AI Art

To preface, a general working definition of art must be made. It can be defined shortly as any piece expressing an artistic vision, something made with a deeper meaning or expression. Things like driving to work are not art, but things like carving are indeed art, if an artistic vision and meaning is being expressed. This will focus mostly on painting, but other aspects will be touched on briefly.

A look into the history of art will yield interesting results into the development of art and technology's influence on it. Ancient prehistory gives many examples of art such as cave paintings which retell events or stories. These were possibly art, but the chance of it being a mere historical account -- of a great hunt or something similar -- cannot be discounted. If it a mere historical account, it is not art, because a factual retelling is not an expression of a vision and does not contain deeper meaning. But if it is in fact a fantasy, a story, then it would become art. To some extent, art must be detached from reality, and a recounting of an event is itself not art.

Next, the era until the modern age can be discussed. Generally, actual art did not dominate the artistic scene, largely due to the agrarian lifestyle of these times not giving people the chance to acquire much specialized training in things such as painting, and the productive forces not being developed enough to make the means of producing art accessible to many. Painting was expensive, so only those with means could afford to make a painting for something other than sale. Given that things such as cameras did not exist, much of art was merely descriptive rather than expressive. It captured a moment, but did not have a stance, a meaning, a message, an opinion. It was simply showing what happened. Think of medieval battle tapestries, royal portraits, and so on. Even the Mona Lisa is not necessarily art, it was a commissioned piece. Art was dominated by the descriptive, not pure art.

Great works such as the sistine chapel are beautiful and masterworks, but are not necessarily art. They were produced by commission, and the artist's individual creative expression and vision was ultimately subsumed to the will of the patron. It is beautiful in the same way that a sunset is beautiful, but it is not art.

When cameras came around, art shifted into being more expressive and opinionated, and true art began to dominate. An entire sector was destroyed, that of the descriptive-artist. Royal portraits became royal photographs. Battle tapestries became battle photographs. As such, an entire class of career-artists became redundant, and generally fell out of work. Instead, the realm of art became more dominated by those expressives, the true artists. For a period, art was produced as art alone, commissioners would often prefer a photograph and the means to mass-produce paintings did not exist yet. This period generally lasted during the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s.

There then emerged a market for art as an item of exchange again, as a career. This did not take the form of portraits, but moreso the form of mass-produced general art. Rather than being tailored for a specific nobleman or his family, art was produced for the public and copies of the same painting were produced by the thousands, by the millions. Think of those cozy, feel-good paintings of cabins in the forest, or little gardens with all sorts of animals. The type of thing you see in a cabin or a hotel room or an open-house tour. The ones that clutter thrift stores.

These are paintings, but not art. They exist solely as a commodity, produced for exchange, a product of capitalism. Rather than being produced by the artist for use by a specific wealthy person, art as a career reemerged once techniques for mass production and copying of paintings became commonplace. Art could be learned like any skill, and an honest living could be made by producing paintings without opinions, depictions of ideals of the common man but not necessarily of the artist. Even if the artist did idealize these scenes, the notion that this is ultimately a commodity for sale for the market sanitized and sterilized any risky aspects that may alienate buyers. The artist's vision was subject again, not to the individual nobleman, but to the common market itself.

Art also became an investment piece. Wall Street suits sought to buy 'fine-art' as an appreciable asset. The expressionists were once again sidelined, the concept of art-for-art's-sake was put on the backburner. Career-artists flooded back in, making generally uninspired works of abstract art that were more about selling a story than expressing ideas. An artist's success was gauged based on how many millions his pieces went for, rather than underlying messages and beliefs embodied in the work. Many used the excuse of "art doesn't have to have a meaning" to justify this nonsensical turn, and for a good hundred years people have been calling their pieces 'Untitled', a brilliant subversion that only gets more profound as decades pass and this trend continues.

Again in this period, art is commodified, true art is put in the background. The artists who dominate the scene and are most well knownmay be a true vanguard, but many countless people enter the arts solely as a way to make some money. This also occurs in industries such as graphic design, animation, and so on, being turned into a solid career.

