But is it really art? A.I. and creativity.

Sunset pier #1, by Deep A.I.

One of the interesting things to pop up online recently has been the subject of art generated by so-called artificial intelligence (AI). It’s a subject for contentious debate: can something really be considered a piece of art if it has been “created” by a computer program, rather than a human being?

My interest was piqued by Lee McAuley of the Cuckoo Club Archives, who mentioned it in a recent piece, and to whom I give all credit for spotting it – I’d no idea it was so advanced. In order to explore the question, is it art? I’ve been playing around with a version called Deep AI – available to try here, and I fed it the following text:

An old pier running out to sea, sun setting, people walking towards the sunset, blue skies and tobacco coloured clouds, light rays, romantic, impressionistic style.

The result was the header picture. Then again, same input:

Sunset pier #2, by Deep A.I.

And again:

Sunset pier #3, by Deep A.I.

So, each image is unique: same words, different output. There’s also a remarkable alignment with the textual prompt, whilst maintaining the look of something definitely painterly, rather than a pastiche of images brutally cut and pasted from around the Internet. There’s something interesting here and, though there’s a temptation – as a human being who likes to think of himself as “creative” – to be dismissive of it, I don’t think we should be too hasty.

The freebie images are a modest 1024×512 pixels, but useable, say for blog illustration, or, with a bit of Photoshop enhancement, as e-book covers, or simply for pondering. I find them quite haunting and, in spite of their unique nature, strangely familiar in that they combine elements I feel I have seen before, but which are just out of reach of memory.

There are other online generators, free to try, but they all have some kind of limiter, or a token system, to prevent over-use of the servers. I also like Nightcafe Studio, which I fed the following prompt:

A young woman wearing a long, red dress. She is reclining on a chaise lounge. Victorian and romantic in style.

To which it responded:

Young woman in a red dress – by Nightcafe Studio A.I.

The result is somewhat lush and stylised, though not unpleasing, and nicely lit. She has an oddly shaped thigh, strange hands and what appears to be the stump of a third arm, but for all of that it would not look out of place on a gallery wall, given a suitably pretentious blurb. It’s also unique – sort of. No image will ever come out quite like this again. However, once you’ve got the image, you can copy and paste it as many times as you like, of course, which, like all digital art, renders it nothing more than a worthless and disposable curiosity, right?

Well, that brings us to non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which I looked at last year. NFTs and digital art go hand in hand. Digital art, whether it be by human or AI, is – by our normal calculations, based on supply and demand – of no value at all, because we can copy and paste it as many times as we like, and the result will be indistinguishable from the original. However, AI generated art can come with a unique digital token, which proclaims you as the owner of the original file, which is something that, in our topsy-turvy world, can then be traded. And, though it might sound unlikely, it being essentially the value of nothing, some tokens are trading for millions of dollars – or at least those that receive the most hype.

Here’s another one. Input: Man writing at a desk, background of bookcases. Lamplight. Studious, romantic atmosphere. Impressionistic.

The result:

Man writing – by A.I.

The debate over AI generated art also throws up the old chestnut about the nature of human consciousness, and the belief among the so-called “hard AI” scientists, that it’s just a question of time, and a critical mass of artificial neural complexity, before we create a sentient computer. But this kind of thinking is bourne out of a strictly materialist paradigm, and goes too far for me. Our machines are breathtakingly intelligent, but that’s not the same thing as saying they might ever become sentient. Like a chess playing computer, it does not arrive at its moves by thinking about them like a human player, but its moves are always good ones. It does the same job, but better. Like an electric saw, it’s better than a handsaw in certain applications, but only because we have made it so. And even then, we wouldn’t use it everywhere.

AI sentience also rather presupposes the brain is what generates consciousness, and I do not subscribe to that view either. I’m deeply impressed by A.I. generated artwork, but feel there’s a danger here of setting off down the wrong path in our appreciation of what it means and that, like all A.I., we should not be tempted to make the retrograde leap from master to servant. A.I. serves a purpose. It can protect, it can run complex services on our behalf better than we can ourselves, and it can entertain, but it cannot be allowed to control and delimit, either our actions as free beings, nor supplant our imaginations.

Another one: Input: A young woman in a long red dress, fantasy forest setting, backlit, lush greenery, light rays. Output:

Woman in a red dress, in the forest – by A.I.

A human artist invests time learning how to paint. Then, having mastered the art, a large painting might take months, or even years of the artist’s time to complete, and the end result is always going to be fragile. It’s likely then, a very old painting by a recognisably competent artist will have survived any number of potential calamities, and is worth all the more for its rarity, and the simple fact of its survival. By comparison, a computer generated artwork takes seconds to make, and the result can be backed up digitally so many times as to be virtually immortal. NFTs not withstanding, I know which artwork possesses the greater intangible value, the greater allure, to my own taste and I would care nothing for who owned the digital title to an AI generated artwork. All of which is to say, while AI can produce some stunningly beautiful and provocative images, let’s not lose our heads over what it means.

Is it truly art? Well, yes, I think it is, but certainly not like anything we have known before.

