The advent of AI models will only accelerate this trend. We will give more weight to works that seem to be made for us rather than us. That’s bad news for artificially intelligent robots designed to please us. It’s one thing to engage in a mission for the sake of the mission itself, which is structurally beyond the capabilities of any AI. They’ve been trained on what appealed to us in the past and re-offered in new colours.
We will view these collages with increasing skepticism, scrutinizing the provenance of words and images. Books and movies will tout their innocent goodwill. We’ll think these are “better,” just as we convince ourselves that small-batch mustard tastes more “authentic” than its supermarket counterpart. We will develop increasingly sophisticated ways to differentiate the two, and technology itself will be involved.
The foundation has been laid, as is often the case. As it turns out, the Gothic revival had been underway for over a decade when William Morris offered his studio’s hand-painted tiles to the British elite. Likewise, the AI revolution will further enhance consumer “authenticity,” with painters, illustrators, and writers going all in. In contrast, the emergence of artificial intelligence does not herald the decline of original human art, but will make it more precious. The gap between artists and robots will grow wider, just as their technological capabilities continue to converge.
What practical form might our newfound preferences take? William Morris provided some additional clues. His greatest influence was the art critic John Ruskin, who was 15 years his senior and who arguably initiated the Gothic revival that Morris exploited. Ruskin was a polemical thinker who combined a range of aesthetic preferences with an earnest social philosophy. Not only did he have fixed ideas about stone carvings for churches, but he also had strong beliefs about social institutions. He strongly opposed the inhumane division of labor in Victorian factories, and he believed that manufacturers should be involved in every stage of manufacture. “Painters,” he declared, “should grind their own colours.” Morris himself embodied this idea, and it proved to be good business. Although he eventually found himself at the head of a thriving company, he never stopped polishing his colors; he remained obsessed with every stage of production.
This trend is expected to continue. We will be asking for work that can be attributed to an identifiable personal vision. The age of artificial intelligence will cause biography to double down on bets, and that happens to be another thing that bots are conspicuously lacking. Already there have been complaints about how major contemporary artists, from Damien Hirst to Jeff Koons, rely on a large number of assistant studios to do the actual painting and sculpting as a way of satisfying the need for maximum scale and output. Expect complaints to become deafening, while rote responses, even Renaissance artists delegating tasks to dozens of apprentices, lose their potency. That might have been fine in Titian’s day, but we’re now dealing with a painting robot upstart, and our tastes have become fickle.
That’s not to say artists won’t use AI as a new tool. Even the Impressionists, who responded to the advent of Daguerreotype photography in the 19th century by traveling where photography could not trace, relied on photographs as a sketching tool for their own work. But the creation of artificial intelligence can only be rescued by tethering itself to the personal vision of humans.
As it turns out, we’ve been preparing for the AI revolution for decades, developing an eccentric taste for the sort of token values — personal passions, goals, life experiences — that robots won’t soon manifest. That’s why it’s unlikely that an AI will create “better” art than a human. Instead, it alters our perception of sweet and sour. Our collective defense mechanisms will kick in. Robots should be racking their brains.
