The Demise of the Digital Artist - Part2. Classical Art Against the Machine

In the previous article I quoted a paragraph from George Orwell's book, 'The Road to Wigan Pier', which I believe proves that the tendency of automation is to frustrate the human need for effort and creativity. "There is really no reason why a human being should do more than eat, drink, sleep, breathe, and procreate; everything else could be done for him by machinery. Therefore the logical end of mechanical progress is to reduce the human being to something resembling a brain in a bottle. That is the goal towards which we are already moving, though, of course, we have no intention of getting there; just as a man who drinks a bottle of whisky a day does not actually intend to get cirrhosis of the liver" - Orwell, idem.

In wanting to protect digital artists from the disastrous consequences of text-to-image AIs, we are confronted with a set of cynical questions from the AI developers: 'what is art, anyway?' they ask. 'How dare you tell someone that their MidJourney art is not real art?' 'Do you realise the effort they put in prompting and nudging the AI into reaching a desired outcome?'?

Playing the hatchling works like a charm, and all of a sudden you get 10 definitions of art that seem to contradict each other, playing into the hands of those whose indifference or even contempt for art has become obvious. The leaders of the current protest (support their Go Fund Me) have thus chosen to avoid any ambiguity and to focus exclusively on the unethical practices employed in developing ImageAIs. This might result in copyright strikes, compensatory payments to artists, new regulations etc. It's not difficult to predict that all these pushbacks will be temporary; that even if the Image AI developers would be forced to start their coding from scratch, they could do things legally and arrive at similar results. And the artists who are now participating in the protest would no longer have a principled stance against text-to-image AIs; especially if they get paid to feed the data mining beast.

HUMANISM AGAINST UNLEASHED TECHNOLOGY

Steven Zapata's video essay was not just about unethical data mining practices and legal loopholes; its powerful effect came from its case for humanism against transhumanism. If we want this protest to succeed in a lasting, meaningful way, we must provide a positive definition of art and name the values which are being undermined by the machine.

If we attempt to define art in the broadest sense possible, even though we may have disagreements, one thing will become immediately apparent - the artists are attempting to have a values-based conversation, whereas the tech developers are attempting the complete opposite. Artists like Zapata talk about humanism, mastery of skills, inspiration, imagination, enjoying the fruits of one's labour, whereas teckies talk about automation as the only thing of real value.

In the following lines I will attempt to offer a classical definition of art, one with which all past generations of artists would have agreed wholeheartedly (excluding some parts of the 20th century) and which would accommodate every contemporary artistic endeavour from traditional hand drawing to voxel art.

PYRAMID OF VALUES

According to the scholar and psychiatrist Ian McGilchrist, our minds are capable of two fundamentally different ways of interacting with the world. The right hemisphere of the brain [artists] builds on lower-order values to embrace higher-order values, all of which require affective or moral engagement with the world. The left hemisphere [teckies] tends to dismiss higher-order values in favour of lower-order ones; it either reduces everything to its utility value or rejects it vehemently. When describing the different tiers of values human hold, the scholar references Max Scheler's pyramid of values, which looks like this:

I. Sacred: connectedness of all things

II. Wisdom: justice, beauty, truth, learning

III. Virtue: courage, loyalty, teamwork, humility, prudence, compassion

IV. Utility: usefulness for satisfying basic needs & wants

ART AS ELEVATION

None of the values in Scheler's pyramid make sense on their own; they become meaningful only when they are subordinated to the layer immediately above; utility loses its value if we do not harness it towards virtue - courage, loyalty, prudence etc. Virtue is also valuable only when we direct it at the level above: wisdom, beauty, truth, learning. And wisdom only makes sense when it is directed towards a transcendent, eternal good.

To quote the oldest treaty on beauty, when the human soul encounters something beautiful, 'like someone using a staircase, he should go from one to two, and from two to all beautiful bodies, and from beautiful bodies to beautiful practices, and from practices to beautiful forms of learning. From forms of learning, he should end up at that form of learning which is of nothing other than that beauty itself, so that he can contemplate what beauty really is' - Symposium.?

