Well, well… there comes a time in every art head’s life where we must address the glaringly large elephant in the museum. Artificial intelligence is a complicated subject to tackle. It’s still a very new technology, one that we can’t calculate easily how it will evolve. We don’t have the timeline in front of us, and it’s hard to say how it will change our world. What regulations will there be? How much of it will be integrated into the workforce? Will human art still be valued ten or twenty years from now, or will AI generated content dominate? These are scary questions, if I’m being honest. One of my biggest fears in pursuing art was the sudden rise in technology. I asked myself if I would even have work by the time I graduated. Of course, I wouldn’t be writing this right now if I hadn’t been able to push past those fears. Though a small part of me worries, a larger part of me is pretty optimistic that things will turn around.
It feels like the world is taking art and looking for the most profitable means of using it. Money dominates society as a catalyst for harm. Data centers are built over necessary ecosystems, machines taint our water. But hey, it wouldn’t be the first time, would it?
2021 was pretty weird. This is a gross summary of what was happening, but didn’t the NFT craze feel like a really roundabout way of buying art? Now, bear with me. I know the point wasn’t the pictures, it was the currency. Still, the NFT boom marked a time where cryptocurrency was strongly connected to art. Illustrated tokens were taking my social media algorithms by storm… and I guess the digital market, too. But that felt less significant to me as a kid who just wanted to watch Minecraft videos.
I remember thinking, “what, they’re paying for the link? That’s dumb.” I’d say I was right. People were valuing not the art itself, but the hypocritical, pseudo-money its token was worth—to my understanding, anyway. It was strange to me then, and stranger now knowing that this predated the AI advancements. Those were all human-made tokens, but in assigning a crypto number to it, it felt like we were devaluing the art itself.
But aren’t NFTs rather obsolete now? Or maybe it’s just not relevant enough to override my precious Minecraft videos.
Jokes aside, NFTs seemed to have settled into a niche on the internet that only certain people continue to interact with. They aren’t hot anymore—nobody waves their hypothetical value around, and a huge portion of NFTs aren’t considered profitable investments.
Thinking about this over a nice cup of cranberry juice, I had an epiphany. This would taste amazing with some sparkling water.
Oh, and I guess I also wondered, “couldn’t it be possible that AI art will follow this trend?”
Artificial intelligence is much more integrated, for lack of a better word, into contemporary times. It’s more corporate. But, it’s also doing a lot more harm. Its greater support also means it has greater opposition than its predecessor. What I would call the human advantage in this situation is that we aren’t devaluing authentic creation with AI generation. The AI is devaluing itself. It’s working off human work, yes. But it’s also working off its own output. Yellow tinted illustrations, grotesque expressions, homogenous facial features—these things all come from AI’s recycling. Frankly, it looks crappy and cheap. I know a lot of people, both in the art sphere and not, that would agree with that in a heartbeat.
I tell everyone I know that I think human art will win in this great war of man versus machine. Where corporations turn to automated “art,” the people will turn their backs. Human art could become scarce, but not worthless. Maybe it’s my optimism, but I’m pretty confident we’ll become more valuable as time goes on. And I don’t need to put my money on a fake token to prove that.
No matter what happens, we are living in a critical time for art and art history. The rise and fall of AI art will be a long, long chapter for the books, but it’ll have an end nonetheless. It’s important for us to keep our hopes high, and to ask ourselves questions when we see a pattern. If we do that, I think it’ll be okay.
Be curious,
— Ari A. 𓆟