The advent of AI models will only accelerate this trend. We will place more value than ever on works that appear to have been created for their own benefit, rather than our own. That’s bad news for AI robots, which are clearly designed to please us. Engaging in a quest for its own sake is one that is, in a constructive way, beyond the capabilities of any AI. Trained in what has fascinated us in the past, they offer us new colors again.
We will consider these mockery with growing suspicion, scrutinizing the origins of words and images. Books and movies will tout their truest selves. We will consider these as “taste,” just as we convince ourselves that small-batch mustard tastes “real” more than the supermarket equivalent. We will develop increasingly sophisticated means of distinguishing the two, and technology will itself are enlisted in the effort.
The ground has been set, which is usually the case. It turns out that the gothic revival had begun more than a decade ago by the time William Morris supplied the British elite with hand-painted bricks from his workshop. Likewise, the artificial intelligence revolution will further enhance “authenticity” from consumers, which artists, illustrators, and writers will take advantage of. Far from signaling the demise of original man-made art, on the contrary, the advent of AI will make it all the more precious. The gap between artists and robots will grow larger and larger, just as their technical abilities continue to converge.
What kind of reality could our newfound hobby take? William Morris provides some more clues. His greatest influence was the art critic John Ruskin, who was 15 years older than him and can be credited with launching the gothic renaissance style that Morris took advantage of. Ruskin was a polemical thinker who united a set of aesthetic preferences with an enthusiastic social philosophy. Not only did he have complete ideas about the church’s stone work, but he also had strong beliefs about social institutions. Against what he saw as the inhuman division of labor in Victorian factories, he argued that manufacturers should be involved in every stage of the production process. “The painter,” he declared, “should sharpen his own color.” Morris himself embodied the idea, and it proved to be a good business. Although he eventually became the head of a thriving company, he never stopped honing his own color; he remains obsessively involved in every stage of production.
Hopefully the trend will continue. We will ask for works that can be attributed to an identifiable personal vision. The AI age will lead to a double drop in biographies, which is yet another thing robots are noticeably lacking. There have been complaints about how major contemporary artists, from Damien Hirst to Jeff Koons, rely on vast assistant workshops to do realistic painting and sculpture as a way to meet the need for scale. and maximum output. Expect increasingly deafening complaints and a rote response, whereby even Renaissance artists tasked with dozens of apprentices, to lose their validity. That may have been fine in Titian’s day, but now we have to compete with emerging painting robots and our tastes have become fickle.
This is not to say that artists will not use AI as a new tool. Even the impressionist painters, who responded to the advent of the daguerreotype in the 19th century by going places where photography couldn’t keep up, based on pictures as a sketch device for their own work. But AI creations will only be rescued by tying themselves to the individual’s vision.
It turns out we’ve been preparing for the artificial intelligence revolution for decades, developing an odd taste for the very kind of symbolic values—personal passions, purpose, life experiences —which robots won’t show up anytime soon. That’s why it’s hard for AI to create “better” artwork than humans. Instead, it transforms our sweet and sour sensations. Our collective defense mechanism will come into play. It is the robots who are squeezing their little clamps.
