Lessons From Art in a Mediated Reality

AI and knowing what is real

Today a friend of mine who is an artist posed this question on social media:

“Wonder why some people are really upset about AI art. Some of it is quite beautiful. But, I get rude responses… like “AI Fake” if I post a pretty picture.

The picture below is hand painted. It’s not realistic at all. It’s an artist’s perspective and uses artistic license.

But … that’s okay?

I have played around with a Corel program off and on. A person can create some beautiful artwork through computer generated imagery software.

Tell me why AI art has become an issue?”

She added a semi-abstract city skyline painting, the hand painted art she refers to, as an image.

The point being of course that both abstract and realistic art can be beautiful, and these images can be created solely by human beings, by human beings using AI as a tool, or entirely by AI.

There’s a certain pragmatism to this argument. If the purpose of art is to be enjoyed, if it simple exists to please the eye, then any method of generation achieves the same end.

This utilitarian view of Art having a purpose to please and be pretty gives an ontological view of what Art is (an answer about the core essence of a thing, in philosophy ontology relates to the ‘beingness’ of something, the fundamental characteristics or qualities without which it is no longer itself).

And so far as it goes, this justification of AI art is actually very traditional, and one entirely in accord with my own aesthetic position in many instances. For me, one of the truly great errors of contemporary art came with the abandonment of what was once called ‘the pursuit of Beauty’. Beauty is indeed an important factor when considering whether something is a work of art, and aiming for Beauty certainly gives an artist a head start in any race to create an object that is moving and provokes the kinds of emotional response real art often generates.

But Beauty, sadly, is not the sum of human experience. In fact it can be one of the most fleeting and elusive of human experiences. It’s also somewhat more complex than it would first appear to be. What an artist often does is to transfigure things which are not themselves beautiful into images that are, to somehow find Beauty in unlikely places or in unusual ways. There are plenty of masterpieces of Art that present grim or horrific subject matter, for instance, indeed these proliferate. Think of all those images from the Old Masters to the present that are based on Biblical tales of murder, execution, beheading, torture, martyrdom and suffering.

The most central of these, of course, is the image of Christ on the Cross. Whether carved in wood or stone, or painted on a canvas, the figure of Christ on the Cross is not beautiful in the sense of being something pleasant and enjoyable, it’s not ‘pretty’ or simplistically uplifting in the manner that, say, a traditional chocolate box or Christmas card illustration might be, or outside of art the smile of a handsome or beautiful man, woman or child would be. It’s a depiction of the most extreme agony, of a body in crisis under the strain of torture. It would be a perverse mind that considered such an image pleasant.

But these images are nevertheless beautiful, more often than not. Whilst strict and dismissive atheists, or perhaps proponents of another faith, might see Christian imagery of Christ on the Cross as reflective of a sick culture, of a fascination with torture and suffering, the Beauty comes from the combination of intention and skill and from a human sympathy with the aims and achievements of the artist. It is only this sympathetic understanding that translates the image of torture into an image of deep and meaningful humanity.

You have to know that the image exists and is valued not to express a sadistic love of the suffering depicted, but a sacred understanding of the sacrifice being offered, a religiously instructed awareness that this is God, as Christ, suffering for all mankind. It’s an extraordinarily moving and profound image because of the complex layers of Christian understanding of what Christ did and who Christ is. Christ is God and part of God and the son of God, but also human. So there we have the wondrous and remarkable reversal of pagan sacrifice. Rather than a Deity demanding offerings from Man to assuage his Divine Anger, this is God giving an offering to Man to wash away all human error and sin. That itself is a means by which the image accesses the most profound sense of hope and joy, if you have the key of faith unlocking that message. But Christ is also a man, who like a man feels despair (“Father, why hast thou forsaken me?”),doubt, torment, and of course the pain and horror of physical torture. As such, he represents Man as a whole, and every instance of suffering we have felt, or can feel, as a species of individuals in what sometimes seems an uncaring universe.

Christ’s sacrifice would not be meaningful if it was experienced in the aspect of an invulnerable God. It means something because he bleeds and suffers and knows what it is to be human in such adversity. But knowing that he experiences it anyway, he chooses it, on behalf of all of us.

The Beauty is in the artistic skill of the depiction then, in the technical mastery that conveys the agony, but so much more Beauty is there in what the artist and the viewer both know and feel as human beings aware of the meaning of the image. It takes human understanding in both the creation and the witness of Art to make it truly Art, because the truth of Art lies in the human element of this creative endeavour.

When I replied to my friends post I said this:

“For me it’s an issue because anything generated by a machine is soulless. Art is human creativity. It is skill and imagination and exists to express these human qualities. If it’s created by a machine it has no heart, no depth, no meaning, no purpose. If it’s created by a machine it’s wallpaper.

