There is a profound difference between machine art and the art of conscious beings. The philosopher and educator John Dewey has a good explanation of that difference.
(Before we begin, I need to point out that the images above were created by AI. The writing is my own, with the exception of passages from a book, as cited in the text.)
I entered "Sunrise with lilacs in the style of the French painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir" into Photoshop's Generative AI tool and the landscape above is what I got. Needless to say, the other iterations from the same instructions were just as bad.
This is one of several attempts I've made to get anything that looks like art out of that tool. I never attempted to use these images — I'm driven mainly by curiosity.
I also asked it to make "a picture of a hand painted Japanese vase with a large bouquet of white chrysanthemums and other flowers in soft pastels, including green. Put it against a grey background in a shaded interior setting. Please make it in the style of Pierre-August Renoir."
For a quick reference, just Google "'Spring Bouquet' by Renoir." That's what I was shooting for. It's not what I got. See second example.
Why Renoir? I was hoping that the tool is smart enough to look up examples of the artist's work and move away from its usual PSExpress Generative AI style — which is generally eyeball-exploding gumballs of color, suitable for a five-year-old's birthday card.
In other words, by asking for Renoir, I was looking for a frozen moment of light and soft gradations of color, the way a beautiful day or a bouquet of flowers actually appear to a human being.
No dice.
I can predict a lot of responses to this post — if I put it in front of a general audience of people on social media:
"Ooh, I love it!"
"I want to hang that over my sofa!"
"So cheery!"
And of course, one of the first objections I received when I first posted this on Facebook is that I just wasn't using the right app.
We all know that we have collectively lost our minds. But are we also losing any ability to discern or comprehend what is or is not art?
Besides the fact that AI art is either silly and childish, or ugly and weird, like the nightmares of a gamer who's had one too many Doritos, there are certain criteria for defining what art is, conditions that make it impossible for AI as it exists today to produce art that rivals the art we have from the past and the present.
Many critics have tackled the issue of distinguishing art from other fruits of human endeavor, the products of technology.
One clear, if lengthy description was provided by the early 20th century scholar, John Dewey, in 1932, in the first William James Lecture at Harvard.
To make it as simple as possible, Dewey argued in his resulting book, Art as Experience, that art-making is the transmutation of an experience into a particular medium, and art-consumption is the experience of sharing that conscious event as recorded in a medium of art.
When we look at a painting, or hear a piece of music, or read a poem or a novel, we enter into the perceptual realm of an artist.
Software does not have a physical body in the universe. It cannot experience anything. It doesn't have a perceptual realm.
What is experience? Dewey makes a clear distinction between experience in general and an experience.
Experience in general, for conscious beings, "occurs continuously, because the interaction of live creature and environing conditions is involved in the very process of living. Under conditions of resistance and conflict, aspects and elements of the self and the world that are implicated in this interaction qualify experience with emotions and ideas."
But an experience, he writes, an experience worth transmuting into art, is different from experience in general. In our time, we might have "an experience" when things happen that we recall as being "like a movie."
"[W]e have an experience when the material experienced runs its course to fulfillment. Then and then only is it integrated within and demarcated in the general stream of experience from other experiences. A piece of work is finished in a way that is satisfactory; a problem receives its solution; a game is played through; a situation, whether that of eating a meal, playing a game of chess, carrying on a conversation, writing a book, or taking part in a political campaign, is so rounded out that its close is a consummation and not a cessation."
Intelligence that is not conscious cannot experience being "finished" and cannot feel any satisfaction whatsoever.
But more importantly, the artist, in the process of creation, steps back, looks long and hard at a painting, plays the opening chords of a new symphony again and again, reads passages from literary works in progress again and again. The artist perceives not only the experience that triggered the production of art, but experiences the aesthetic state of the perceiver or consumer of art, in that stepping back and looking, listening, or reading.
That is what art is. A way of sensing, a way of perceiving, a way of being in the world, or in a world, that was experienced perceptually or imaginatively by a conscious being, the artist, in such a manner that we, the viewers, can share that experience.
I find Dewey's explanation deeply satisfying.
A machine may produce images of a world that looks like ours in some way or in many ways.
The machines we're discussing have been taught to produce the images you see below by being fed information about what pictures look like by "scraping" images on the internet, regardless of such niceties as copyright.
Those scraped images may at least potentially include my own photography. That bothers me, but it's beside the point.
If the art isn't triggered by human experience, the product leaves us cold, or it should, because we have been cheated, and those of us who have a scrap of humanity left know that.
My photography page on Facebook is Red Riot Images at https://www.facebook.com/laura.marland.12/
