Recently, Pope Leo posted on X that "it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce," and called for an alliance with artists. I've been thinking on this the past few days. Emotionally, I agree. Intellectually, I'm in limbo. I have the following questions:
First, how do we even distinguish AI art from human art? Maybe it's not too difficult today, but at this pace, AI art may be indistinguishable within a year or two, except perhaps in some physical media like painting and pottery.
Second, why do we care? Does the provenance of the art matter or change its purpose? If you unknowingly experienced AI art, thinking it was human-generated, wouldn't it have the same effect? What even counts as human-generated? At what point does artwork switch from human to machine generated? Let's consider some examples: If I do a dance, that's completely human-generated, no? If I paint, maybe machines in a factory made the canvas and paint brushes, but a human still did the majority of the creative work, no? If I program a CNC machine to carve a sculpture out of marble, a machine did the physical work but a human made the design, no? What if I ask AI to make a print and describe every single aspect of the image? What if I ask AI to make an image to evoke certain emotions or meaning? What if I just ask AI to make good art? There's a spectrum here. Is there a cutoff at which point the art is no longer human? Maybe it was never "human". Maybe authorship is just a story we tell about art. The only reality is that the art exists, and it moves people or it doesn't. Unless what moves us was always partly the story of who made it.
At this point I feel we either begin to value the human aspect of the process more, or we begin to value the story or message more. Let me elaborate. 20th century philosopher Marshall McLuhan thought that the medium is the message. In order to preserve meaning in art, we might begin to value media where it's easier to establish human provenance, like previously mentioned painting, pottery, live performance, et cetera. The message or meaning comes from the human aspect of the provenance, and rebellion against AI provenance. Or, we may begin to value the message of AI-generated art for what it says about human desires. If quality art can be created simply by a request to a chatbot, the message becomes what I asked the AI to create, or maybe it relates to the advance of technology. In a previous post I wrote that we may soon have to choose between our humanity and the brave new world of technology. Art is one branch of that choice.
I'm still hedging. My instinct is to cling on to the old ways, to make art as before, to manually make 3D animations in Blender, to paint with my own hands, to write without AI influence; but some part of me is saying to embrace change. I imagine a philosopher I greatly respect, Nietzsche, would ask if I'm choosing out of strength or fear. I don't know yet.