It’s not about whether it’s realistic. It’s not even about whether it’s beautiful. It’s about whether it expresses the beauty of human creativity…..put it this way, if I had one of your paintings I’d have a real piece of art. If I had an AI generated piece I wouldn’t. It might be pretty. Fractals are pretty. Lights in a puddle at night can be pretty. But only human endeavour makes art.”

Those who say that AI generated images are Art I think miss this fundamental point. Much as those who pretend that ‘found objects’ are Art do the same. When artists at the start of the 20th century started to pretend that anything the artist claimed as Art was indeed art, they made the same profound error as those who today assert that gender is purely an act of self-invention or assertion, and that is that there is no objective reality within which the assertion takes place.

A person who decides that a man can be considered a woman by choice alone is a person who, like those who think that a toilet bowl or a banana stuck to a wall becomes a work of art simply by the artist or gallery claiming that it is, a person who has entered a magically delusional relationship with objective reality. The artist is perhaps more susceptible to transformative delusions than anyone else, because it is his business to translate an object from one form to another. He does indeed change the state and nature of a thing by willing it to be different, but remains delusional if he believes that his mere presence, decision or word enacts this change.

Real change requires effort rather than merely intent or claim. The successful transformation of the mere ingredients of an artwork into Art requires intentional skilful change, not mere declaration. And this must be by human agency, not an automatic process in Nature itself or a process deferred entirely to a machine. And even then there are limits which do not allow a thing to claim correctly to be something it is not, when objective reality differs on the essence of the thing.

If objective reality makes the claim impossible, no amount of effort changes that.

Found objects claiming to be art represent a grotesque betrayal of sincere artistic intent, because the artistic intent is to mould, shape, and create, transforming a mere thing into something more, into an expression of the artist’s human imagination and skill which speaks to the human condition itself, his effort calling to the effort that all of us make to impose meaning on the world around us. The realisation that a thing is Art is the shock of recognition of a shared effort, with perhaps far greater skill than we can supply, to understand and react to objective reality in meaningful ways. Its emotional echo in ourselves derives from a shared striving towards meaning which can only be supplied in the first place, and experienced by a witness, via their shared humanity.

Nature of course supplies an abundance of Beauty, and a multitude of experiences and scenes which do not require human activity to move us or appear meaningful and profound to us. In many instances (landscape art, for instance, or poetry prompted by a scene in nature) the artist is trying to evoke in others the resonance with Nature he himself has felt. But the man who finds a seashell on the beach and then places it in a room has added nothing of himself, and the effort of merely moving it is insufficient to pretend that this is Art. At the very least he must turn it into something else, applying his imagination and aesthetic sense to that task.

If I was to summarise what makes something a work of Art I would say it requires at least these elements:

1. The intervention of human imagination-a sentient mind must have considered the thing and changed it according to some internal picture of what it could be. This excludes things created solely by AI or by machines.

2. Some degree of human effort and activity to mould, shape, depict, and define distinct from efforts which have no aesthetic intent at all.

3. Some degree of required human skill distinguishing the thing from that which might randomly exist by itself or that which a person devoid of any artistic ability could produce by accident. This is the most controversial area today but should be the most obvious (and was in the past). Art is a qualitative judgement as well as a form of creativity, and any aesthetic sense that does not distinguish between works which require supreme skill and works which any child could duplicate is as false as one which takes the product of a machine to be equal to the product of human effort.

4. The application of additional materials to create something new.

5. Art tells us something about what it means to be human-literally or figuratively, by theme or by provoked emotion.

A good rule of thumb then is to say this:

1. If the artist has done nothing it is not art.

2. If it is produced entirely by a machine it is not art.

3. If it can be easily replicated by any child of any age and ability, it is not art.

4. If it could exist by common random occurrence rather than by deliberate effort, it is not art.

Now many people will response by saying that some or all of these points are subjective ones, and that they or others have a different, equally valid or more valid aesthetic sense. But the judgements I make are only those which exclude the things that can occur by chance, by nature, by automatic process (even technological automatic process). The harshest part might be excluding works which have aesthetic intent and took some effort, but which through poor skill alone do not meet the criteria given. In that last instance, if the person has produced something pitiful we might fairly describe it as ‘bad art’ but we definitely should still distinguish it from the works that require great skill. Because if we don’t we do a severe injustice to the effort of the skilled artists among us.

There will also be those who think that all of this is an irrelevance. People will have their subjective tastes regarding what is and isn’t art. Other people will like things we do not like. We will like things that others dislike. Many are tempted to believe that there are no fundamental rules and all definitions regarding the ontology of art (answers to the question what is the essence of Art) or the epistemology of art (answers to the question how do we know it’s Art) are purely subjective aesthetic issues with no relation to anything else.

