Thought Dumping Some Ramblings About AI Art at 2 In the Morning

Recently, the ethics and artistry of AI assembled works have been an unavoidable subject of debate, and the subject has been taking up my thoughts for a while now. I am not a critic, but I am a passionate viewer of art, enough to have this blog dedicated to it, and as such it's been fascinating to see this phenomenon call challenges to the ways people interact with art. The subject has gotten me to do a lot of introspection on my relationship to art, and it's currently 2:30 AM, so what better time to go all existential about the nature of art? This is essentially going to be my off-the-cuff ramblings about the subject, the version that comes out after being tired as hell during a moment of insane stress, directly after an 11 hour work day, so I'm not going to think too much about the quality or structure of this and I'm just gonna do whatever my mind decides to go with.

Let's get some contextual groundwork out of the way. I have little to say about the ethics of this. I am not sure how to decide if AI manipulation of information into a collage of sorts is transformative, so I can't comment much on the debate about if the technology is closer to speedrunning training or to plagiarism. I've read a decent bit from both sides and I have to admit that I'm struggling to totally make sense of it. But no matter what, I support the artists. They seem to be pretty unanimous here, and so I do at least think that their work shouldn't be used without their consent, and that they should be credited for being used in a training set if they do consent. I am very afraid for the inherent effects of capitalism taking advantage of this technology, I don't want companies to use the same derivative training sets to guarantee repeat success, and I especially don't want artists to be out of work and don't want AI to replace human artists. As for the perspective I'm coming at this from, I am not an artist in the sense that an artist would describe themself as one, but I have attempted to make art in a number of mediums throughout my life. I am somewhat of a musician, and have played quite a bit of music at a relatively high level. I have also attempted to write quite a bit of music in my youth, and even fully completed one song which I'd sent to friends at the time. I have attempted to learn how to draw, but I was discouraged thanks to a very bad teacher, and I have attempted to write novels but never made it past some planning stages and maybe the first chapter. However, I am close friends with a few bonafied artists, one of whom is a freelance graphic designer who can also draw decently well and is a good musician, and another who aims to make something in every medium has has produced some great music, animation, and game design work. As someone who has not gotten nearly as far in his artistic endeavors, I greatly respect the insane amount of work, dedication, and influence that goes into their work, and for myself, I would rather not use AI because I'd like my art to fully represent myself. That is a personal preference for myself. 

To simplify it somewhat, I've seen roughly two camps of opinion. Some people, particularly those whose main interests lie with technology, seem to view art as a matter of the final product. To them, the creative process itself is not a part of viewing the work. I have often seen artists label this group as people interested in superficially "consuming" media the same way they would a hamburger, looking at it for a second, thinking it's nice, and not really engaging with it; people who view art as decorative more than evocative. The other camp is generally artists, who view art as a matter of the process, and do not separate the art from the process behind it. To this group, art is a matter of intentional decisions, personal and social contexts, and years of influence and training; to ignore these things is to not interact with the art in a meaningful way and they cannot be separated at all. I have often seen the technology focused group refer to this thinking as elitist or gatekeeping, and that group seems to have a general disdain for certain kinds of non-traditional works. Seeing these groups, I honestly don't think that either of them properly represents my own experience with art, nor does either group's interpretation of the other. 

My first step was to think about the way I view art on the average, but that has largely changed over time as I've gotten more interested in specific mediums, so I decided to generalize it a little bit. When I go to an art museum, what do I see and what do I think about? The art museums I've been to typically have a series of works laid out in exhibits, often with a small plaque to give some information about the art. My tendency is to look at the artwork first, take it in, and then look at the plaque afterwards. I usually don't know who's art I'm looking at, and any information about the artist's intent is my interpretation of it based my perception of the art. I may then look at the plaque afterwards, which sometimes affects my view of the art but usually doesn't. Typically, my process of viewing art starts with me trying to lose myself in it, to be taken in by it and to immerse myself in the atmosphere and emotions it wants to evoke, a result that happens because of how the various techniques come together. I try to understand these things and figure out what's going on. This leads to an emotionally resonant experience (provided I think the art is good at least), and I think that this goes beyond what many derogatorily refer to as "consumption" and would generally be seen as my engaging with the work on a deeper level. But most of the time, knowledge of the techniques or process doesn't actually change how I am affected by the art, and is rather an explanation of how the art had the affect on me that it already did; in a sense, a fun fact about the artist and this art. In this way, I typically find it very easy to separate the process from the final product while still engaging with it meaningfully. 

