Since beginning my MA research project just a few months ago, which aims to explore how our relationship with technology is changing how we view ourselves, several AI image generators, such as Midjourney, Dall·E and Stable Diffusion have been released. Various levels of skill and experience with code are beneficial for the moment if you want to create animations with your output, although the developers are working on releasing moving images and 3D versions soon. But prompting the machine to produce an image can be done by anyone who wants to type a few words into a web page. This sounds relatively simple, but a site for so-called *’prompt engineers’ has already been released.
Understandably, for photographers, AI generated imagery may seem like an imposition of impotency or an existential threat. And as it was with photography during its early days, quite a few voices are adamant that AI generated images are a disaster for artists of all persuasions. (And evil, according to one Twitter user, whom I won’t reference). I would suggest this is only true (not the evil bit) if one has a narrow conception of what art is. However, I don’t deny it presents the creative world, especially commercial illustration and stock photography, with seismic conundrums, as well as providing it with a new dynamic toy to play with. Photography and illustration are not the only industries that must evolve as AI develops. All sectors are in similar positions to a greater or lesser extent. Which is why it is so odd for the current UK government to be hellbent on a 1940-s Ayn Rand type ideology when automation threatens to wipe out or at least transform whole industries. Beware the myths and simplistic predictions, but the idea that everyone will need to work in crap jobs till they drop is completely against the tide. Futurist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi (2017) writes, “Today the scarcity regime is unnecessary,” unless of course those in power actively want to maintain that reality for some reason.
I have been thinking a lot about the difference between photography, painting or drawing, and AI images, and wondering if there is any – beyond the mechanics of their creation, which I appreciate may be substantially different in ways that matter. But it reminds me of a chapter by James Elkins (2022b) from On Pictures, and the Words That Fail Them. He notes that “contemporary mathematics, writing, and picturing can sometimes be thought of as related—or even entangled.” Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than with AI generated images, powered by code, prompted by sentences, and resulting in pictures of varying interest. However, if the following, also written by Elkins (2011a), is true about photography – and many disagreed with the sentiment when it was initially published – “Nothing is more amazing than Flickr for the first half hour, and then nothing is more tedious,” the same might be applied to AI generated output. But in spades. A tremendous amount is simply less interesting than the process itself, in my opinion, although I might not have chosen the word tedious as Elkins did. Even so, there is a lot worth investigating, and to dismiss AI generated work wholesale may prove churlish.
Thinking more positively, a designer in a video about AI images recently said, “someone like a poet might be the best artist of the future because he’s able to talk to the AI in the best way” (2022). I can see the logic, but it feels ‘linguist-centric’, especially in a paradigm where language is being reconfigured, and developers are quickly adapting the technology so that other images, sounds, even breath or temperature, possibly even the firing of synapses in your brain – which is actually terrifying because of the implications, might act as a prompt. We live in a world where everything can be reduced to number.
But does any of this suggest the end of art? Arthur Danto (1924-2013) spent the second half of his life pondering art’s demise. But in fact, he was describing the dawn of a new age in which “it can be affirmed that today all artistic options are valid […and…] there are no more coercions to the artist than those he wants to impose on himself” (1997). Except nowadays, the imposition comes from the calculations of the tyrannical machine, within which we’re all enmeshed. Therein lies the conundrum. Since that coercion is expressed as self-reinforcing and viscous polarisation online.
