Humour by Rehana Munir: Who killed the artist?

AI is driving a chilling creative renaissance, both democratic and dispiriting

Some of my most disturbing school memories are located in the art class. (The unmitigated horrors of PT I’ll repress to my dying day.) I regularly churned out paintings that were a cross between disturbingly garish and grievously insipid, with perspective issues that reflected early cubism but without the payoff. Thanks to stupendously advanced artificial intelligence, I am now capable of creating a decent-looking work of art in just a few seconds, simply by typing in keywords in any combination that pleases me. This should make me feel empowered and invincible. Instead, I’m quivering at the thought of machines edging out humans in the one realm we had so far claimed as our own: creative expression.

AI-generated art has become popular across social media, and the world, for both comedic and creative purposes (Hexcode)

Don’t Panic!

It’s hard not to be alarmist about it all. I recently read a poem about cryptocurrency published in The New Yorker, written by AI in the style of Philip Larkin, a favourite poet. It was surprisingly and unnervingly good. How the hell did the robots get this smart?! And what does this mean for the future of writing? It was bad enough to have SEOs and hashtags dictating writing styles. Now we have digital geniuses capable of replicating van Gogh and Tolkien, Shakespeare and Banksy in no time. And then there’s Lensa’s controversial ‘magic avatar’—customised AI illustrations based on selfies provided by the app user—that went madly viral earlier this month. We’re throwing keywords, selfies and money at apps, and they’re throwing back bona fide art. As a popular meme goes: Make Orwell Fiction Again.

As if it wasn’t enough that the world showers its riches upon dull bankers and hyperactive marketing professionals while allowing artists their little revels in the illusory bubble of social media. Now, artists are left to compete with AI that draws from the entire history of creative output, without having to deal with house rent, existential angst or Hill Road traffic in December. Is it too late to be an accountant? one wonders.

A Tale of Two Christmases

But only momentarily. I console myself with the thought that technology is an excellent ally but will never wholly replace the living artist in all her complexity and unpredictability. The feeble foundation for this grand theory is that the artist still has agency, even if it’s in the rather emasculating form of data entry operator. Picture this: You and I both enter a competition powered by Dall-E 2, the annoyingly efficient AI system that creates digital images based on language prompts. Hmpf. The theme is ‘Christmas 2022’.

This is what my keywords would look like: Bombay noir, street kids kicking around a football, Chinese food stall, emaciated Santa on pavement. Yours, on the other hand, might look like this: Walt Disney, alpine slopes, snowman with red and green cap and muffler, café in the distance. Same theme. Same tech. Strikingly different results.

Ergo: the vision of the artist still prevails. But there’s a whole world of debate and discovery lying hidden in this seemingly playful app. “AI in its current state is quite literally an unconscious mind, full of memory, but unable to make sense of it […] Could the AI age be fertile ground for a new surrealism in which human artists pry open the digital unconscious?” asks artist Elizabeth Price in a recent article in The Guardian. Freud knows.

Alexa, write me a poem

Perhaps it’s best to balance the philosophical with the practical (which is good general advice for the new year). There was a time when digital photography was thoroughly discredited among the gatekeepers of culture. It has now been regularised, with no damage done to the art form, in my opinion. Yes, everyone’s a photographer, thanks to camera phones. But standards will always exist, governed by flair and rigour. The same goes for music created using synthesisers and other digital beasts. There are listeners who will groove to live-looping, and those who cannot think beyond vinyls of rare recordings. We need them all to feel superior, inferior or equal to, addicted to comparison as we all are.

The new year is not far, so it’s a good time to befriend AI in its art-enabling avatar, if only to see how far one can go before returning to the limitations—but also freedoms—of old-fashioned creativity. It would be fun, for example, to ask Alexa to write a poem about AI, feeding it some clever and caustic keywords. And no doubt it will be thought-provoking and metrically precise. But what poet worth their salt merely seeks efficiency from poetry? Let’s leave that to the marketing sharks.

Follow @rehana_munir on Twitter and Instagram

From HT Brunch, December 17, 2022

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