In that sense, I don't really fit either established category that I've seen. I generally value the final product more than the process, and rarely find that knowledge of the process fundamentally affects my perception of the whole. No matter the art, I will always try to interpret intent, even if I don't know who the creator is. And that is still true of art made by AI, even if I already know it's made by AI. In my mind, meaning is typically imbued in the art itself, the art is outside of the control of its author and meaning can be placed unintentionally, or a creator's stated intent can make no sense. I don't find myself critiquing AI generated works any differently than human made products. To me, art is a matter of emotional resonance and its ability to evoke something powerful in me. It's more than something to just gaze at because it's pretty, but simply viewing it without such context can still have that powerful affect on me. But of course, I'm using words like "typically" and "generally" here, so something is still off. 

What of my own art? I never finished much, but I did finish on musical track. I was in high school at the time, and it was designed to be some kind of video game main theme. I had titled the track "Victory Unto Darkness," and it was sort of like an epic orchestral score that devolves into something darker, the kind of thing you'd find in the opening cutscene of an RPG game. My influences were clear in this track, as the orchestration had come from my time in middle and high school band, and the style was meant to emulate the video games I was most into. It's a mildly ok-ish track from what I remember of it, but it certainly wouldn't find its way into any games. It was an amateurish track from a passionate but amateur music student. But the track is made of myself, my own expression, influences, techniques, abilities, and values. What value does this have to a listener? I don't really think it should have any tbh. It's something that I personally like about the track, since it's something I made and expresses myself. But I don't understand it going beyond that, nor do I think an AI couldn't recreate it or something like it perfectly. You could learn something about me from listening to it, but you could interpret intent similarly to something from a machine, and personally, I don't find it less affecting to learn that the intent and meaning I found was "accidental" because a machine settled on it. I wouldn't expect anyone to view my art differently (not that I want you to view it at all, there's a reason I'm not sharing it), nor would I find it offensive if someone found more meaning or intent in a machine produced track. This is my own feelings towards my own art of course, and maybe no artist feels similarly about their own creations, but my perspective is inseparably tied to this. 

Next, I thought back to the most powerful experience I've ever had with art. For me, this was my first viewing of the final 6 episodes of the anime series K-On!!. This took place at the end of summer in 2016. I had graduated from high school just three months prior, and had just finished my very first semester of college. I was going to be returning home for the rest of the summer in a few days, and I had been lonely due to not being able to see my friends in person for that semester. I had intense fears of us growing apart due to my absence, and this return home would only last a few weeks before I'd eventually have to return to campus three hours away for a far longer period of time, and thus I felt like those weeks might be my last chance to push for the group to make an effort to stay in contact. At the time, I was a brand new anime fan who had only been watching for a few months, and I had no knowledge of the person who would later become my favorite creator, largely spurned on by the affect K-On!! was about to have on me. It was around 9:00 and I had finished dinner a while before, and decided to finish the anime I was in the middle of, having last stopped K-On!! around episode 17 since it was a good stopping point. At the time, I had been greatly enjoying the show far more than expected, but didn't think of it as an all-time great, but that changed about an hour from when I started this session. 