These people are, of course, wrong. If you regard all judgements on Art as subjective, you have no objective standard by which to say a thing is NOT a work of art. By that basis, ANYTHING can be art, which renders the label ‘art’ entirely redundant and meaningless.

This is of course exactly what has happened with much modern art, which requires no skill, little or no effort, and little or no imagination either. Artists and galleries go around magically deciding that anything they wish to sell is ‘art’, and people end up paying 6 and a half million US dollars for a banana taped to a wall. The ‘artist’ has no artistic ability and no artistic intent, and the ‘art lover’ who purchases it probably doesn’t either (such works are often purchased purely as a perverse investment that’s slightly more sordid than investing in drugs or pornography. The investment only works if you are sure that other people will continue to make the same debased and degenerate aesthetic choices as you have made). When someone invests in the banana on the wall, they are essentially taking a bet that their society will remain aesthetically perverse or become even more aesthetically perverse.

There might be other people wondering why I’m discussing this at all when I’m normally talking about politics. Well, it’s good to have a range of interests. But really I’m not so sure anymore that there is EVER such a thing as a range of interests. Because the reality is that the one thing the fanatics I oppose get right is this:

Everything is political.

I might differ from them in wishing it were not so and wishing there was such a thing as a creative space which offers an escape from politics. But really we have seen how every aspect of culture, aesthetics and entertainment is used as a political front for the promotion of woke, globalist and progressive political stances. The other side do not believe in ‘art for art’s sake’. Art always has a political purpose, so far as they are concerned. This makes them philistines and barbarians, but it is also something which we cannot ignore.

We cannot treat any artwork as politically neutral, or any new aesthetic as politically neutral either.

One of the really noticeable things for example is that the art world has prefigured, so many times, the trajectory of society as a whole. If we think of the way in which so many things in modern politics are wrong, we quite quickly come to consciously or unconsciously recognise a distorted aesthetics not just acting as the propaganda vehicle for political messaging, but as the underlying and original form of corruption and perversion which existed BEFORE the purely polirical manifestations of it came into being.

Politics is downstream of culture.

And if we look at the history of western art, what do we see? We see the artistic decline into perversity, degeneracy, feebleness, inauthenticity, fakeness, charlatanism, poor standards, pitiful achievements and delusional obsessions occurring in Art before it occurs in Politics.

We see the art world and it’s custodians becoming people incapable of correct judgement and in love with charlatanism and fakery BEFORE we ALL, to some extent, succumb to these things.

Ugly art reflects an ugly society. You can tell how successful a society is by the art it values, and you can tell how much trouble a society is in by the art it abandons and ignores. If shoddy workmanship is your societal norm, the art will show you that. If the economy is failing, the art will show you that. If people have a delusional worldview, the art will depict it. If that society is savage, ignorant, brutal, barbaric or vile it will be shown to be so in the art of the day, whether that’s Aztec sculpture or Soviet Brutalist architecture or Damien Hirst cow carvings or Tracy Emin’s bed.

All of this is further complicated by the fact that this truth, that Art helps shape politics, is the propagandists realisation. When we come to it, we are also, unfortunately, following in the footsteps of the most malign people we can imagine. It is true that a diseased art reflects a diseased society, that the degeneration of aesthetic standards is a moral issue because general standards elsewhere will follow the artistic precedent. But we must also be uncomfortably aware that the vilest and most degraded and inhumane of political systems of the 20th century said this too. The Nazis condemned ‘degenerate Jewish art’ and described modern art as a Jewish invention. The Soviets of course equally imposed strict rules on what was to be considered wholesome art embodying socialist virtues and what was, for them, degenerate capitalist products of bourgeois conformity.

We must therefore uncomfortably navigate the fact that hideous regimes can sometimes be partly correct, or can first expose a truth only to bury it under a new layer of loathsome lies. If we are truly honest, we can recognise that the Nazis were right that some of the art they disliked was hideous and dehumanising, even while still fully recognising that they were considerably worse and their wider conclusion (that western artistic decline was caused by Jews) utterly vile. In this sense our recognition of the bit they got right is only an awareness of Art’s impact on society, and perhaps akin to recognising for example the flaws of Weimar Germany economically that led to Germans accepting Nazism instead.

Modern art is mainly ugly and stupid, doing the opposite of what the genuine creative effort does in uplifting mankind, and if the Devil himself recognised that, he would still be right no matter his other crimes.

For over a hundred years, the ability of the aesthetic custodians of western culture to be truthful, moral and rational in their judgements, to apply their judgements in accordance with objective reality and to esteem Beauty rather than Ugliness, has been compromised. Now, our political and media class are as incapable of correct and moral judgement as our gallery owners have been for a century. Aesthetics and politics can’t be divorced because both politics and art are systems for thinking about the world, ways of seeing and shaping the world, and when one becomes utterly distorted, so does the other.

