegetables are to the functioning of the body.
Another assumption technologists make is that we want art that is produced instantaneously, that appears in the blink of an eye or with the snap of our fingers. But what about the care, effort, and labor that goes into an act of creation? We may not know really the extent to which a creator has put time, sweat, and tears into the completed work that stands before us, but we feel it when care has been taken in the making, and we feel something missing when it has not. Even a baby does not appear out of thin air; it needs nine months to gestate, grow, develop, and prepare itself for entry into the world. New tools are always promising to make things easier and more convenient, but tools are not what make art, people are.
The idea that simply because you have a new, more advanced tool with which to string sounds together into music or words into novels or images into films, you can skimp on thought, detail, care, and labor is an illusion. All great art is personal, in that its ores are mined from the deepest parts of ourselves, but the deepest parts of ourselves are also those that are in communion with the divine, the universal, the sacred and the transcendent, and thread us across our boundaries into a common fabric. To reach that depth is not a matter of pushing a few buttons or typing in a few words and hitting enter. Whether you use AI or not, the tool is not the artist, you are, and to create truly meaningful art will always require the sacrifice, labor, and discipline of craftsmanship. Let us put the horse before the cart, please, or the cart will soon have us careening—oh, who knows where?
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Thank you for reading!! If you enjoyed, please LIKE this post and SUBSCRIBE to this newsletter! and of course I’d love to hear your ideas on this topic in the comments—what do you think about the possibility of personalized AI art? xoxo Ramya <3
WOW! such a beautiful piece Ramya!!!. Yes I whole heartly agree with every word you said in this piece. "those who make their careers in art should not shy away from monetary and financial ambitions, for artists are people first, and people need food and water and shelter and to put their kids through college and save for a rainy day" - so profound.
I also feel, as much as we embrace technology, we also need to value certain elements of life in its own merits and its place. Art is one such element of life that it should have its special place, irreplaceable by any technology or AI for precisely the reasons you mentioned. Thank you for sharing.