Anyone who's seen K-On!! will probably instantly know where I'm going with this, given the background context I laid out, though I won't spoil the content here. Its emotional climax in episode 20 is a widely beloved moment that has elicited no shortage of tears from fans, but for me, it was something a lot more, something that changed me on a fundamental level. To describe my experience of the moment itself, I was largely in a trance by the episode's close-to-real-time concert performance, and was in a daze similar to the characters by the episode's final scene. They start talking about things, and I even remember the particular shot at which I realized exactly what the scene was going for. At that realization, I started crying, and the characters started crying at exactly the same time. As the scene kicked up, so did my reactions. By the end of the episode, I was struck by some kind of bizarre daze, and distinctly remember just sitting in my chair for about 5 minutes, and then taking off my earbuds and just laying on my bed for some indistinct amount of time, probably somewhere between 10-25 minutes. During those minutes, I was purely a puddle, completely unmoving, face covered in water, no thoughts in my head, an existence defined in that moment by nothing but this indescribable, overwhelming emotion. I had been seen. 

Eventually, I regained some composure, and had to decide if I wanted to continue watching the show. I ultimately decided on doing so, and finished it that night. I laughed my ass off as always and cried my eyes out at the big moments nearly as much as I did before (though without the daze), and then I X'ed out of the streaming site and just let it sink in. If anyone could have peaked in on me watching these episodes, they would have seen me at the most human I've ever been. First, my understanding of my own opinion of the show had been reframed. I thought I liked the show, but these final episodes made it clear that I was far more attached to it than I ever realized. Next, I took its theming to heart. K-On is a story about the impermanence of a specific time in one's life, but bittersweetly conveys the necessity and hope of change. It's also a story about everlasting friendship, and the ways that these bonds deeply impact us. It was something directly applicable to my situation at the time, and it was directly responsible for some of my actions during my weeks home. It's also directly responsible for my own feelings towards those friends currently, a set of relationships that have continued to stand strong even now that I've graduated from college, and in spite of all the changes that have occurred between us.

K-On altered my view on time, change, and friendship, in such a way that I simply would not have been the same person if I hadn't watched it. The show, and that viewing of it in particular, is now a fundamental aspect of who I am, and has deeply impacted my view of art in general. I didn't even know it was possible for art to affect someone like that until it happened to me. It spawned my interest in learning about the people who create art, and allowed me to learn about Naoko Yamada who would become my favorite creator among all media, as well as writer Yoshida Reiko and character designer Yukiko Horiguchi, both of whom would also become some of my favorite creators in the medium. And it did so in an extremely unique way, an experience unique to myself and my viewing of the show, inseparable from the context I had watched it in, speaking to me on a human level. I've been obsessing over it ever since, the show and this viewing never leaving my mind. This is the kind of experience that I think artists would die to have their art make on people, and I feel that my reaction to this work signifies an engagement with it that goes far beyond passive consumption. So taking all of this into account, does that change anything about my previous thoughts on AI? 

Well, I wanted to learn about the staff of the show, and Naoko Yamada had recently started to become a noteworthy name. In trying to recapture some of the magic of K-On, I watched Tamako Market, and it didn't quite land for me at the time, but I would rewatch it later and come to adore it, and then watch Tamako Love Story and it become one of my favorite films ever. Learning about her unique array of influences, from live-action techniques to bizarre foreign stop-motion pictures, gave me an intriguing picture of the director. With her later works, I would come to learn that a running thread through all of Yamada's work is the idea of impermanence, everything she's ever made has something to say about that topic. All of these things would make me come to appreciate this creator as a person and as an artist. But of K-On itself, it kind of didn't change anything. I had the experience of K-On that I did, a life-changing interaction with great art, but learning about the director just made me appreciate the person more, rather than appreciating their art more. I'd come to appreciate K-On more just by watching it again, and seeing techniques and ideas I'd missed on my previous viewings, something I could have done without knowledge of the creative staff. Indeed, my experience of K-On was separate from the artists. I would later learn about individual episodes and specifics of craft, such as with my analysis of K-On!!'s 16th episode on this very blog and Noriko Takao's involvement with it. But I had already appreciated this about K-On, and instead just came to think Noriko Takao is a pretty awesome creator. I think about what if K-On had been made by an AI, and I genuinely don't think it would have changed anything. After all, I first watched the show without any knowledge of its creators. When I learned about those creators, I came to appreciate them personally, but my opinion of their art remained unchanged. If I had learned that AI made it, wouldn't the same thing have happened? I'd have come to appreciate this AI, or at least this particular AI's work, and my experience of the work would remain fundamentally unchanged. 

