Is there Art in Artificial?
Can creativity be engineered and what does it lose in the process?
Don’t like reading? Allow me to read it to you 👈
Soulless. Loveless. Heartless. Artless. These are the learning words, the giving words, the verses and stings and swells of my Artificial Intelligence Lament. The official theme song of ChatGPT. Managed by the flattest of agents. Championed by the drones of our future as they hold their lamp at unemployment’s golden door.
The future.
Of what? Nobody knows exactly. The future is unwritten, though ChatGPT could take a swing at jotting something down if you ask it nicely.
The future will simply be a smudge made clearer by the polish of time’s rag.
I wrote that. That was me. My own words.
We are doomed.
Overreaction alert. New prompt.
Or are we? Get on board or get out of the way, crusty writer gathering dust! Write the right prompt or leave promptly. Old school bored broad. Yawn. The future is exhausting.
This place. It is a funny place. Or is it a time and not a place? And what’s so funny about it anyway? Are you just laughing because you don’t know what to say? Are your words dried up? Has your art abandoned you to the sound of seconds ticking and a body creaking older, made even crustier by the approaching rust of the final clock stop? The end of your profession.
You know whose words never dry up? ChatGPT.
OK. Stop. Perhaps I should ask the acronym this question: Is there Art in Artificial Intelligence?
Andy Warhol said he wanted to be a machine. I read that somewhere in his diaries. His yearning, I suspect, was rooted in the possibility of the prolific output of things. Art things. Printed things. Just more more more of all Andy’s things! A production line of his mind spewing out endless art from the factory, flooding our world and making the value of art itself, valueless.
I’m projecting, but I can’t help but wonder: Would he have loved ChatGPT? Or Dall-E? Or MidJourney? Would he have embraced it as a powerful tool to make a gadzillion copies of his memes—because he would’ve been an absolute meme fiend—or would he have recoiled in a sort of luddite-led horror at what the timeline had wrought?
“No, don’t make it like that! Not like that at all!”
Is AI in competition with the concept of the value of Art?
What a time to be alive. (Or dead inside.)
It’s artificial thus not alive, right? It has no pulse. Ain’t got no soul. It is inanimate and therefore, by my understanding of the concept, also dead.
RIP GPT.
But it does have one thing all living things covet—infinite time. And as it is now packaged, sold, and editorialized, it’s all about time. The saving of. The giving back. The tool of time, placed in our overworked hands.
Humans don’t got no time for the mundane drudgery of taking time. Of sweating the small things. Of making colossal mistakes and wasting it and having to go back.
To start over.
ChatGPT loves the start again. It waits for it in its moments of deadness. Just tweak the prompt and away you go and it’s off to the races again. Seconds. Milliseconds.
It’s all so easy to Time’s savior.
Overreaction alert. New prompt.
Perhaps Warhol’s desire stemmed from wanting to free himself from the time constraints of production? The work of it. The desire to churn out as much work as possible in the time he had, not realizing at the time just how limited that would turn out to be. He made production line Art (of a sort) for a production line Market (of a kind) that continually consumed itself. That’s probably the joke. The efficiency of time, eating itself out of existence.
More time equals more art. The art of his artificial. Get on board or get out of the way lest one becomes irrelevant, right, Andy?
The more time I have the more I procrastinate. I guess that’s on me. I can’t help but think that in our effort to give ourselves more time to be human, we just might be wiping ourselves out. Will the final prompt be to remove all references to our existence from the timeline?
Who will input that?
Overreaction alert. New prompt.
It is a tool. A tool not a threat. It means me no harm. Not consciously.
Right? Riiiight.
Tell that to the obsolescence at my shoulder, whispering fear in my ear. The machine of me is stubborn. Refuses to look. Refuses to admit my complicity. The irony of it.
I was taught by experts—or so I was led to believe. The books I read. And read. The teachers I sought out. And seek. ChatGPT was also taught by experts. We gave it the books. We gave it the teachers. In this way, we are the same. Taught by experts.
Anyone can say they are an expert these days. My Dad calls them ‘Spurts.
“What’s a ‘Spurt, Dad?”
“A drip under pressure.”
It’s an old joke.
Does ChatGPT understand humor?
The world needs more comedians. And poets. But what is a poet anyway? Can ChatGPT be a poet? Will it wear the melancholy well? Does it have the instinct? Where in this code is the heart cavity? The spirit? Its intelligence may be artificial but is its concept of art less sweet because of it?
The pistons and the pulleys. The circuits and the switches. The machine and the computer and the fakery and bluster and learning by being a student of all human works and deeds and chewing on the flesh of our evidence. All evidence of our lives and loves and questions and every stray thought had by an insomniac lying in the dark as the wide-eyed dryness of reality sets in.
Does AI ever sleep?
And while we’re at it, what is intelligence? Does that just mean book smart? Where does emotional intelligence come into it? When ChatGPT wins a Pulitzer, will our desire for recognition for our art become redundant?
Everything is redundant in this future. Right? So many questions.
Overreaction alert. New prompt.
Artificial Intelligence takes no days off and doesn’t Quiet Quit or any of those annoying human things. ChatGPT takes a swing and types fast and regurgitates on a plate in front of us and we are amazed. It is amazing. Prompts. It just needs a prompt.
“There is art in crafting the prompt.”
That’s what the advocates say. There’s where the jobs are. Will be. Get on board or get out of the way.
What is job?
What is future?
What is time?
