AI Ragnarok

A new technology has appeared. It has the capacity to create images that defy the imagination. What used to take a human artist hours of work applying skills acquired through years of practice can now be accomplished in seconds by pressing a button on a machine. The ability of the machine’s operator is besides the point. They click the button. It makes the image.

Why be an artist anymore? Why practice? Why train? Many members of a despairing art community are considering throwing in the towel. After all, the future of art seems to be: Press a Button. Generate an Image. Rinse & Repeat.

This revolution took place in 1826 A.D., the machine in question is the camera and portrait artists the world over felt their craft and livelihoods had just been gutted by inventors and mechanics - i.e. the tech bros of the 1820s.

You knew I was talking about photography right? I was totally talking about photography. The thing is, the threat posed by the camera to the portrait painters of the 1800s mirrors the threat of AI to visual artists today.

That threat is not obsolescence. The true menace of technology is this: it threatens us with change.

The past can teach us how to survive the present. Understanding how the camera upset and remade the world of art in the early 19th century has given me hope.

Hope for the future of art.

Hope for the future of artificial intelligence.

& Hope for a future where the two are not enemies.

Hope doesn’t come without a cost. Every story has it’s terrible price. The invention of the camera brought with it a ragnarok of sorts - complete with a death, a resurrection and a new birth.

Portraiture in the form we now call photorealistic portraiture was over.

Why sit for hours while a human attempts to capture your exact image when a camera could capture your exact image in a click? People stopped sitting for portraits and painters stopped painting them. This was a Death.

What did all of those painters do? Some quit but most kept painting…

Other things now: new subjects & new styles. There was no longer any point to capturing photorealism and this freed artists up to focus on expression.

The Modern Art movement can be understood as a reaction to/against the camera and the photograph.

Technology did not destroy art in 1826, it pushed us forward into a new era. This was a Resurrection.

The camera gave us the photograph, it gave us the modern art movement, but it also gave us the photographer. Not every photographer paints. I’d guess that most of them don’t. The camera was a tool that created opportunities for artistic people to express themselves. This is a New Birth.

So what do we think of a human who is wholly reliant on a machine to create their art. Do we call them an artist? Should we call them and artist? Can we call them an artist? My answer to this question is a person: Ansel Adams.

Ansel Adams (1902-1984 AD - visionary, environmentalist, photographer) - wearing a shirt I designed, sporting tattoos he never had. Though it may be pure conjecture, I like to think that he would be down with Minor Threat, who released their first album a year before Adams died.

If you are not familiar with his life or work, you owe it to yourself to look in to both. His striking black and white images arrested the attention of the American public & his photographs of Yosemite played a critical role in its preservation as a National Park.

Though he had no formal training, Ansel Adams was an artist. He was an artist who made magic by pressing a button on a machine.

Whether we are smearing materials across paper or canvas, whether we are moving a stylus over a screen, whether we are capturing an image or video through a lens or curating an alchemical balance of inputs for prompt-guided software, I believe it is vital for us to remember that it is an artist who holds the pencil, moves the camera and clicks the button.

The presence of an ever-expanding range of artistic tools leads to more humans engaging in the creative process. I can’t see this as a bad thing.

So what do we make of our AI Ragnarok? What Death, Resurrection and New Birth can we expect to see?

I am not a prophet, but I am excited.

I am excited to see new philosophies & new schools of thought emerge and battle for primacy. What is art? Who is an artist? What do we celebrate? What do we condemn? All these questions are up in the air and will be bitterly disputed for years to come. Then in the settling dust, when the paradigm of our old world is burned to a cinder, I eagerly await the dawn of the new, the dawn of the next. We are all authors of this saga. Collectively, we write our own end as well as our beginning. 

Don’t you want a hand in it? I know I do.

I’ll catch ya next month on the 3rd,

JT⚡