On AI, Art, And The Fear Of Being Human

The following is an opinion piece, written from a personal, subjective perspective, and not intended to reflect the author´s authority over the subject discussed. 

In 2022, I remember that there was a meme going around the social media platform once legally called Twitter. The meme consisted of the use of a website, Dall-E in its Mini variant, to create images with prompts put into the website´s artificial intelligence. The images were crude, anatomically incorrect, and funny in a way that the website probably did not intend. I remember making several 9-image sets based on visionary prompts such as "fisheye lens view of Darth Vader skateboarding" or "Queen Elizabeth boxing Obama". To me, they were little more than a form of amusement at ideas conjured by a bored mind mixed with a certain awe of using a nascent, barely awake piece of technology. The fad lasted for a month, two at the most, as memes on Twitter tend to do, and then vanished.

A year later, websites like Dall-E, Midjourney, Chat-GPT, and their like burst into Western pop culture out of seemingly nowhere, all beefed up and ready to take prompts and data and turn them into images that, although vastly better than the blurry, janky images I had Dall-E Mini make, still had this strange and unnatural sense, an odd sheen that was a dead giveaway of its artificiality. Sooner rather than later, deepfakes incorporated this technology into their assembly line of ghastly recreations of celebrities dead or alive, social media filters started to use it to make their recognition softwares better, Adobe started to implement its procedures in Photoshop...I could go on. As with the crypto craze before it, a leap in technology took industries by storm. 

And yet, despite the fact that I had seen pieces of technology rise and fall like trees with the pass of the seasons, from the Google Glass to the "hoverboards" to the aforementioned digital coins and NFTs, a certain writing appeared on the metaphorical wall of  dread at the back of my mind. For the first time since the launch of Cloud worskspaces, a digital tool appeared declaring itself the next step in revolutionizing labor efficiency. And if there´s anything I know about the modern patricians at the head of the most powerful corporate entities in the world, it´s that they will pounce like wolves onto anything that promises efficiency, as this word often predicts a rise in work output, which in turn promises profit, which makes stocks go up, which makes executive bonuses go up, which enables lobbying for further technological replacement of the workforce in the name of "the economy", and the cycle resets.

However, this is not the face that Silicon Valley presents when it comes to AI. Despite the fact that AI is already seeping into our digital workspaces, or creative softwares, our calendars, and our dearly held documents in order to gather consumer data for ads and/or further automatization, the real spokesman of AI is, from what I can see, content generation. It´s my personal conspiracy theory that Chat-GPT, Midjourney, and Sora are supposed to be the distraction, the object of either our ire or our adoration. If the public´s reaction is the former, tech companies have the opportunity to separate the efficiency AI models from the generative ones vilified by people like you and me on Twitter. If it´s the latter, Big Tech can lump all these models together and sell them as a revolutionary wave of miraculous software that will make all our future ventures as a species possible.

However, I don´t really wish to delve into these aspects of technology, as this is a blog about my relationship to film and TV and other forms of art. In public and private, I have talked extensively about the capitalist scourge of tech companies, the concerns of AI in terms of plagiarism, labor security, and the environment, so I have nothing new to say about that, and I´m by no means a tech expert, or a business insider, or even a professional in the entertainment industry (yet). I write about this subject in this way because I am in a moment in my day and life where I feel like I need to, and I write based on what I know, and I write today because there are a few ideas relevant to this mental crisis I have that I know for sure: 1) I am a human being, with all the natural desires and needs for connection, understanding, attention, and love that being human imply; 2) Capitalism makes me uneasy, because it makes me feel small in the face of other humans who wield power and influence over my own life for seemingly arbitrary, illusory reasons; and 3) I like to think and write about what I do, what the world around me does, and how I feel about it. 

So, let´s talk about the human soul.

I don´t feel like I need a whole "Webster´s Dictionary defines the word "artist" as" thing. I AM an artist. I should know what I am.

To me, to make art is to communicate purposefully and poetically. There is a purpose in using art to communicate rather than just saying a speech or making a phone call: necessity and catharsis. If I feel like the best way of saying something important to me is to paint it with acrylic paints on canvas, there is a release in doing so rather than just tweeting it. More often than not, there might be even a sense of a lack of completion or closure in saying that thing in any way other than in the one you needed to say it. This might seem like a vague, open way of defining art and artistry, but the matters of the heart and the consciousness are often nebulous and fluid.

If you´re an artist, like I am, then you´ve probably felt anger at Meta using your IG posts to train its AI. And you have perhaps been very sad at the idea that your work is subjected to the whims of advertiser-motivated algorithms rather than organic discovery by an audience. And you´ve definitely expressed contempt at the apparent grifters calling themselves "artists" and "filmmakers" on Twitter when they post an image made on Midjourney, or a video clip generated on Runway, and even more contempt when those algorithms that punish you reward these grifters with exposure.

And yet, my real anger is directed not at these people, and definitely not at people who innocently reserve their use of AI as a way to quickly generate, for example, an introduction to a school essay or an image for a social media post in promotion of an event. I do not hold contempt for people who see it merely as a tool to simplify tasks, which is not attempts at artistry and therefore not what I´m criticizing. It is no secret that my resentment is ultimately for the handful of corporate execs who hunger for profit even if it costs us the planet we live on. I reserve only my pity for these so-called AI artists. Why? Because that´s all I feel for anyone who willingly disengages with intimacy, with suffering, with what comes with day-to-day existence as a human.