In response to this, I suspect that some will try to argue that an AI could never make art like K-On. K-On spoke to me on such a profoundly human level, and so only a human could make something with that effect, or so the argument goes. Also, even if AI could make art that is indistinguishable from human made art, it would inherently be lacking something, like some kind of soul or humanity. I have to admit that I am not convinced of either of these arguments. The second one is easier to debate. "Soul" and "humanity" are vague, ambiguous, unquantifiable terms. They don't exist in any meaningful sense, and I see no reason that works made by AI couldn't replicate whatever it is people are perceiving. After all, if AI couldn't do that, then that art wouldn't even be indistinguishable from human made art. If AI art were truly indistinguishable, it would have this quality we refer to as "soul" or "humanity." 

That first point though, is a bit more complicated, and for this, I think I'll have to explain a bit about how I perceive the world. I have autism, and to simplify it, that means that human mannerisms, speech patterns, and general interactions don't come to me intuitively. Instead, I had to spend my entire life learning them logically. And the result of this is that I've come to recognize a set of patterns and heuristics that I use to parse communication. In essence, if a person I'm talking to does X with their eyes and hands under Y context, they're probably communicating Z. I've gotten very good at picking up on this stuff over time, to the point I'm now largely overly aware of it, and it generally gets me through interactions. This strategy works, I usually have a good understanding of what people are communicating, sometimes a deeper one than my allistic friends have because I'm just thinking about it more since they don't have to. One can understand and even feel the thoughts and unspoken gestures of others on a purely logical level, because the things that people intuitively pick up on operate on unspoken rules and patterns. And art often operates on the same principals, it's made by humans after all. When I watch a movie, I know that X camera angle and musical cue under Y context is probably communicating Z. Editing choices in a TV show, certain brush strokes in a painting, certain prose choices in a novel, etc., all seem to me to operate on this type of logic, albeit more complicated than I'm making it out here.

If you've read anything on this blog, you've seen the results of this method of understanding at work, and if you're still reading this blog, I'd like to assume that you think I'm doing something right and have developed enough media literacy to be worth reading. I see no reason why AI couldn't similarly pick up on such patterns, to the point where they understand and communicate ideas similarly to how I do as a bona fide human being. That's not to say that I'm like a machine, but more that understanding the world through predictable patterns and data sets is not inhuman. Artistic intent is a product of an artist's training and ability, but it's also a product of that person's intuitive (or logical) understanding of the patterns of the human mind, and their method of selecting a technique that affects the mind via such patterns. Art can break these patterns and be better for it, but then that just creates a new pattern to learn. Now, I am not an artist beyond what I've mentioned, and I'm willing to accept that there's missing information here I'm just not privy to, like maybe there are other kinds of things that go into techniques than executing on an idea based on intuitive understanding of patterns of human thought and behavior. But I do think that the human mind operates in patterns, and can be predicted to a large degree. Patterns are the specialty of a computer, so I am not convinced that AI won't be capable of making art that is fully indistinguishable from human made art given enough of these patterns. 

But OK, there's still something bugging me, like a cognitive dissonance of sorts. There are obviously some times that I can easily completely separate the final product from the creative process behind it even with some of the most impactful experiences with art I've ever had, but clearly I'm missing something given the near unanimous consensus among artists. Although I do think AI will be able to replicate human art, and perhaps already has in some cases, I'm still afraid of human artists disappearing, and not just because it will leave them out of work, or because I think capitalism will likely lead to an influx of derivative works from people who don't care about or want to understand art. And then I remembered the existence of a painting called "Take The Money and Run." Although to call it a painting is perhaps a stretch. The work in question is just two blank canvasses. As the final product on its own, this is meaningless and is unlikely to resonate with anyone. But given the context behind this work, I think it's brilliant. An artist was commissioned to create works of modern art to be shown in a museum, and was given two canvasses with which to give life to their work on. The artist did not do anything to either canvas, turned them in just like that, and titled the work "Take The Money and Run." 

