Introduction
I’ve always been moved by art.
I was the child who excitedly attended Symphony Orchestra concerts. I was the teen who devoured Shakespeare and Steinbeck. I am the adult who plans travel itineraries around museums and architecture.
I am emotionally moved by the creation of non-essentials, the creation of beauty for the sake of adding beauty to the world.
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To me, the Statue of David is the essence of beautiful creations. So during a recent trip to Florence, I had one main priority: Witness the iconic sculpture in-person.
As I stood looking up at this 17-foot marble masterpiece, I started thinking about artificial intelligence.
The Fallacy of Speed Above All Else
Michelangelo spent three years carving his Statue of David.
ChatGPT can churn out a 1,000-word article in less than 5 minutes.
We now place more value on the latter, especially in corporate capacities, but can you imagine a world without the lasting legacy of the former?
Art is a fundamental part of the human condition. Humans add art and beauty in all sorts of unnecessary places. We embroider fabrics, we use poetry to teach our children life lessons, we add seasonings to food, we carve 12,000-lb marble sculptures to showcase the bravery of an underdog.
These artistic activities require additional time and energy. They aren’t necessary to clothing, teaching, sustaining, and explaining ourselves. However, we do these acts of art because that extra time and effort equate to increased fulfillment.
Hand-crafted works (from clothing to coliseums) make us feel good, and one cannot recreate the same level of fulfillment when one focuses on speed alone.
It’s the age-old adage of quality vs quantity.
The Statue of David is quality. He took my breathe away and made me feel both small and eternal. Works like this transcend time, which makes me feel like my human experience can transcend it, too.
When I see “AI slop,” which is that low-quality, AI-produced content that lacks deeper meaning or effort, it gives me the opposite feeling of fulfillment.
In the case of art, both consuming and creating it, I find the slower, “less efficient” method far more rewarding than the speedy one.
My Internal Conflict
There is a time and place for artistry, and there is a time and place for efficiency.
In addition to art-making, tool-making is a fundamental part of being human. First, humans made fire and hammers. Then, we made computers and AI. These tools, and their ability to optimize our time and energy, have unlocked incomprehensible potential.
I recognize the positives of ChatGPT, Claude, etc., as tools for tedious, repetitive tasks like data entry and automation. These are excellent use cases for AI, and I’m not too proud to admit that much.
However, by it’s very name, AI is void of sincerity. It is artificial, not genuine. And some humans are attempting to replace the genuine with AI.
True art is genuine, and I believe that only a human can capture that feeling I had looking at David (both the statue and my partner - love you, bud).
The best AI can do is attempt to make a flat reprint of a human’s art.
AI cannot produce an equivalent to Michelangelo’s Statue of David. In fact, the marble block David is carved from would likely be deemed “too inefficient” by modern AI standards. (The marble had been previously worked on but abandoned by other sculptors due to a flaw.)
Only a human, with all that nebulous artistic inspiration, would take a flawed piece of marble and make a masterpiece.
Conclusion
I clearly don’t have all the answers in the AI debate, but I can confidently say this:
AI is not an artist. It is a copy-machine.
No matter how sophisticated a computer or software becomes, it will never have the nuance of a human experience. AI lacks emotion, which is what humans have poured into genuine art (the kind that moves me). So that’s why I will continue to advocate for an AI-free art world.
Let’s leave AI to the binary tasks.
Humans are for art.