GenAI Art Is the Least Imaginative Use of AI Imaginable

Plenty of people use others' expressions as a form of art, (sharing song lyrics, singing others' songs in the shower, cat memes, and so on).

If you gave me an exoskelton that I could put on that would allow me to just do those things without any practice, I would not want that. I'm not just looking for the thrill of being on the board or hanging from a rock wall. Building the skill to do it myself is the point.

I haven't been into any more explicitly artistic creative endeavors since high school, but I think I'd have said the same thing then. I spent 60-100 hours per painting back then, and I did it because I enjoyed doing it, I enjoyed seeing the fruit of lots and lots of practice, developing skills. If I could have just pressed a button and had the same paintings but not done them myself, it's hard to see what the point of that would have been. The effort involved was most of the reason I even wanted to do it. But this was 30 years ago and I guess it was different days. We had schoolwide and district-wide art shows and it was cool to win awards, but I wasn't selling anything or trying to gain fame in an attention economy, never hoped to make any kind of living off of art and I never did.

I would have said the same about school band, too. Probably a programmed synthesizer could have produced better melody than me, but physically practicing and playing the instruments myself was part of the point to me.

But I think this reveals at least two entirely different purposes to art, creativity, skill, whatever, reflected different in the author, myself, and you. I don't mean to invalidate your approach by any means. Creating something you and others love, by any means at all, even automatically by machine, is entirely valid. There is still that other side, though. Think of the whole meme of engineers who take up woodworking. I highly doubt they ever really make better furniture than could have been made by some more automatic means that doesn't involve their own labor, only expressing a desire and letting someone or something else do the work. But that isn't the point. They're doing it because they want to make something they tangibly did themselves, even if it's shit at first, shit for a long time, or even shit forever. It's why my neighbor (we live in downtown townhouses) insists of growing her own peppers. They're not better than she could buy from the store, or cheaper. DIY is its own reward.

In my opinion, GenAI has revealed that the art isn't primarily in the creation, but in the selection. It used to take incredible talent to create something worth selecting (writing, painting, sculpture, etc), so creation and selection were often so close to be seen as indistinguishable. A technically skilled artist was likely to create something great, because they were likely making high quality selective decisions all along the creation process. So the end result of a gifted writer was probably a high quality work.

But now the creation of technically skilled works has become detached from the selection process. Now we're flooded with technically skilled work, but no selection. But the selection process is still critical to make something compelling and innovative. The artist needs to evolve to inject themselves into selective decisions of GenAI, both in the process and in selecting the final result.

1. https://youtu.be/ggRcDQZWD_8?t=1253