Sophie Labelle | Instagram | Bluesky
Transcript
four frame comic.
first frame shows a typical AI poster that says : All chatgpt flyers look the same, especially with this font! the text above it reads : I won’t go to your event if the poster was made by AI.
second frame shows a still frame from a Hank Green youtube video. text above reads : I won’t read your post or email and I won’t watch your video if they were made with AI.
third frame shows an AI restaurant poster of burgers and chicken in a window. text reads : I won’t patronize your shop or restaurant if it is advertised with AI.
last frame shows an MS paint window with badly written : Your bad art is better than AI slop. text reads : if you can’t take the time or make the effort to interact with me yourself, then why should I do it?
I spent a little bit but not too much time on this, I hope you enjoy it.
Every generation that decides a new image machine is rotten thinks it noticed first. It didn't, and there are receipts.
Grant Taylor's essay "The Soulless Usurper" walks through how the art world greeted early computer art, and the complaints are the same ones being made about generative images right now: mechanically sterile, nobody actually decided anything, a machine getting slipped into a chair reserved for the artist. This you?
Taylor documents sabotaged machines and physical attacks on artists in the late '60s and early '70s, plus a long tail of milder stuff — eye-rolling, flat refusal to call it art at all — running from the medium's start in the 1960s to the early '90s. His verdict: computer art was "possibly the most maligned art form of the twentieth century."
Two dates worth holding together. That period is half a century behind us, and the takes aged badly — the plotter drawings critics wouldn't call art hang in museums now. And the essay came out in 2012, a decade before Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. That's what makes it useful: Taylor isn't arguing about AI. He's describing the previous fight, written before anyone had a stake in how the comparison would land.
Source: Grant Taylor, "The Soulless Usurper: Reception and Criticism of Early Computer Art," in Mainframe Experimentalism, ed. Higgins & Kahn (UC Press, 2012), p. 18.
Thanks for taking the time to put together this viewpoint and sourcing your argument.
I disagree with the comparison to digital art. Computer generated art takes skill, effort, and an artistic eye to succeed. Not just anyone can pick up a stylus or mouse and make good art, though it is a bit more accessible than some traditional mediums.
AI on the other hand requires no effort or skill on behalf of the creator. Furthermore, any artistic style is just mimicry. AI models have scraped real artists work without permission and is being used to slap together plagiaristic content, no accreditation of any kind to the source.
It took less time than you think for exactly the reason you might guess. I guess I just see a different 'brush'.
I'm glad you disagree. I'm fortunately old enough to remember being told that digital art wasn't real art, and do be alive today where nobody cares, oil painting is cool, brushing up your oil painting in GIMP is also cool, using GIMP alone, still cool.
Just take your same argument and fast forward 30 years and you'll get ahead.
There are undiscovered art forms and new/reset expectations just around the corner. The first real artist (with real artistic genius) to adopt the tools is going to be in every MOMA around the world.
Your mistake is in positing that the MOMA is in any way relevant at this juncture.
Eh, when they're updating the teaching materials for art in the late 20th and early 21st centuries then. Whatever your flavor is.
You're conflating ideation with creation.
Critics disliked Van gogh in his time too. And he used all the traditional kit.
Art had a sort of schism once photography took off. Pro-ai art seems to get stuck on one side of it. Traditional art had a long, long run of 'good art' being well composed and skillful reproductions of realism: people, places, events—with a few visual metaphors for spice.
But then came photography. And all those people using art to look back in time had options, cheaper and accessible options. The demand for the skill to make precise replicas nearly collapsed.
What has sustained was not the technical method of making art, but the expressiveness of the artist. The spice becomes the meal. Things become more referential, abstract. It envokes states of mind often contextual to the times and circumstances the art was produced, and drawing on concepts outside of the image itself. It's not just about making pretty pictures from paint, charcoal, or photoshop.
Once you have the dadaists, Duchamps and Pollocks running around, arguments about 'correct' techniques to make art are always going to be shortlived. It's not the advancement of technology that people question. Longish ago most of us collectively decided method didn't really matter, intention did.
If you scrolled through your camera roll would you consider it art? Can you use ai to quickly copy a technique? Yes. Can it be applied critically to success? Maybe. But if you outsource the practical skill and contextual knowledge that makes good, deliberate art, what are the odds that happens?
Walter Benjamin, nearly a century ago now, established a fundamental argument that most cultural critics of today have forgotten or simply gloss over: fascism twists art into a simple aesthetic rather than understanding art as a means to express change in the material conditions of the culture and its people. By relegating more and more to the machine, the machine gives us a false sense of expression without ever actually affecting our own material conditions. We are in the era of mass creation of the simulacra that Jean Baudrillard warned about.