The Definition

Art is the process of conveying a meaning or a feeling to somebody else without using a worded description of it in an attempt to make them understand or feel the same. Defining art as anything else is a pointless exercise. There are meanings and feelings that cannot always be correctly expressed in words, so instead they have to be expressed in art. A drawing, a music or a poem are all roundabout, they all require interpretation and thought; it is the decoding of feeling, of meaning that the author has encoded sensorially. For art to be art, the feeling and meaning must permeate its conception. You can shred an electric guitar in anger, you can paint melancholically, you can write off the stream of consciousness. Throughout each step, the feeling and meaning influence the composition and provides it with much of its soul. This is distinct from the process of, say, writing informative non-fiction, which is more calculated and less about replicating a feeling in someone else’s heart. In art, there must be a continuous line of emotion perched across the lifecycle of the art that has no breaks, no period where we find a discontinuity in the action of transferring thoughts to senses.

This is why today’s machine-generated pictures, sounds and text can hardly be considered art. It is not the machine quality that disqualifies it as art; machine-generated media can look good and have a purpose, and I would argue it is nonsense to research and document telltale “signs” of diffusion-generated pictures as they will simply get better, in strict terms of aesthetics, in time. Rather, what makes machine-generated media incapable of ever being art is that this perched line is broken. It is not continuous across the lifecycle of the media. This is observable from how machine-generated media is created today; the person that asks the machine to make media for them has to encode a description of it as text that the machine can leverage to guide its output. This step alone is emotionally lossy; what you describe to the machine will never be as representative or as embodying of your feelings as anything built manually with the pen, paint, instruments, or keyboard. The sole use of these tools in production of art is colored and influenced by how you feel, both at a conscious and subconscious level. These artifacts of emotion are not replicable through the language we use to convey and describe information, and therefore the machine will have none of these tones; after all, it is why we use art to convey these, the artifacts that we cannot conjure up the words for!

That conversion of feeling to cold words that you know will be accepted by the machine breaks the line. At this exact point, your emotions are no longer carried forward, unless you figure out how to telepathically transfer them to the machine¹. Perhaps what came before in your mind were the seeds of art, the embryonary spark of what could possibly have been a great masterpiece of outsider art, but through the use of the machine for the purpose of total execution, you have exchanged it for the artistic equivalent of fast food; easier, faster, requires little effort to swallow and digest. As the machine tries to approximate what you want, any spontaneous meaning that could have been had doesn’t happen. Any inborn idiosyncracies that would have otherwise been indicative of your character as an artist, preferences and techniques that are not willed by you but simply part of you, are not expressed. Likewise, any deficiencies in skill that could have grown into a cultural hallmark of your style will never appear. All that happens next as you iterate in collaboration with the machine is simply an effort of the will that happens consciously, cognitively, at the surface of your mind and not reflective of your spirit like art would be. Two brothers, born of the same mother, given the same brush, paint and canvas will produce vastly different works attributable to character; two machines, of the same model, given the same prompt, seed and random number generator will produce the exact same work.

None of this is meant to reflect negatively on the artists that have made art with machines, such as synthesizers, painting software, and bespoke algorithms of all manner. The continuous line of thought and emotion remains visible across their use of these and it would be unreasonable to compare it to the modern machine generation of media. This extends to people that build generative models on top of their own work. Now, it is inevitable that naysayers full of the can’t of mediocrity will try to approach this at an obnoxiously atomic level, speaking in audacious condescendence that the line is broken at the placement of a pixel on the screen, as the computer “places this pixel for you”, and therefore the digital artist with many years accumulated of skill and profession is equal in value and worth to the man that punches comma-separated words into the prompting box of his chatbot; it is straightforward at this point to ignore these people, for they know what we mean when we say these things, but like many of the pseudo-philosophers and young imbecile Internet politicians of our days, claim to be entirely unaware of the meaning, claiming to be bringing a fresh, previously unthought perspective grown from a virgin substrate. We rejoice in the fact that, like most of the other brainless investors in postmodern thinking, they will fail to reproduce, and the problem will take care of itself.

Footnotes

1. Which, besides, cannot even think or feel as we do, much to the chagrin of the AI pseudo-optimists that believe they do out of the metaphysical belief in the spirit of the machine, influenced by fiction. ↩