Why AI?

 

P-197 (1977) -- Manfred Mohr

 If you already have skills, why would you want to make AI-generated art?  

This is an interesting idea to ponder. In the past, abandoning traditional craft was a way to make a clean break with the past--as John Baldassari did when he staged a "cremation" of his paintings, or when Robert Irwin nixed painting in favor of light and space art, or when Marcel Duchamp did things like use Rembrandts as ironing boards and bottle the air of Paris. I have been thinking about doing a similar 180 in music, but I realized I already did that in the late 90s when I wanted to do something postmodern--something that wasn't a song as we know it. But is it worth another squeeze--especially when non-musicians are making music? I've been wondering if AI art even has the capacity to allow that kind of re-invention because there really is no artistic risk in it if you don't know what you're breaking from. It's not anti-art, as it was with the Dada.

Being successful as a self-proclaimed non-artist, non-musician, or even a non-architect, is elementally a postmodern idea. It's democratized to the point where you're knocked off-balance by its banality, and AI art makes it all the more easier to be a non-artist being an artist. I see AI art as akin to ordering from a menu: many people are using the same menu in the sense that the printed menu (data set) is the same, but the results are slightly different, even though the ingredients are the same. If you cook something for yourself using a set number of ingredients there could be more variety because you're working with the cooking algorithm in real-time, and not just re-shuffling the ingredients like a playlist. (You can work with temperature for caramelization for example, or use different spice combinations). Even the "ordering from a menu" metaphor is bereft of cleverness. In the 60s making art from a menu would have been a conceptual idea (and perhaps was--I suspect Sol LeWitt might have), but now it's banalized because we don't care about conceptual art now--at least not in the mainstream. It's ironic that art is now back to being completely retinal--an aspect that Duchamp used as a pivot away from traditional art. AI art isn't that pivot, or at least not that I know about.