I do not, at my core, like AI that makes art.

I am an artist, and it takes me time (precious to mortals) and money (precious to us hedonists) to write this and everything else you see here. Every time a human has created a tool – forks, lingerie, code breakers – it has been invented to make our lives easier, cleaner, more full of time to do what we want. Art is the pinnacle, culmination, goal, and fervent desire of the human lizard brain is to create beauty after our own mind imagery. 

AI art creates itself in seconds and costs hundredths of a penny a piece. I cannot compete with it. I can barely read half a book of poems, take three photos (good or bad), and write a blog like this in a week. I need to eat and sleep. I need to work 40 hours a week to pay for my hobbit hole home (read: cellar door apartment). I cannot ever compete with an AI which a) has ‘read’ but completely memorized, analyzed, and reconstituted the entire canon of poetry, b) doesnt sleep, c) takes 30 seconds to create award-worthy visual or written art, c) doesn’t eat or need to pay rent. You can’t compete with that. 

This image was made with the prompt “pier one entropy”, the title of a collection I’m currently working on.

AI is a tool like forks, lingerie and codebreakers. We should use it to enable artists to more easily create art. We should be able to to use it to enable our art, not create it for us. 

All of that said, I love so many of the images that AI accounts create. 

First, they are just pretty. Many accounts seem to have collated the greatest most romantic photography and paintings and combined them into rococo confectionaries that may not defy the laws of physics, but certainly defy the laws of capitalism and scarcity generally. To snap a perfect photo takes time, patience, and being in the right place at the right time. To set up a new circus world on Mars, and populate it with 1950s beauty queens in complimentary cotton candy bouffants. Well, that’s just not possible with our current physical and monetary abilities. 

Second, they often take on the surreal quality of the uncanny in weird and unusual ways. This is very much not to enable marginalizing people with such afflictions, but to acknowledge that there is a small child lizard brain reaction that we have to the  usual uncanny things:  broken, diseased, or deformed fellow humans. That is, if a person has a weird skin condition or disproportionate limbs or something missing, that person will likely encounter gawkers in the supermarket and curious children who haven’t yet learned to politely accept people not exactly like our individual selves. I love images by AI because they do not create uncanny features like amputated limbs or masses of skin boils. No, it just can’t figure out how many fingers humans should have, or where a finger tip should fade into the foreground. It creates a new weirdness that I find compelling. 

I don’t remember the prompt for this one, but it shows this fascinating surrealism I’m talking about.

So I admit I love what I hate. 

I love it, what it gives me. I hate it, what it takes from artists everywhere. 

But I would rage-smash its disembodied existence if it meant I could give you and our artist friends supremacy again.