First, I wanted to name this story “The Soul of Art”. Then, I thought about it. That would mean that art and soul can somehow be separated, eg. that you could take the soul out of art. But no, you can’t. Without soul, it just isn’t art. Art is soul!

So, what exactly brings the soul in art? Simple. The human factor. Us. People. The artists, ultimately. The artist.

Let me give you an example. You are probably familiar with Formula 1 (F1) racing. The sad thing about F1 is that it used to have soul. Fifty years or so ago. Today, it is without soul. Why? Because today is is a competition between car manufacturers. Just look at the results of any race. Typically you see this result: team A position 1 and 2, team B position 3 and 4, team C position 5 and 6, and so on. In other words, it hardly matters who is the driver. The only thing that matters is what car you have, ie. how rich your team is.

In the old days, cars were much more similar. And it did matter who was the driver. Besides, they risked their lives. Now, I’m not saying current drivers shoul risk their lives more. But there clearly is less spectacle and human drama that there used to be in the old days. Less soul. So, what gave it soul? The human factor. Even today, everyone knows the drivers hardly matter. Yet, most F1 fans cheer their favorite driver, and not the team so much.

With the advent of photography, advanced printing techniques, automated sculpting machines, and most recently artificial intelligence (AI), a lot has changed in art. In the old days, art used to be about a skilled hand, craftmanship, methodical and creative mastery. Today, you can design and make any drawing, painting or sculpture with electronis tools and machines.

Still, something is missing. Here’s an interesting article, “The Work of Creation in the Age of AI“, by Andrew Perfors, who is a professor at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and the director of the Complex Human Data Hub. It is quite a long article, but if I understand him well, it comes down to this. For art to be art, it requires meaning, and AI can never give an artwork meaning. And, meaning ultimately comes from the dynamic between creator and audience. And for the creator, the process of creation is part of the artwork. Here’s how he says it:

Part of the point of creation, for a creator, is the process. Use of AI allows people to “create” but removes much of the purpose of creation in the first place. It turns something that can be one of the most soulful and expressive of human activities into automated button-pushing.

So, from the perspective of the artist, when you use AI to ‘create’ an artwork, you take away (part of) the process, hence (part of) the soul.

Well, then his article gets quite technical, in a way. He says, if you put a lot of effort in developing the right prompts, that is a creative process in itself. I tend to feel he’s right, there. It’s a bit like in the old days, when an artist would practice using the painting brush optimally to get exactly the effect that you want from a single stroke of paint. Like Frans Hals, for instance, or Rembrandt van Rijn.

Then, he says, okay, let’s assume an artist goes through the effortfull and mindfull process of developing prompts that give unique artificial artworks. Here’s his response:

… How could we tell?

This touches on the biggest way that AI changes our relationship with creation, and it has to do with Deep Meaning, with the relationship between the creator and the audience. The issue is that very little of the underlying process is apparent in the output in the same way it is for a non-AI mediated creation. At most, we can often pick up the “vibe” of an AI-generated piece and can guess that it wasn’t made by a person. Even with that, our error rates are not great. And if we are confronted with something that was co-created by AI and human, it is nigh impossible to tell what parts are from the human and what parts aren’t. Is the wolf that particular shade of brown because the model decided to make it so, or because the human prompted that? Does the essay use that word because the human mind behind it thought it was the best way to express the meaning they intended to convey, or because the AI selected it as statistically most probable?

We simply cannot tell. And that means we (as the audience) cannot engage in our end of the rich process that underlies Deep Meaning: we cannot do anything but extremely shallow interpretation. Moreover, there is no mind on the other end to respond to our interpretation. The reciprocal interaction loop that Deep Meaning requires is destroyed when we place AI in the middle; it eats away at this vital, deeply human thing until very little is left.

Sounds a lot like Alois Riegl’s beholder’s share, right?

Well, he goes on. He concludes:

AI-generated content is a perversion of creation.

I advice you to read the entire article.

I’m inclined to let it rest it my mind, for now. But it sure is food for thought.