Joan Fontecuberta and Pilar Rosado’s 2022 work Deja-Vu begins with the statement, “When algorithms and artificial intelligence start replacing the camera and the eye, it will be time to rethink the role of the images that have so far helped to forge our sensibilities” . Given that, it seems somewhat critical that people do attempt to make art with AI in some way and take it seriously. However, from the apoplectic paradigm in which we find ourselves, Danto sounds naive in 1994, when, roughly as the Internet was inveigling its way into our various territorialities, he wrote, “…how wonderful it would be to believe that the pluralistic art world of the historical present is a harbinger of political things to come!” Not only would he likely be horrified by the politics (anyone remotely sane would be), he may also be disappointed after engaging with hints of, or else blatant, tribalism in the art world. These tribalisms might be disguised as nostalgia, or a rejection of contemporary processes, or the else rage directed at makers of NFTs – I’m not one by the way. All of which, perhaps inadvertently or only semi-consciously, echo polarisations found throughout society. Of course, there are related issues that need urgent addressing. The ecological cost of crypto vehicles is distressing, but experimentally necessary, since fiat money will not be around forever. AI image databases built without permission out of scraped online information, resulting in artefacts that look like living artists’ work, is another problem. But the belief that alternative processes or your favourite film stock somehow escape the tyranny of the neoliberal apparatus because the media is old is fallacious. Anyone who has read Vilém Flusser, and I urge everyone interested in the photographic medium to do so, might be persuaded otherwise. Of course, tribalisms among artists can seem almost meaningless outside the confines of their various cohorts, especially when we consider the state of the wider world: except that they’re microcosms and fractalised moments of violent polarisations that have infected everything in our increasingly entangled reality.
It’s hard to stop oneself from “giving it all that” about one’s passions in a few characters on social media when we feel threatened. AI images, certain kinds of photography, what camera make you prefer – nothing escapes the generalised ire that permeates social media. But, despite the naysayers, I very much doubt AI images are the end of art, nor the end of artists. In fact, as we become more and more enmeshed with the machine, we might find that art is what saves us from losing our humanity altogether, in which case, the more people have access to whatever form they like, the better. I do, however, hazard a guess that it is part of a bigger ending, a terrifying ending for all of us born into the world of Western Capitalist individualism, no matter who we are, what politics we favour, or what medium we prefer to play with – but that would require a much longer and more carefully considered screed than this.
In the meantime, I’ll end with a line from Berardi’s The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility, which could lead to a follow-up blog about connection being more vital than the artefacts artists create – if I can get organised…: “Redistribution of wealth, equality, sobriety, solidarity and friendship – these are the keywords of the possible and [much] needed cultural transformation”.
Work in progress by me and the unconscious soul of the internet via Midjourney – collages: artificial lamellae and plumbing instructions (2022)
Refs:
Arles, Les Rencontres d’. n.d. ‘JOAN FONTCUBERTA & PILAR ROSADO’. Accessed 4 September 2022. http://www.rencontres-arles.com//en/expositions/view/1095/joan-fontcuberta-pilar-rosado.
Berardi, Franco. 2017. Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility. London ; Brooklyn: Verso.
Cascales, Raquel. 2018. ‘The Development of the Sense of “the End of Art” in Arthur Danto’. Rivista Di Estetica, no. 68 (August): 131–48. https://doi.org/10.4000/estetica.3542.
Colberg, Jörg. n.d. ‘The Death of the Artist (or: On the Arts Economy)’. Conscientious Photography Magazine. Accessed 7 September 2022. https://cphmag.com/death-money/.
Danto, Arthur Coleman. 1997. After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts 1995. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Pr.
Design Theory, dir. 2022. Will Artificial Intelligence End Human Creativity? YouTube: Design Theory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqamdXxdfSA.
Dissanayake, Ellen. 2003. ‘The Core of Art—Making Special’. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, September. https://jcacs.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/jcacs/article/view/16856.
Elkins, James. 2011a. What Photography Is. New York: Routledge.
———. 2011b. ‘On Pictures, and the Words That Fail Them, Chapter 5, & “The Common Origin of Pictures, Writing, and Notation”’, January. https://www.academia.edu/3125416/On_Pictures_and_the_Words_That_Fail_Them_chapter_5_The_Common_Origin_of_Pictures_Writing_and_Notation_.
Flusser, Vilém. 2012. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. London: Reaktion Books.
- For my thoughts around the term ‘prompt engineer’, please visit my Instagram.