Understood in this context, art is something that permeates all the layers in Scheler's pyramid. Building a cathedral is an obvious example. The community wishes to erect a sacred monument. It employs a builder (artist, architect and artisan) who applies his knowledge of Euclidean geometry (level IV) to draw a plan of the edifice. The families and guilds of builders who will then erect the monument will employ virtues (level III) such as the loyalty and teamwork required to persevere despite knowing that they will never see it completed during their lifetime, the willingness to risk their lives in the process, the embodied knowledge necessary for building arches, vaults, statues, or the prudential decision of a successor to alter and beautify the initial architectural plan without contradicting its vision. All these layers are informed by a classical understanding of beauty (level II) as consisting of integrity, proportion and clarity. The architectural elements of the cathedral, its pointed arches, rib vaults, flying buttresses, stained glass windows and ornate decoration - were all materialisations of this understanding of beauty. And all this multi-generational effort was directed at the desire to celebrate the most supreme value humankind can conceive of (level I).

Remember Steven Zapata's appeal to protect humanist values against the inhumaneness of image AIs? This can only be achieved if we root said humanist values (virtues) in the level that comes above it (wisdom, beauty). This is why it's necessary to define art as something more than subjective emotion. Even though this seems scandalous to many contemporary thinkers, it was the norm for all art history from classical antiquity until the early 20th century. While studying the relationship between fine arts and philosophy, the scholar Maritain concluded:

'There is a curious analogy between the Fine Arts and wisdom. Like wisdom, they are ordered to an object transcending man and of value in itself, whose fullness is without limit, for beauty is as infinite as being. They are disinterested, pursued for their own sake, truly noble because their work considered in itself is not made to be used as a means, but to be enjoyed as an end, being a true fruit. Their whole value is spiritual and their manner of being is contemplation' - Maritain, Art and Scholasticism.

ART AS PARTICIPATION

Human flourishing is not an individualist pursuit, it is relational and occurs in communities.?

Everything that gives life value and meaning happens within this web of human relations. Only in this context it makes sense to discuss art, beauty etc. Making and contemplating art should enrich, transform and ennoble us, and like Maritain observed, it should be pursued for its own sake, not for some ulterior motive. The transformative qualities of art are lost when outsourced to automated processes. To quote Iain McGilchrist:

"A piece of music I have passively heard and overheard is familiar to the point of having no life; a piece of music practised and struggled with by a musician is familiar to the point of coming alive. One is emptied of meaning by being constantly represented; the other is enriched in meaning by being constantly present – lived with, and actively incorporated into ‘my’ life" - The Master and his Emissary.

CONCLUSION

When judging the effects of a new technological development such as ImageAIs, it is important to keep in mind Scheler's pyramid and ask ourselves: will this tech threaten the income of artists? Will it make their entire professions superfluous? From these questions we should move up to level 3 and ask: will text-to-image AIs encourage or deter the cultivation of virtues? Will the art community become more tight knit, more prudent in its experiments, more courageous etc? Moving on to level 2, we can ask whether image-to-AI tools will enhance the beauty we see in the world, whether they will support justice and learning, or do the complete opposite. On level 1, we can ask whether the promoters of ImageAIs are willing to give their offering for the benefit of something transcendental, regardless of whichever hippie-trippy way they choose to define it.?

From what I've seen so far, the answers are all negative. Image AIs will most likely cause an irreversible tectonic shift which will result in devaluation and loss of jobs; among the art community it will encourage laziness, helplessness, the reckless embrace of a deleterious technological mutation only because it is novel and it promises to open up a niche for them. At the level of wisdom, it will encourage folly - a brute indifference to beauty, learning and justice, which will all be contrasted with the inevitability of automation ('change', the only thing that brings goodness into the world). At the top level, they will contrast God or the Cosmos with worship of the future, self congratulation ('behold the power of AI', 'the age of homo deus has begun') and the exaltation of some glorious golden Utopia that will never materialise.

In order to counter this, we must first embrace a classical understanding of art and second, understand the destructive historical processes that have led to this kind of aggressive evangelism for a clockwork society, mindless 'change' and endless automation. More on that in the 3rd part.