AI Art: Connecting the Dots

In my upcoming book, “Cheating for Kids”, I tell the next generation there are ways of understanding the world beyond those they’ll learn from their teachers and parents.?

Forget numbers, I implore my young readers, and forget letters. Just focus on the dots. See and feel what connects the dots, and you’ll understand physics, history, and the nature of Nature.

I warn children that this clarity of vision will not be appreciated by grown-ups because adults don’t trust the simple. They think simple is cheating because everything valuable must be sufficiently complex. For the longest time, photography was too simple to be upgraded to a fine art; it was just “pressing a button”.?

Now grown-ups are jumping up and down chanting “AI Art is not Art”. It’s way too simple, they say, just a human typing a few words into a text box and a robot mechanically regurgitating art previously created by hand, with great thought and effort.

Is AI Art cheating? Is it too simple to be true?

At its core, AI is very simple. It has to be because computers are very simple. Computers only understand binary. On or Off.?

In AI Art, the binary option is the pixel, or simply the full-stop at the end of this sentence. It’s either ON or OFF.?

If you feed enough sentences into a computer with a pixel at the end, set to ‘ON’, and then ask AI to write a sentence, that sentence will end with an ON pixel even though AI knows nothing about language and sentence structure.?

Take the same concept up a level, and show AI thousands of images of Picasso and similarly thousands of cats, and then ask it to draw a cat by Picasso and it will do a pretty good job. Again, not by studying the history of art of the anatomy of cats, but simply by remembering which pixels were filled with which colour when they appeared next to the words 'Picasso 'and ‘cat’ respectively in its extensive training sessions.?

The AI artist, in turn, has a similar learning path. They must repeatedly enter text into a box and work out how AI renders the text. Or, more simply, what colour AI will make each pixel when asked to draw Picasso or Andy Warhol, to throw in some acrylic paint, or switch to a telephoto lens. The magic starts, when the AI artists start to mix artists and mediums, colours, and textures. Possibly real artists feel much the same.

Real artists learn by repeatedly painting the same strokes, chipping at stones, and pressing camera buttons, then watching how the paint dries, the marble cracks, and seeing what they captured on the photo. Often, they hone their art by reproducing works of the masters before them. They’re not trying to be Matisse, they’re just trying to understand how Matisse's brushstrokes produced the masterpieces they did.?

I’m not trying to be Matisse or Warhol. I’m looking to see how the AI will interpret these names, what happens when I mix them together, and how to create my own style.

And before that, again much like a real artist, I need to work out what I even want to say with my art. The AI has yet to be trained on the dots that form my thinking.?

Will I, and other AI art hacks, ever be accepted as real artists??

I tell my kids, if you want to know which way adults are heading, on AI art, for example,? simply connect the dots in our thinking. Some of us will be dismissive (“AI will never be an art”), others reluctant (“some of this AI art isn’t bad''), and others will have reached acceptance (“I get it now”). Ultimately, many adults will rest as abject liars (“I always said this was going to be great”). ?

There are a lot of people out there pressing a lot of camera buttons, but very few Annie Leibowitzs. It turned out that some people are particularly good at pressing camera buttons. It took a while, but we now call them artists.

My guess would be that grown-ups will dismiss AI Art for a while. Then they’ll slowly connect the dots and realise that some people are particularly good at typing texts into boxes, they have clear visions, and that they’ve been working hard to create something we can agree is indeed ‘art’.?

Dorian Harris AKA "Artiface "