AI Can’t Make Good Art (But We Can)
I Don’t Want to Scapegoat Artists— I Want Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism
Sometime in the early 2010s I came across a book of “computer generated prose” at a bookfair. I was entranced, it felt both soulless, and containing of all the weird complexities of being humans in the age of the internet.
Unfortunately, I no longer remember the title—too many “AI Poetry” books have surfaced since, and I doubt most are worth the time. But that particular book fascinated me.
It strung together fragments from the internet—personal ads, family BBQs, online articles, live journal blogs—into random, nonsensical prose. The only sense made by the writing was what you took out of it. Each sentence, on its own, revealed nothing about its source or significance - yet altogether, it was fascinating, beautiful in its mundanity.
I lent the book to countless friends, often trying to explain that the merit of reading its nonsense was akin to reading theory. With theory, I’d skim through the text, rarely understanding anything fully, until I caught onto a thread, an idea. Then, just as quickly, I’d lose it, slipping back into the dense jungle of jargon and fragmented thought. Somewhere along the way I lost the book too.
At the time, I wanted to be an academic of sorts, but I often felt super stupid—lost in a sea of complex ideas. In hindsight, undiagnosed learning disabilities and mental illness, paired with a heavy dose of alcoholism, made it miraculous that I deciphered anything from college textbooks or my anarchist reading groups at all.
I tell you this, to tell you about my long standing fascination of AI.
I think the current giants in the World of Tech feels like the closest thing we have to an evil overlord, with true terrifying power, and an eye-of-Sauron level surveillance of us all, but I don't despise AI— their odd, prodigy child. Technology, in its essence, is neutral.
Since that time, both our world and the realm of “computer-generated” things have spiraled into absurdity. Gone totally bonkers. I get why so many people have grown to hate AI.
As an artist, though, I don’t feel particularly threatened. AI doesn’t make *good* art because it can’t distinguish between good and bad. It lacks taste, wit, and originality. It doesn’t understand what makes something funny, poignant, or unique. Or why.
Yet, technology always carries the risk of replacement. These days, not having a smartphone or computer makes you a Luddite— or, at the very least, Amish. And this moment feels eerily similar to the time of the original Luddites, caught in the Industrial Revolution, smashing factory machines to protect their livelihoods.
Back in the '90s and early 2000s, I was a wiz at MS Paint. I had an ongoing weird series of drawings—ducks in seasonal outfits for greeting cards I’d give to friends and family. (People kept asking when the next ducks were coming.) I've never used Photoshop, partially because I “quit” all things digital art during high school. At my arts-focused school, we were explicitly taught that digital art was lowbrow, fake, and even cheating. Traditional and conceptual art were considered next to godliness. And they BETTER not see anime in our sketchbooks.
And now, here we are again, with AI being cast as the devil himself—and those who use AI, as his demon spawn, accused of squandering the world’s precious resources. Precious, indeed, but let’s be honest: the waste of water or energy at an individual level will never compare to the massive consumption of corporations.
Honestly, I’ve been a bit confused by the backlash—especially from anarchists. While I’d love to see tech giants fall, an overhaul of the degradation of our planet, and the world become a little less technological, I also recognize the access that technology brings.
This brings me to my frustration with the hate directed at artists who incorporate AI into their creative process. I agree that prompt-in, prompt-out AI art is soulless, just like my assumptions of those AI poetry books. But AI’s true strength lies in its ability to run simulations, generate options, and provide a foundation for an artist to shape into something meaningful and beautiful.
I’m not sure what it would look like to “smash” AI, but I’d love to see it. At the same time, I also dream of a world where we seize the means of production—not in some Marxist way (college reading group be dammed) but in a true anarchist, stateless, full-communism kind of way. Half measures availed us nothing.
In the meantime, I trained an AI on my art and used it to create a comic. It still needed a fair bit of editing in post, as AI can’t maintain a consistent style to save its life. But it’s part of the creative process, and maybe that’s where its value lies.
To be clear, I don’t see the following as “my” art, but rather a collaboration.