Without knowing of the artist's intent and creative process, you just have white canvasses. But with this context, my perception is changed fundamentally. This work hung in a museum, so when you actually go to the museum and are looking at various works of art worth thousands of dollars, you see these blank canvasses alongside them. The implication, of course, is that this artist was commissioned to make something and was paid up front, and then just left the boards and took the money as a scam. But nonetheless, this piece hangs in a museum, has an official title, was made by an artist who was credited for the work, and is placed on equal standing as every other piece that it shares the room with. It started a heated conversation which said artist is involved in. This is a hilarious joke, and a commentary on what actually counts as art all at once. It's clever, funny, thought provoking, and challenging, all hallmarks of great art. Those who see it may initially be confused, but when they read the plaque describing it, it will stick with them in some form, positively or otherwise. But it only is any of those things with knowledge of the process behind it, the content is inherently tied to the process. This is the breakthrough, the realization that helped me to get into the artist's head a bit more. 

I definitely don't think AI can create work like this. If a machine came up with the idea, it probably wouldn't be impactful. Machines don't get paid money, they can't desire money or desire to not do work, and without those desires the piece doesn't land. Take The Money and Run works because it can be argued that the artist was lazy, the ambiguity of the situation and the artist's insistence on the work being a commentary is a part of the commentary itself, baked right into the meaning of the work. You cannot have this work with just two white canvasses, a machine perfectly recreating the image fails to perfectly recreate the work. This does call into question what happens when AI gain the appearance of sentience indistinguishable from humans, as seen in much media about androids, but that's so far off that I don't find it worth thinking about for the moment. Instead, it begs a different question: how integral is this to art in general? 

Take The Money and Run is a special case, is it not? It's "modern" art, it's almost an interactive piece. There are other works like it in that way, and they may be a special category. But if an AI perfectly recreated a traditional painting like Starry Night, I can still get lost in its impressionistic, ethereal beauty no matter the intentions of Van Gogh, right? But then, this piece does change with knowledge of its creation, at least for me. Knowing that it's the view from his room at the asylum he admitted himself to after cutting off his ear, with the addition of an imaginary village, does add another layer to the work, doesn't it? That context makes it a little haunting to me in a way it's not without that context, and this is all just superficial viewing. Clearly, there are more than a few cases where context and process matters for more than just appreciating a person. But I can't help but think that I just don't experience most art that way. When I think of Naoko Yamada again, although her perspective is tied to her work, it's also something that's more replicable. In contrast to these two works, knowing that she directed Heike Monogatari after losing 36 friends and coworkers in an arson makes me think Yamada is a strong person more than anything, Heike is still what it is. It probably would have been different without that perspective and experience, but knowing that perspective doesn't change what we got in the way that it seems to me like it does for so many, and like it does for Take The Money and Run or Starry Night. Would knowing the process behind passionate staff of the mediocre seasonal anime I dropped make it resonate more? Somehow, I doubt it. Maybe the cross-medium comparison is unfair, but I'm sure there's also some movies and TV shows that make for more equivalent examples. 

Then I got to thinking about mass produced works. What's the difference between a mass produced dollar store vase and a 10000 dollar "art" vase? In my mind, it's the price. I've always been confused at the notion that being mass produced make something less artistic, or less of art. Art, to me, is a matter of something being expressed via a medium, and just that very broad idea which is capable of creating all manner of incredible stuff. In my mind, all vases are art by virtue of being vases (sculptures essentially, often with painting on them), and all paintings, movies, literature, pieces of music, etc. are similarly art, be it big budget blockbusters fine tuned for success, small scale passion projects, or cheaply made schlock and pornography. Is decorating one's home such a mundane process for most people? If I have an empty wall that I want to decorate, I don't just look at stuff superficially and pick something that's kind of nice. I want to feel something when I look at that wall. In college, my wall was largely decorated with posters of anime and games, usually fan art I bought at an artist's alley at a convention or otherwise official artwork made for the particular work. These are human made works that elicit many feelings in me, both from association with another piece of art and from the composition, aesthetic, and general tone of the work itself. When I would look at my wall, I would feel something and be happy I had that poster, a deeper feeling than "hey, that's pretty." I want the same to be true of any paintings or vases I use to decorate my home when the time comes, so when I see a dollar store vase I'm judging it the same way I do that 10000 dollar museum one. The one that resonates with me more is the one I feel is better crafted in an artistic sense, I simply don't believe for a second that a factory made product is incapable or unlikely of leading to that kind of artistic resonance, even as someone who's taste generally couldn't be described as generic or mass produced. 

