A Different Kind of Camera
When the camera was invented, painters were worried they would be replaced. Upon seeing an early photograph, French painter Paul Delaroche exclaimed “From today, painting is dead.” We now know that painting has not died. Painting is alive and well. However, the camera did change what kind of paintings we appreciate. When I see an artist sketch a hyper realistic portrait, I can appreciate their talent and skill, but I hardly appreciate his work as art. That’s because he is trying to mimic what a camera can do for free. We appreciate Jackson Pollock’s work more which is art that the camera can’t create.
Generative AI “art” is now making artists as nervous as when the camera was invented. The Illustrator Guia Abogado has said “The technology will still end up being monopolized by the elite.” and that art will be “democratized”, which is often a euphemism for cheapening it. Artists are afraid they will be out of work just like painters thought when photography was invented. Creative director Emil Mercado asks “From the client’s perspective, why would they go to the trouble of hiring an artist?”. You can put some words in, and out comes a painting. This is incredibly similar to photography, where you just point a camera and press a button and out comes a picture. With modern cellphones, we now have more photos than in all of human history. Yet we still appreciate paintings. What I want to tell artists is that I believe Generative AI will just be a different kind of camera.
There is a Japanese aesthetic called Wabi-Sabi that I believe captures why we will continue to care about human art, and we will treat Generative AI ‘art’ the way we treat photos. Wabi-sabi is the appreciation of the “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete”. I don’t know a better description of what people are than that. There is a beauty there that a machine doesn’t capture. Generative AI will be able to mimic the style of millions of different artists, the same way a camera can mimic the real world. But a photo, no matter how detailed and profound, doesn’t capture a place and time completely. Nothing replaces being at a place and time. Generative AI, like a photo, no matter how detailed, captures one projection of what these artists make.
I believe Generative AI will change what kind of art we appreciate people make just as photography did. We will no longer value the clean surrealism that Generative AI seems to make. I believe it will push us to value something more human, something we haven’t seen before. Something that captures being imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.