The Great Lie of AI Art

AI cannot create art. It can create pictures, it can create sentences, it can put notes into a pleasing order. It can fool some into thinking art has been created. But this is a great lie; AI cannot create art.

It cannot paint masterpieces, it cannot write literature, it cannot compose symphonies.

It is a trick, a sideshow hustle, a slight of hand. At best “AI Art” is a gimmick, at worst it risks sowing the destruction of human culture.

Because what art needs is humanity. Whatever it is that is innate to all humans, call it a soul, call it heart, call it love, call it emotion - that is what art needs. Even quick, throwaway commissions have at least some of that humanity poured into it.

It’s impossible for them not to, because they are created by humans.

Art is the sum of a human experience. Or the transformation of a human experience into another form. The best art tells us a story about the artist, about where they lived, about who they loved, about who they hated; about who they were. Even the worst art does this to a certain extent. That is why it is art. It is impossible for AI to do that, because AI does not have these real, human, experiences; that is what makes it artificial.

Now, AI can steal these experiences from humanity, and spurt out something approximating art, but it does not create art. It plagiarises. It robs individuals of their livelihoods and robs the world of essential human experiences and connections.

AI is nothing more than a clever thief.

And not only is it robbing the entirety of humanity of genuine art, it is robbing artists of work and pay and life. And it is robbing them of their own thoughts and experiences. It is stealing their style and trying to steal their very soul. And that is unforgivable.

But art is not only created, it is also received. So when we are the audience for something AI created, what are we getting out of it?

Absolutely nothing. We are not learning anything about ourselves as people.

We might enjoy it on a surface level, but that’s it. Any deeper engagement is a lie. Because no artist has put their soul into it, there is no pain nor love behind it, only an algorithm. And while algorithms can give us beautiful things, they are not human. And so the heart of what art is, that is, the connection between humans through both space and time, is absent. Whatever beauty the AI has made has no greater meaning.

It is superficial beauty.

What we may feel when we look at this beauty cannot be true, for the creation exists in a void, free of all history, unable to be analysed. And without the ability to be analysed there cannot be meaning. And there is no truth without meaning.

Art needs meaning to be both given and taken. AI cannot give meaning to art; it simply can’t understand the meaning behind each drawn or painted line, each word, each note. Its imitation of the human arts might look impressive, just as an artificial plant might look impressive, but there is nothing real about it. An artificial plant doesn’t grow, doesn’t change, doesn't die; it doesn’t do anything that a real plant does. It looks pretty and that’s it. Artificial “Art” is the same. A pretty distraction.

You cannot look at AI creations and feel a connection to persons you never knew. To paraphrase Alan Bennett's, 'The History Boys', there is a deep emotion in finding a thought that you believed to be entirely your own contained within something written decades or centuries before you existed. It is the same with great paintings, sculptures, drawings and music, and great forms of every other human artistic endeavour. Here are emotions, feelings and thoughts that connect you to someone, or even to a group of people, that you can never have known. And yet they share the same thoughts as you. The same desires. The same weaknesses and frailties.

That is what makes art. Not algorithms, not plugins stealing phrases and chords and styles from all over the internet. That is theft, not art.

Humanity is what makes art.

And without humanity, there is no art.