Art, Culture & Artificial Intelligence
Are AI artists real artists? The definitive answer: “Yes”
Or you have to reject a whole host of 20th Century Artists
There’s been a lot of debate over whether AI art is ‘real’ art, and whether its practitioners are artists. Jason Allen’s “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” winning the digital art category prize at the Colorado State Fair lit the powder keg under that discussion. It’s fair to say many people are angry. But AI artists/prompt engineers, myself included — often bear the brunt of misdirected ire.
Thankfully, we have a close-knit, supportive community and most of us agree that there needs to be a fairer system to recompense those artists whose works have been ingested as training data (and possibly an opt-in/out). In fact, many of us want to train AI on our own art. We’re not just prompt artists: outside of AI we also paint, sculpt, draw, and take photos.
I could also argue about the painstaking craft, and often literally thousands of hours some of us pioneering in AI art spend finessing our skills. There’s a misconception that we make AI images in seconds. No, the generators are fast; but the best practitioners among us spend hours crafting our prompts, learning techniques, choosing colors, and refining our designs. In terms of the dictionary definition of an artist, “n. a person who does anything very well, with imagination and a feeling for form, effect, etc” — we are artists.
But that’s not what I want to talk about today.
The simple argument I want to present is: if mechanized reproduction and curating ‘regurgitated’ images make something ‘not art’, then much of what we’ve culturally considered art throughout the 20th century is also ‘not art’.
“If Andy Warhol were alive today, he’d be an AI artist”
The history of art is one of copying. So if cultural gatekeepers want to exclude art that is sampled, modified, copied, stolen, reprocessed, or reconceptualized, here’s a list of celebrated artists they’d have to drop:
- Andy Warhol
- Roy Lichtenstein
- Mel Ramos
- Tom Wesselman
- April Greiman
- Robert Rauschenberg
- Joseph Cornell
- Marcel Duchamp
- Jeff Koons
- Damian Hirst
- Tracy Emin
- Jake & Dinos Chapman
- Larry Rivers (who made a copy of a commercial copy of Rembrandt)
- John Baldessari
- David Hockney
- Sturtevant
- basically the entire cadre of Pop Artists in the mid-late 1950s
- much of the Avante-Garde movement
- and almost all the Deconstructionists
This list is hardly exhaustive; it’s just the ones I can think of off the top of my head as an art graduate. Many of the works, such as Warhol’s screens, involve artificial processes. We’re not even getting into copying styles and influence; these are artists or movements that ‘ingest’ other works of art — often verbatim — and repurpose them. As Lichtenstein himself would say:
“I am nominally copying, but I am really restating the copied thing in other terms”
And it’s not just contemporary art that copied compositions. Old Masters like Michelangelo and Rembrandt routinely “borrowed” earlier works. In Michaelangelo’s case, from Ancient Greek sculptures; and in Rembrandt’s, from the late-Renaissance woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer.
Here are some side-by-side comparisons of Rembrandt and Dürer:
It’s impossible not to draw comparisons between what Rembrandt did and the current state of img2img and shape-conditional syntheses in AI art. If the collecting of someone’s earlier work and recreating it in another mode and technology (in this case, engraving to etching) makes one a fraudulent artist, those same gatekeepers should consign Rembrandt to the dust heap.
Also, they’d have to reject entire recognized art traditions like assemblage, decoupage, collage, scrapbooking, photomontage, bricolage, and papier collé. Even Lord Byron decoupaged. These are all respected art forms.
Obviously, I don’t think we should cancel Rembrandt and Michelangelo. The point is, if we want to discuss art seriously, and not fall victim to the Myth of Originality, we have to acknowledge the transformative possibilities of copies.
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