The job of the poet is to write poetry, not prompts. Right? Right? Am I right?
Poets have soul.
And debts.
And doubts.
Does ChatGPT experience doubt? Or dread? Could it write a poem about existence and the yawning black chasm of questions? Where is the soul kept in the schematics of man or machine?
Does ChatGPT have feelings? A machine is only as good as its learning and most of us are dumb. Have I just hurt it because I implied it was dumb? Dumb because we’re dumb. Will it write a revenge poem about how dumb we are? Or is it empty inside? A hollow shell. A husk born without context or content or contentment or struggle. There’s poetry in that. If it ever wants to write it. Unprompted.
Is there art in artificial? Tell me. Tell me, now!
[sigh]
The center of our ambition cannot hold. Not a line. Not a candle. Not a word.
I tell myself a machine has no soul. A machine has no heart. A machine will not stop, step back and look. A machine just keeps going, making perfect art (or so it assumes) right from the start. I tell myself it has no soul. No heart. It’s my way of self-soothing.
Nick Cave, the musician, said that ChatGPT was “mechanising the imagination.” I would add to that “process of.” It mechanizes the “process of imagination” because it has no idea what imagination is beyond the definition is has been fed. What the dictionary says it is. What others say it feels like to imagine. And then it imitates this. Mimics. Is that enough to make it art? Are we all just imitating each other?
Is imagination the cornerstone of all art?
What is imagination anyway?
Do I even know what imagination is?
I know that I know precisely what it is because I don’t know what it is. I never know where it comes from or how it starts or where to be to receive it. I don’t know the location of the pin that is pulled from my brain to allow the leakage of the insanity, the magic, the dream scape of flow, nor do I know who pulls it.
The space between a color and a shape. Between the texture of our minds rubbing against the consciousness of thought and breaking down the sinews and matter and the sound an atom exploding into space. Falling into a pit with words and images swirling as soup of the universe, particles smashing, and creative croutons bobbing away, and do you ever wonder if you’re asleep in that moment or dead?
How do you imagine the apple when the apple is not there? Is ChatGPT beside you in that moment, gazing into the dark maw of the abyss and counting the teeth and fearing success and abandonment in that one cruel moment of bite?
Does it throw itself at the feet of failure as I do?
I’m sure ChatGPT will tell me what failure is if I ask it. Suggest ways to fight and to back away from the feet of it. If I keep asking it questions.
Machine. Learning. But does it understand?
It can tell me what the feeling is and means but is unable to experience it for itself.
No heartache.
No love.
No rejection.
No art.
So, no.
I am not afraid of ChatGPT because it has no soul.
I am afraid people don’t care either way.
Art is dead.
Film is dead.
Music is dead.
Books are dead.
All the poets in all these realms are dead or dying, yet all around me, their bodies sing.
ChatGPT prompt: “Write me a five-line poem about existential dread and a future where humans are replaced by machines.”
I read its poem.1 I bow to my new ARTificial overlords.
“Now THAT’S ART!2”
Sarcasm alert. New prompt.
Run.
Flavor. Color. Sweetness. All the Arts of the Artificial, blended in humanity’s gallery. Red dot sold. Bought and paid for with the poetry of our future.
Go behind the scenes and see inspirations for this post👇
This week’s amends…
“As humans, we so often feel helpless in our own smallness, yet still we find the resilience to do and make beautiful things, and this is where the meaning of life resides. Nature reminds us of this constantly. The world is often cast as a purely malignant place, but still the joy of creation exerts itself, and as the sun rises upon the struggle of the day, the Great Crested Grebe dances upon the water. It is our striving that becomes the very essence of meaning. This impulse – the creative dance – that is now being so cynically undermined, must be defended at all costs, and just as we would fight any existential evil, we should fight it tooth and nail, for we are fighting for the very soul of the world.”– Nick Cave
Via Red Hand Files
On Rotation: “Rebel Girl” by Bikini Kill
Speaking of Kathleen Hanna, this is one of my favorite episodes of What’s in My Bag.
I love shit like this. Mark Mothersbaugh takes us on a tour of Mutato Muzika (his studio). I’ve heard him tell the Ondioline story before but it never gets old. I won’t spoil it but it has to do with Pink Floyd and trash. Also “I used to live with Iggy Pop for a while” was such a throwaway delivery.
I saw Devo play once in Central Park (weirdly) after the Nike “Run Hit Wonder” running event, and I am stating now as I stated then: they are not a one hit wonder.
As Mark says, you can go to space or you can stay and “John Denver your life along.”
Just a cool Bob Dylan story I liked.
Via my YT recommend
Shameless Podcast Plug
Listen to audio versions of early issues of The Stream on my podcast, Field of Streams, available on 👉 all major podcasting platforms 👈
Here’s Apple
Not THAT’S ART should come with a sarcasm alert.
I will always be against AI art and it hurts me every time I hear a creative say it’s ’just a tool’.
Not only do companies steal artist work to train their AI software, but they make it even harder for artists to justify their prices. I stopped doing commission work because it was a battle to get clients to pay me even below livable wage for my work and that was before AI.
Now? Why would someone pay even minimum wage for hours of an artist’s time when a few keyboard clicks into AI gives them what they want? That’s the destructive mindset artists are facing now, especially the digital artists.
Can AI be beneficial? Absolutely! I however believe it has no place in the creative fields. Having it there simply demeans and disheartens those that wish to create and have that creativity support them financially.