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Non-Fungible Tokens. The value of nothing?

Until now, the value of a thing for sale has always boiled down to the availability of that thing, which is determined by how rare it is, or by the difficulty of its manufacture. And then there’s the demand for that thing, whatever it is. Things that are difficult to find, or produce, and are very much in demand, command high prices. On the other hand, things that are abundant or easily mass-produced, but for which there is no demand, say because they’ve fallen out of fashion, or have become obsolete, aren’t worth anything.

These traditional laws of supply and demand have held true, until now. But now, the digital age has begun to render things that are very difficult to produce worthless, by virtue of the fact that technology enables them to be re-produced instantly, and infinitely. A practical example of this, is the chess set I’m modelling.

In olden times, my chess figures would have been hand carved, and each chess set would have been unique. In the right market, a maker of such ornate pieces could reasonably expect to make a living from it. I’m in the process of sculpting them, digitally, using a piece of software called Blender. Amongst other things, it simulates very well the process of modelling in clay. The end result is a three-dimensional digital model of whatever you care to imagine.

But what use is a digital chess set, you ask? Well, having defined their shapes digitally, as computer files, one of the things we can do is print the pieces out, using machines like this:

When they first appeared, in the late 1980s, 3D Printers were the stuff of science fiction. They cost more than a house, and only big engineering companies ran them. Now you can get one for the price of a washing machine.

There’s a lot of modelling work in each of these chess pieces, hours and hours of it, but a set made by digital methods is essentially worthless, because, once finished, the technology of 3D printing renders it easily, instantly and endlessly reproducible.

3D Printed Chess Pieces – Crealty Ender 3

I’m going to gift the set I’m making, so its value in monetary terms is irrelevant, but my little hobby here also illustrates how seriously our technology is upsetting economic norms. Capitalists are starting to worry about it too, and they’re coming up with ideas to artificially inflate the value of digital assets. To this end, we now have the Non Fungible Token, or NFT.

You may have heard about these as the latest get rich quick thing, with people trading NFTs for large sums of money. What NFTs are, in essence, is a way of offsetting the infinite reproducibility of a digital asset by registering ownership of the original file. Then, like any other artwork, you can make as many copies as you like, but there will still only be the one original. I could register myself as the original artist of my chess pieces, which would make the files I hold unique, and any copies you hold, not. You can copy and paste your files as much as you like, but the originals, in theory, retain their value – if they ever had any – because there’s a ledger out there in internet land that says they’re the original. What you buy when you trade the NFT is, if you like, the title deed that says those files once belonged to me, the artist, and now they belong to you.

But here’s the thing I don’t get about NFT’s, and perhaps someone can explain it to me. For the NFTs to be worth anything at all, be they the data for my little chess set, or the original word-files for my writings, or a doodle from a digital paint program, I’d have to be a name by other means, and much trumpeted by the machinery of name-making celebrity culture. In which case, we’re no longer trading purely on skill – say in a work of art, or a piece of music. We’re no longer manufacturing a product at all, we’re manufacturing value.

The skill is still required, a product must be produced – there’s no getting around that – but no matter how well executed, the digital product, as a thing in itself, is not worth anything. What grants it any value at all is how easily a potential consumer can be persuaded the original creator is a name whose name is worth more than other names, or is at any rate a star that is rising, so an NFT, perhaps traded modestly to begin with, might one day be worth a fortune. But this is a very strange business, that we have come to value no longer the thing in itself, but its digital seed, and in fact just one seed in particular, when, for all practical purposes, it is identical to all the others copied from it.

The owner of an original painting can take pleasure in that ownership, in its display, its history. It can be gazed upon, and appreciated as a work of art. But one does not display an NFT. It has no aesthetic value, no line, no shape at all to the naked eye. It says nothing, speaks nothing to the soul.

Capitalists have embraced all previous industrial revolutions, but it seems to me, they’re not so keen on this one, whose business it is to blur the boundaries between the physical world, and the virtual. The creative types were among its first victims, but now it’s coming for the capitalists themselves, since the basis of “capital” is becoming less tangible, infinitely reproducible, and therefore materially worthless. I may be thinking about this all wrong, but the NFT strikes me as a dubious last ditch fix, a way of holding on to a decaying system of values, and a value culture, that technology would otherwise have little trouble sweeping away. That said, what the world looks like, if we let the machines loose from the NFT noose, is anyone’s guess. It would require at the very least, a fundamental restructuring of society, how we earn, and live in an equitable fashion, but thus far, that seems not to be up for discussion.

I could create an NFT for my chess piece data, but unless I make a name for myself, or have someone else make it for me, no one’s ever going to speculate on its value, so it remains worthless. Meanwhile, more marketable NFTs change hands for tens, or hundreds of thousands of pounds. In this privileged version of the world, NFTs might mean something, but it is a world that seems designed only to give the wealthiest something to spend their money on. Meanwhile, the food charity queues grow longer, and our escalating energy prices mean people cannot heat their homes.

In the latter world, which is a big world, and getting bigger by the day, NFT’s don’t mean anything at all.

Here’s a humorous take:

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