Instead, my fear of mass produced AI art is largely about art's fundamental incompatibility with capitalism. The art related industry's we currently have already to as much as they can to stifle creativity or uniqueness, and value the works that guarantee success. If AI were to be used by these companies, not only would artists lose their jobs, but the data sets fed to the machine would be homogenous. In an industry where franchise films and action blockbusters always top the box office, I don't want a company to see that, feed the AI the scripts, visuals, music, and directing for these movies, and just make nothing but similar works. But that's probably what will happen if Disney and Sony get to perfect and use the technology. I don't want artists to stop being commissioned and for all paintings and drawings to have a similar style. I enjoy plenty of mass produced art, but I don't want all art to be mass produced. I don't want to live in a world where I can't watch a Marvel movie and then also watch an arthouse film in the next room, I want both, but companies with the tech would definitely only make the one that is actually successful, presuming the tech will become good enough to be indistinguishable from human art (and again, I think it will). It's capitalism that I think needs to change before I can embrace this technology wholeheartedly, because currently, artists get screwed over and art will only work under a few successful data sets. 

And this is where my rambling thoughts have led me to for the moment. I exist in some weird middle ground between the "sides" I typically see represented in discussions about this topic. My experience of art is complicated, probably not universal, and not the same for all works. I think AI is going to get really good as it goes, and I think it will probably be capable of making really great, powerful, thought provoking, emotionally resonant works of art; the kind of work that can effect people the way something like K-On did for me. Technology just has a tendency to improve in this way, and I don't think the human experience, the quirks and thought processes of people, and the powerful techniques of these trades, are quite as impossible to replicate as some do. But there are undeniably a few things that need human thought or experience to exist. It's for this reason that AI can't replace humans, I want works like Take The Money and Run and Starry Night to exist. I can't help but think there's a place for this technology. I think the fact that humans can make art and do the insane feats they do is really incredible, and it's driven my interest in animation for years. Humans can just draw whole sequences that feel alive and convey emotions and style just with still images, how fucking cool is that? But I also think it's cool that machines have gotten to a point of being able to do something similar, and I don't find that the latter makes the former less impressive. I'm not afraid of the existence of fully AI made productions, I'm afraid of what capitalism will do with it. I'd love for them to coexist, but massive systemic change would need to happen first, so perhaps my optimism towards AI and acceptance of the format as art comes from my judgement not taking the capitalist dystopia into account for it (plus the whole plagiarism thing). My ultimate conclusion for now is that AI art is pretty cool, if maybe an ethical nightmare, but art and capitalism are fundamentally incompatible and thus the consequences will be pretty awful if things don't change in major ways soon. 

It is currently 4:52 in the morning so I've been on this for like 3 hours, and I have work in about 10 hours, after having worked 11 hours today. This writing is a result of that context and experience, and will hopefully fundamentally change your view of it. As such, I hope you won't treat me too harshly if I said something bad or problematic in my sleepy haze, or if this is full of grammar and spelling mistakes. I'm trying to work through all of these conflicting feelings and thoughts as someone who loves art, and I want my opinions on this subject to be educated, so if you're an artist who takes issue somewhere, I'd love to hear your thoughts. I wrote all this in this haze because I wanted to see where I'm at, and my ultimate goal is to understand the artists point of view more clearly.