I don't want AI to do my art
*feelings on the intersection between AI and art
I don't want AI to do my art
I don’t want anyone but me to do my art - otherwise how can it still be considered mine? (but do I really need “my”art to be defined as “mine”? if so, why? why is ownership the only way to have or give value? why cannot art simply exist: not mine, not yours - no ownership. free)
I don't want AI to do my art, while I become its tool. I want AI to be my tool, so that I can do my art
I don't want to sit in front of the screen all day, doing repetitive tasks, repeating to myself that I don't have time to write, and then enter chat GPT the questions that once were the prompts for myself
I don't want to blind myself at the computer and ruin my back on the chair in front of it while forgetting how I used to think
I don't want to remind myself that is human to make mistakes - and non-human not to
I don't want to explain to the kids of today (adults of tomorrow) that we, once, used to write essays and poems - way before the machines did
I don't want to explain the kids grammar and history and literature and maths and science only once they've grown up because at school was not needed anymore
I don't want to become an algorithm, for brands to sell me their stuff better and to let them know me better that I do
I don't want to be a number, a data, the sum of things I've purchased and the people I connect with on social media but never in real life
I don’t want to be known as a finished being, and I don’t want to see myself as the end result of everything I’ve been. Instead, I want to think of myself as a complex flow of my lived experience, an ever-moving river, carrying with me everything I’ve encountered along my path, yet always evolving, changing direction, and never staying in the same place as I was before
I don't want to hear the unbearable numbers of people killed under the bombs and let them forget under empty statistics. I want to know their names, I want to know their stories, I want to know who they loved and who they got angry with and why, and who was their favorite band and what was the last movie they watched and if they liked it or not
I don't want to forget what does it mean to be human.
I want to leave my Zoom meetings and go outside and breathe the fresh air and feel the sun or the rain on my skin
I want my toes to touch the soil outside and let them become cold and then massage them later to make them warm again
I want to get cold in the winter only to come back home and make a tea and feel the warmth on my nose before I do the first sip
I want to get emotional when I unexpectedly hear my favorite song playing from a bar as I walk by. I want to stop at that bar, simply because they’re playing that song—and that’s enough a good reason
I want to breathe new smells and taste more flavors and remind all my senses the cakes that my grandma used to make when she knew we were visiting on Sunday
I want to swim in the ocean and see the fishes under me swimming free and not trapped in the plastic we left
I want to make mistakes, because I can learn from them - I am not a machine
I want to hug, and be hugged back so hard that my back makes weird noises
and I want to laugh about it after it
I want to listen to my favorite songs and sing them loud in the car, as my mum taught me to do
I want to be curious, learning new things every day until the end of my time, because there’s always more to discover, and my knowledge is never complete, never finished
I want to do nothing when I feel tired or sad or both, and allow myself to do so, because I am human and I exist even if I don't do, contrarily to what the capitalist system built on the extractive exploitation of resources has taught me since I was born
I want to learn from technology, and innovation, and AI and look with curiosity where this will bring us. I want to trust the process, hoping that it will ease my boring tasks and not cancel my creativity, take over my identity
but I don't want to forget what does it mean to be human.
I want to feel, I want to create, I want to invent, I want to think, I want to rest. I want to be
And I still don't want AI to do my art.
more on this topic
1. FKA twigs creating her own AI deepfake as a way to evolve her art
In April, visual artist-musician-dancer-performer - queen - FKA twigs had something to say about how creating her own AI deepfake can actually help her with evolving her art (watch: FKA twigs Creates Deepfake AI Version of Herself With a Special Use in Mind). She wrote a testimony on artificial intelligence to a U.S. Senate and advocated for “AI as a creative and commercial tool”, as long as artists consent and retain control over their representations. FKA twigs says, “My art is the canvas on which I paint my identity and the sustaining foundation of my livelihood. It is the essence of my being. Yet this is under threat. AI cannot replicate the depth of my life journey, yet those who control it hold the power to mimic the likeness of my art, to replicate it and falsely claim my identity and intellectual property. This prospect threatens to rewrite and unravel the fabric of my very existence. We must enact regulation now to safeguard our authenticity and protect against misappropriation of our inalienable rights.”
Could Twigs’ deepfake be trained using her own performances to develop a unique personality, mimicking her exact tone of voice to speak multiple languages—so she can connect with more fans? And could this extend her art beyond the colonial confines of English language?