Individual animations, such as the turn-of-the-millenium flash games and animations are great expressions of art. They have a vision, often with a commentary on some current topic, and are made with zero expectation of making money. Art is only art when it is made for art's sake, not for that of personal enrichment, the production of exchange-value. But there were other animators besides individuals, those working in large studios such as Disney and Pixar. While animations were produced here, the mass of animators were by no means expressing their individual vision, but submitting their will and their ideas to that of the creative director. Moreover, any piece designed by committee cannot be art, as it must go through revisions and board approvals and so on. The artistic vision is once again subjected to the whims of patrons, and reduced to that of a commodity.

This brings us to the modern day. The emergence of AI is similar to that of the camera. Career-artists, those who view art as simply a means to earn a living, cry out that this AI is not real art, that they can't let it replace them, that we must support real artists. This is not the cry of an artistic vanguard. This is the cry of the petty-bourgeois being made obsolete, like when the automatic telephone switchboard was invented. They are not suddenly prevented from creating art, from making paintings and true works of art. They are prevented from personally producing commodities for sale, they are stopped from earning a living off of their works. Even their cries, that we must support artists, are rooted in capitalist thought, that the only way to defend art is to buy more commodities.

Similarly, those who complain about advertisements and such being made with AI are quite strange, earnestly defending corporate propaganda. Were advertisements previously works of art? Was a vision subjected to marketing analysis and executive approval and all sorts of bureaucratic interference art to begin wtih? What nonsense! It is no more art than a billboard is art, or an employee handbook is art. It is a commodity.

The people complaining of AI replacing the jobs of animators in movies and such are similarly odd. Animation is an art-form, but animation suffers the same pitfalls as painting. It is largely produced as a commodity for exchange, for profit, not for art's sake. A studio must pay wages and must pay bills. The individual's artistic vision is only useful as long as it generates profits and must be subject to market whims.

The complaints against AI art are rooted in class interest, of those workers losing their jobs or the petty-bourgeois being proletarianized. This is nothing new, and this occurs with every major innovation in technology. It is no different than the spinners smashing power-looms to preserve their career. It is dressed under philosophical layers of "art is worth saving", "without art we have no humanity", "AI art is not real art", and so on. Various slogans and rhetoric spouted to attempt to inspire boycotts, but the development of productive forces cannot be resisted. Art is not being abolished, but it is commodity-art that is being 'abolished'. Even that, commodity-art is being preserved in full, but merely streamlined and improved in regards to cost and labor-power required for production.

AI cannot create art. But neither can most artists. What AI creates is uninspired. Same with most artists. Career-artists are the ones who will be victimized by AI, not true artists. Graphic designers, clipart producers, studio animators, commodity-art producers. These people will lose their jobs because they do not produce art, they produce commodities for exchange. They do not create anything of artistic value. Nothing is being said by their works besides "Give me money".

Instead, those who remain will be the non-career-artists. The true artists. Those who create art for art's sake, not to produce a commodity for exchange. AI will drive out the career-artists and purify art, to where those creating it are not doing it for the reason of generating a steady source of income, of enriching themselves, but of enriching culture and expressing ideas, opinions, concepts, all through the medium of art. True art, expressive art, not commodities.

There will obviously be holdovers, those who make art as a commodity and still make a living, similar to those who create artisanal soaps and candles. Think of street-artists and peddlers, or those with online shops. But generally, art will be restored to the purity of expression, rather than careerists.

There are a few other objections to AI, most of them are minor. Many complain about AI harvesting data, reading or copying data and amalgamating it into repositories to train models off of. Many call this plagarism or theft. This is not true, unless we are all plagarists. It is the same as taking inspiration. In an empiricist sense, this is merely the combination of simples into the complex, the same way anything new is created, only that with AI we can know more easily what simples are being used. It is no more plagarism than someone growing up reading Stephen King novels and having their writing-style influenced by King's.

Another concern is that of the environment. AI uses much power, the infrastructure cannot handle it, etc. But this is only temporary, while AI is still new. Deepseek proved there is much to be done in the realm of streamlining and efficiency. When a new technology emerges, it is often inefficient. Cars nowadays can get fifty miles to the gallon. They got nowhere near that when they first emerged. The massive consumption now is merely an adjustment period.

Overall, AI will drive many career-artists to lose their income and have to move to a different industry, same as when any other invention makes a profession obsolete. But the field of art itself will be purified in this sense, the flames will burn away the impurities, and what will be left are those who create art to create art, not to enrich themselves. AI will remove the false-artists and instead leave only the true artists standing. Art will never die, as long as humanity is alive.