More, they are both ways of seeing and shaping ourselves.

The introduction of AI is no more politically neutral than the celebration of ‘Art’ which requires no ability and constantly says ugly things about humanity. AI is being introduced because people with money and influence want it to be introduced. It is not just a greater convenience or a non political tool. It automatically shapes a political reality and does political things. AI run products like ChatGPT are being programmed with political intent rather than aesthetic intent. AI tools are programmed with algorithms that enforce certain political stances as we have all seen from posing particularly sensitive questions to them (ask these tools the same question regarding the acceptability of black pride and white pride, for instance). Most people are aware of this when it comes to ChatGPT or Alexa, but remain unaware of the political features of AI art.

Those who ask such tools to show them images, especially race images, that return ludicrous results (show me Nazis returning a required number of blacks and Asians for instance) are clearly aware of the manipulation that occurs, but what of images that don’t touch on any ‘sensitive areas’ and don’t manifest the absurd results of ideological narratives being embedded in the end result?

Say you use AI to produce landscape paintings of pretty fields, sunsets, or fluffy kittens. Surely these things can be pretty, even beautiful, and have no political dimension?

But their effects are political, in both an immediate pragmatic way and a broader cultural lesson that carries into future politics way. They have short term and long term impacts that are intensely political. In the short term AI Art effectively steals from living human artists in multiple ways. It uses their content to create amalgamations without credit or payment. Their existing work is plagiarised and then mashed together with other, similar stolen images, and they don’t get any recompense for that. But AI then also becomes their competitor for jobs and posts, one with results in those skilled people suddenly becoming (literally) redundant.

However little sympathy you might have for people in creative fields (especially when they don’t share our politics) the removal of classes of work once performed by human beings is clearly a political issue.

The really important points though go far beyond creative human endeavours now being completed automatically by machines. This is more than just the Spinning Jenny for cartoonists, illustrators and painters.

As I said in my first comments to my friend, AI Art is soulless. There is something peculiarly hideous in the society that casually dismisses the wonder of human ingenuity and imagination and skill and which replaces it all with synthetic, artificial and soulless substitutes.

Our society went badly wrong enough when human beings lost sight of what Beauty is and the way in which public art and architecture has a moral duty to uplift and ennoble mankind rather than oppress, depress and belittle mankind. Imagine the kind of ugly that gets churned out by AI and the impact of every image around us being a product of mechanical and automatic processes where no human heart can intervene, no soul can say no, and no artistic sensibility can suggest a better way. Imagine being deprived of all human visual wisdom and poignancy, of a form of understanding of the self and the world thats been operating since the earliest cave paintings and the crudest stone figurines.

At least 45,000 years of the song that is sung between the artist and the world, between the hand and the eye, between the desire to create and communicate and the use of ochre, paint, stone and clay to express things which are otherwise solely verbal or otherwise locked inside altogether.

What internal life does an AI bring to an image as the thing being expressed underneath and through the image? None at all. Perhaps when the machine is fully sentient, AI art will express the inner life of the machine. Until then, it is entirely a thing of the surface. A thing without soul or meaning.

And Art is on a surface, it may be placed on a surface, but it always has a depth beyond that. That depth is put in it by humanity, not by mere perspective, which is why the simplest designs of the oldest ages can still move us.

It would not surprise me if the promotion of AI art was another deliberate assault on the meaning of humanity by those in charge, who seem possessed of a demonic hatred of their own species, or at least of the vast majority of us. After all, previous regimes deliberately used brutal architecture this way, both the Soviets and the Nazis were intensely interested in public art that would tell the average citizen that they lived cowering in the shadow of immovable Power. The history of twentieth century architecture even in the ‘liberal democracies’ that opposed them is of increasingly ugly, crude, monolithic and perverse constructions which debilitate the mind and sit in brooding contempt over the buried hopes of conquered populations.

Compare a shopping centre with a medieval cathedral and tell me again about modern progress.

But how much worse will the dispiriting effect of the deliberately ugly landscapes of modernity be when the rote productions of the machine replace even the twisted scrawls in metal and stone offered by human beings rejecting the lessons of the past? I suspect that machine indifference will surpass human malice in making the world as ugly as it can be.

And the psychological and spiritual lesson again is that there is nothing sacred about Man and his imagination, nothing soaring, sublime or eternal in his efforts, nothing touched by divinity and inspiration, nothing that can’t be replaced by the fake, the automatic, the synthetic and the soulless.

That, ultimately, is why rejecting AI art is part and parcel of embracing and respecting our humanity. That is why it is a political as well as an aesthetic necessity to prefer the real and the human to the fake and the machine generated.

Because we are much more than machines made of meat, and Art is one of the ways we prove it.