A creative response to Kevin Berger’s post “I Am Not a Machine. Yes You Are — Debating the Impact of machine-created art,” Nautilus Science Magazine, December 4th, 2019. https://nautil.us/picassos-got-nothing-on-ai-artists-8642/
The following eight museums are host to most of the most acclaimed art pieces ever created in the world: The Hermitage, The Armoury Chamber, and The Tretyakov Gallery in Russia; The Louvre in France, The Sistine Chapel, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in the USA, The British Museum in the UK, and The Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico. Computers can create wonderful and certainly very appealing things. But by saying that they can create art, their definition or art and that of the Oxford Dictionary are completely different. Art is the use of imagination to express ideas or feelings.
Art is history. Art is emotion. Art is expression. It is not only the final product but the path to get there.
Beethoven, Chopin, and Rachmaninoff are not simply the names behind some of the most beautiful musical pieces ever written. They are persons who lived a life. Each one of them did. Behind each composition, and through them especially, they tell a bit of their lives in Germany, Poland, and Russia, which were the Holy Roman Empire, the Duchy of Warsaw, and the Russian Empire back then. Listening to them is like getting into a time machine and seeing a little bit of that world of theirs. A computer can create beautiful compositions, indeed. By learning the style, machines could easily fool us into thinking that their creation is something from the twentieth century when it is just something of their own, done in 2022. Does that make it art? No. Art is history. Art is emotion. Art is expression. It is not only the final product but the path to get there.
In today’s economy, it is easy to fall into the trap of defining art’s value by its selling price. Adolf Hitler’s paintings are not any better than anyone else’s were at that same level. However, several pieces of his collection sold for $500,000 at an auction in Bavaria in recent years. There is way more to art than just the print itself. There is a story behind an artist; art can be imitated but someone’s life cannot be. Now what’s a banana taped to the wall and sold for $120,000 in December 2019? Pure absurdity from Maurizio Cattelan’s to convey a satirical message. But that isn’t art. Art is creation; art is organising the natural chaos; art is getting the best of us to build something. What about Thailand’s paintings made by elephants and sold for $40,000 a piece? Well that is art. Because it involves the creation of something from the chaos of nature. Money doesn’t define the real value of a piece of art. And we can’t judge the value of it without knowing the story behind it. Just in the same way that clothing brands are more than just the name, art is more than just what we see. It is the whole history behind it what gives it value.
Just in the same way that clothing brands are more than just the name, art is more than just what we see. It is the whole history behind it what gives it value.
We don’t have to disagree on whether or not machines can create art. Yes, they can, but not quite yet. Probably not in our lifetimes. To create art, Artificial Intelligence has to learn emotions and has to be able to build their own ideas. They have to live and create their own history, as it is that precise feature that defines feelings and hence good art, art worthy of admiration in the same way we admire our human art today. One day AI will live through emotions and create history; only then will they be able to create art.