Fka twigs continues: “our careers and livelihoods are in jeopardy, and so potentially are the wider image-related rights of others in society. (…) As artists and, more importantly, human beings, we are a facet of our given, learned, and developed identity. Our creativity is the product of this lived experience overlaid with years of dedication to qualification, training, hard work and, dare I say it, significant financial investment and sacrifice. That the very essence of our being at its most human level can be violated by the unscrupulous use of AI to create a digital facsimile that purports to be us, and our work, is inherently wrong. It is therefore vital that as an industry and as legislators we work together to ensure we do all we can to protect our creative and intellectual rights as well as the very basis of who we are.”
2. Why A.I. isn’t going to make art?
In this NewYorker article, Ted Chiang argues that creating art involves deeply personal, subjective decisions rooted in human experience, which are fundamentally beyond the capabilities of artificial intelligence. According to Chiang, “art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices” - and these choices can only be human. Every time we are creating AI products, we are inputting 1, 2, or a thousand human-choices. Chiang adds: “when you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type; to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.”
As for kids and chatGPT and essays, Chiang says:
“As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way that lifting weights is useful no matter what sport an athlete plays, writing essays develops skills necessary for whatever job a college student will eventually get. Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.
Not all writing needs to be creative, or heartfelt, or even particularly good; sometimes it simply needs to exist. Such writing might support other goals, such as attracting views for advertising or satisfying bureaucratic requirements. When people are required to produce such text, we can hardly blame them for using whatever tools are available to accelerate the process. But is the world better off with more documents that have had minimal effort expended on them? It would be unrealistic to claim that if we refuse to use large language models, then the requirements to create low-quality text will disappear. However, I think it is inevitable that the more we use large language models to fulfill those requirements, the greater those requirements will eventually become. We are entering an era where someone might use a large language model to generate a document out of a bulleted list, and send it to a person who will use a large language model to condense that document into a bulleted list. Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?”
Chiang concludes: “whether you are creating a novel or a painting or a film, you are engaged in an act of communication between you and your audience. What you create doesn’t have to be utterly unlike every prior piece of art in human history to be valuable; the fact that you’re the one who is saying it, the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes it new. We are all products of what has come before us, but it’s by living our lives in interaction with others that we bring meaning into the world. That is something that an auto-complete algorithm can never do, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
So whatever you’re making with AI, as long as you’re making the choices of creating it, you’re still making the art yourself.
3. Harry Potter’s AI
I couldn’t do a list of AI-art and intentionally exclude AI generated-Harry Potter videos. They are art. In case you’ve missed them, below are my favourites:
Harry Potter but in Italy
Harry Potter but in Berlin
4. MoMA’s video on “How artists are using and confronting machine learning?”
This insightful video from MoMA’s “How to see” series explores how artists are using and confronting machine learning in and experimental way and how can we see things that are actually not made for us to see?
Michelle Kuo starts with a visionary statement “one thing that artists have always been good at, it’s taking a tool that already exists in the world and making it do something that it’s not supposed to do.” And this so true. This is what artists have been doing throughout history and this is still how our society (and art with it) can evolve.
How much can we experiment with AI - that we haven’t realized yet? (Yes, even after all the AI random Harry Potter’s video that have been made).
Eventually, another key element is discussed in MoMA’s video that must be considered here and always. And Trevor Plagen puts it wonderfully:
“There are definitely a lot of hard problems that AI can absolutely help solving. Having said that and going back to the idea that the context in which these tools are always been deployed by huge corporations, they worry that there is a huge potential a massive consolidation of wealth and political power, and I’m concerned that adds up to an increasingly inequitable society. Even if the problems we want to solve can be solve, it’s always about capitalism, not technology, right?”
Check out the full video for more.
5. AI Grammarly doesn’t like the word “actually”
According to the AI-generated proof-check writing tool Grammarly, the word “actually” is not art. Actually, everytime I wrote “actually” on this text (and others too), Grammarly always considers it as a mistake. According to AI, “actually” is always useless—and never art. Even if I may abuse its use (no denial), I’m sure there are situations in which the adverb should be used correctly. Maybe going against what is considered a mistake by AI is what makes art itself? Are mistakes art? Isn’t grammar always evolving anyway? What isn’t pleasant for a machine may still be pleasant for a human reader?
Well, actually, I love it. and I’ll keep using it.
Thank you!
But the real question is: are you using AI and your art to bring more kindness in this world? - if not, you have still time to change things up!
That’s all folks - and thank you for reading until here!
this post is so insightful and powerful, more people should read this <3