AI Art

An imperial tension exists in whether or not to call the conglomerations that are produced by artificial intelligence bots ‘art’ - or not; and am inclined to the right - at least in this case - as the heart of the wise is suppose to. In this case, the right is ‘not art’. Art is, by definition, a creative endeavor. Thus, the question comes “can machines and coding ever be truly creative?” It seems to me, with the utmost certitude and rectitude that one can muster at any given moment, that all natural and spiritual affections within me compel me to answer in the negative. Coders can be creative in the true sense of the word, for the code itself is their creative manifestation. Machinists themselves can be creative, with the machine being the embodiment of their creative spirit. But codes and machines, while they can mimic creativity, can’t actually produce it - they are simply obeying the dictums of their wiring or code. Very clever watchmakers from centuries past, particularly in Switzerland and Germany, were known for making wind-up metal-cogged puppets, or ‘automatons’, that could actually draw a prescribed picture. The mechanical puppet would actually draw the picture; now, this is remarkable, but it’s not an example of the automaton’s creativity but the craftsman who made it, with their extraordinary ingenuity and attention to immaculate detail on display! Much the same could be said with so-called ‘artificial intelligence’ bots generating unique works of art. That is, it’s not the creativity of the bot on display, but the creativity of the coders who programmed its immense capacity for ‘machine learning’. One interesting feature, or really “bug”, in the system is the particular difficulty these bots have at generating an image of a human hand, most often producing excessive fingers, including some going in unnatural directions. This is likely due to the fact that the bots are merely gleaning data from available images, and there is no standard photo for the complex anatomy and geometry of the human hand, and thus comes the awkward polydactyl productions. This alone should be sufficient to encourage the thought that these bots are merely generating composites of available images and encoded data on the internet, and are not actually exhibiting genuine creativity. It’s clever, but it’s not creative - not in the proper sense, anyhow. And propriety is of upmost importance in this case!