I see it more and more now, and it terrifies me. I see the people who assume the never-ending hustle as a life philosophy, Gen Z having an aversion to romance and sex onscreen, that one guy who replaces his blood plasma with a mystery golden liquid (look it up, it´s nuts), people worshipping at the altar of white supremacy, people forming parasocial love affairs with celebrities, people killing each other in mad scrambles to get a TV at Walmart on Black Friday, people condoning the murder of children in the Middle East to saciate the bloodlust of Western-backed tyrants, people giving themselves value through designer clothes and devices built by indentured servitude, people clamoring to Elon Musk and Donald Trump to save them from their self-imposed misery. We live in a world where we tolerate the exploitation of other living beings if it means that some of us get to have our creature comforts, a world where we abandon community, human community, if it means we get momentary self-preservation and the illusion of safety. 

I do not believe this is humanity´s default state. Nor do I mean that we are innately pure beings. Human nature in a broader sense has been covered and will be covered by brighter minds than my own, but I do believe that this horror I´m witnessing is all the result of the world our self-proclaimed betters have created, all the result of the modern disease of convenience and ease. We have come to be a society in which a minority, albeit a very vocal one, gets to dominate discourse. Populist governments extoll the virtues of ignorance, claiming it as righteous humility. Although the intent is to create a subservient voter base, the result has also created a subset of culture that mocks ambition, subtext, effort, training, and celebrates mediocrity, pandering, public punishment, and gratification. I´ve seen people who work in animation studios be labeled as "Pencil Pigs" by AI enthusiasts, as if there was shame in the years of training, discipline, trial and error, and desire that go into learning how to draw. Since convenience has come to mean the same as desirability, the ability to create a video with a prompt is similar in philosophy and nature as ordering a package and having it arrive at your doorstep through same-day delivery privileges, or as being able to destroy someone´s life with a picture on a group chat, or deploying massive amounts of napalm with the push of a button. All these are the result of human endeavor, built to inspire wonder and awaken curiosity, but has been used by the wolves above us to turn us into ideal pawns in their games of supply, demand, consumption, and domination.

Art is not an end result, but a process. When Banksy puts up a painting, the painting itself is not the art. Art is a method, a discipline, a routine, an entire lifestyle. Banksy´s art is his language, his intent, the context, the time he took to design a template to spray over. His art is what makes him laugh, or cry, or reflect. Asking Dall-E to make a Banksy does not a Banksy make. Asking Chat-GPT to write a Poe-style poem to succeed "The Raven" does not a Poe poem make. Unless there is reasoning behind the use of AI in art, as a way of commentary or to explore comparisons, I feel that the labels "art" and "artist" are misplaced in AI generation. I don´t just mean it in the sense of the quality of the end result of the AV generation, which is still doubtful at best, but rather in the vital, beating heart that is supposed to be behind it. 

René Descartes authored the cogito ergo sum adage, which means "I think, therefore I am." However, the sentence right before it is seldom mentioned: "I doubt, therefore I am." Cartesian philosophy is entirely based on questioning the existence of everything but yourself, because the only certainty that you have is your ability to question, and therefore can have certainty about your own existence. If you think, you are real. You exist. If I follow this line, the certainty of thinking then implies the validity and existence of everything the human mind, heart, and soul can conjure.

This whole time I´ve been writing, I´ve been taking breaks to read, or watch a movie, or draw. The writing of this piece gave me perspective, a newfound sense of awe at the human mind, its ability to create these books I read, these movies I watched. This makes me even more sad to see people so ready to remove the miracle of thought and feeling from artistry, and it makes me so tired of the poor inividuals who want to reason with them. You cannot: these are people who have elected to hollow themselves out by refusing to allow themselves to feel. You cannot get them to doubt their own existence, or to find enlightenment in the simplicity of these thoughts, as Descartes once did. By Cartesian philosophical standards, if you refuse to doubt or think, then you refuse to feel. 

If art is feeling, if art is thought, then to remove feeling, thought, process, and purpose removes its artistic nature. It becomes empty and cold, just like the code it comes from. Isn't that appropriate? That delegating artistry to an unfeeling, uncaring entity of cold metal and mathematical procedure creates something soulless? Isn´t it an idictment of this technology and its supporters that in my previous sentence, despite being improvised and fueled by frustration, I conjured up more poetry than in any poem written by Chat-GPT or any clip made with Sora?

By Cartesian philosophical standards, if you refuse to doubt or think, then you refuse to feel. 

If you refuse to doubt or think, then you refuse to be. 

To give your ability to think and feel to a machine might as well mean willingly surrendering your concept of your own existence.

It is my sincere hope that, if you read this, you allow yourself to feel, even if it´s pain or sorrow or ennui or hopelessness, and then channel that feeling into something, be it something that requires effort and/or reflection. Maybe the world gets some great art out of that process, out of that necessity and catharsis, and both you and the world will be better for it.