I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
[Nothing] saps my interest as a reader, viewer or listener more than the dawning realisation that a work was made largely by an LLM: that no conscious human could be bothered to fully immerse themselves in creating the thing I’m consuming.
Oliver Burkeman, Four thoughts about living in reality
Burkeman also proposes that “a huge part of what gives work and art and life any meaning is that it involves human consciousnesses communicating with each other.”
In the AI era, my hand-crafting of original artwork and printed gifts based on original artwork means even more. In an era of AI slop and mass production slop, creating something out of my own vision and out of my own interaction with the media I use — acrylic paint, artist’s wax crayons, acrylic paper or stretched canvas — then framed in second-hand frames represents a move against forces which dehumanize me.
I read a comment online recently that “there should be no mistakes in writing anymore, because we have AI to correct it.” I won’t tell you that misspellings are okay in your writing. But I’m also not going to sign up for the idea that we need to do things perfectly now, because AI can. In fact, AI can’t. AI makes mistakes regularly, though rarely to never are they misspellings or grammatical errors. It makes errors of fact. And worse, it produces writing and visual imagery that is overly smooth.
In Saving Beauty, philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that today’s dominant aesthetic ideal is smoothness. Think of the sleek design of Apple products, minimalist all-white interiors, polished corporate branding. Apple’s new Liquid Glass iOS update is an example of it (it’s beautiful but I kind of loathe it). Han suggests that the positivity, comfort, and accessibility of the smooth aesthetic anesthetizes us. It dulls our sensation, eliminates complexity, and substitutes for the truly sublime. It cannot shock us or make us think differently despite Apple’s long ago exhortation Think different.
AI art is the worst. Sometimes I ask ChatGPT to mock up ideas for me when i’m developing a painting. It always makes my imagery more perfect, more smooth, less interesting, even when I ask it to do it in my own style: painterly, imperfect, rough.
Compare its version of Bo to mine. Is mine a little crazy? Why did I write his name in cursive on it? I was trusting in my intuition and in my artistic process. This painting, I think, has the unmistakable aura of having been made by a human.
That is not to say that an artist (unlike me) who makes very beautiful, highly skilled drawings and paintings shouldn’t be celebrated. I’m merely claiming that human-made art is more meaningful and more important than AI-made, if AI-created images can even be said to be art.
I started writing this blog post thinking about imperfection. I received prints of one of my paintings yesterday. I realized my photo and crop were off, and the print was an imperfect rendering of the original artwork. I’ve worked hard to learn how to take accurate and straight photos of my artwork. But I still struggle with it, and I didn’t get the photo of my abstract trees painting quite right.
Handmade items, human-made items, are usually imperfect. That’s not what makes them good, though imperfections can make them more interesting. What’s good and meaningful and worthy of contemplation is the human consciousness behind the art and writing.
Just now I framed a pet painting for one of my sisters. In my zeal to get it done and checked off my Christmas to do list, I inadvertenly got a little crumb in between the glass and the painting. I decided to leave it, not so much as evidence of the human consciousness and human activity behind the gift’s creation but because I was tired and stressed. AIs don’t get tired and stressed (though sometimes they go down!) An AI would never put a little crumb of imperfection into an artwork unless you told it to do it or if it was trying to mimic a human’s imperfect work. It would never actually get a crumb by accident on the painting.
I’m going to end this blog post without wrapping it up. I’m a human. I can do that if I want, just because I have too many other things to do to figure out a summary statement.