No, Alexa: AI Isn't Going to Destroy Art

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• No, AlexaAI Isn't Going to Destroy Art
• David Riddle Watson (bio)

The contemporary world is experienced through a variety of mediums simultaneously. In fact, one can now travel to art museums through VR headsets or immerse oneself in the world of Van Gogh. Recently, in the art world, we have all learned a new vocabulary full of investment terms like "non-fungible" and "blockchain," and with them endless get-rich-quick schemes and lots of Bored Apes. The rise of new technologies always brings with it the danger of falling prey to novelty on one hand and an equally serious risk of succumbing to nostalgia or becoming irrelevant to the concerns of one's time on the other.

A central concern of many in the modern art world is the rise of digital art, which can be produced by artificial intelligence, using popular engines such as DALL·E 2, an open AI platform that allows users to type in text and create art. For example, one could type "guitar player in the style of Picasso" and after a few seconds one gets results. But has one created art? Or what seems to be the bigger question, what is this going to do to the art world? One popular social media post making the rounds in December 2022 laments that art professors are telling their students they should just drop out. (Whether this is true or not, I imagine, is highly debatable and could be as much of an indictment on the institution in the age of AI.) This has led to arguments about copyright and ownership. As one artist, Kim Leutwyler, says in the Guardian, "When I started seeing all of these Lensa app-generated portraits posted by some of my friends, even some other artists, I was instantly skeptical." She continues, "They are calling it a new original work, but some artists are having their exact style replicated exactly in brush strokes, colour, composition—techniques that take years and years to refine." In a story that puts this issue front and center, upon winning the Colorado State Art Fair in 2022 using an AI-generated submission, James Allen quipped, "Art is dead, dude. It's over. A.I. won. Humans lost."

As a musician myself, I'm sympathetic to the concern that technology has commodified art to a point previously unimaginable. For example, with devices like Auto-Tune you can turn someone who cannot sing into a singer, [End Page 44] and with downloadable chord progressions one can simply conjure an arrangement from the ether; however, I believe the ability to respond to the new technological environment to be a requirement of all artists. We can all imagine the terror that must have gone through the heart of the portrait artist upon the invention of the daguerreotype, the precursor to the camera. Similarly, that same photographer has been forced to come to grips with Photoshop along with the fact that everyone always has a camera at hand, these days. To think meaningfully about art, we must realize that the artist is always already in a relationship with the world, the objects in that world, and the history that has made possible the moment at hand. An artist's job is to articulate this arrangement into something that speaks to the time and those who dwell uncomfortably within it. While AI may make the artist appear to be irrelevant, perhaps the opposite is true. Perhaps at no other time has it been more relevant for artists to find ways through this problem, for there is a gap in meaning between what is randomly generated and what is guided, shaped, and created by humans responding to their existential concerns.

To make what may appear as a vulgar analogy, DALL·E 2's performance is more like a magic trick than a work of art. The difference is in the relationship between the art, the viewer, and the creator. When I type in "Picasso-style cat playing guitar on the moon" and see my results, I do have a genuine aesthetic response, but it is like my response to a magic trick. I love card tricks; they certainly reveal much...