Artists have experimented with algorithms and randomness for more than a century.
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Today’s generative-AI tools can concoct stunning designs and playful prose with the push of a few buttons. That, in turn, has bred fears about how the technology could hurt human artists and writers, and led many, in their defense of humanity, to a well-intentioned but confused claim. Even if AI can produce images and text, critics argue, these products are designed to obviate human intent and expression, and thus can never truly make “art.” In this vein of thinking, humans can never use AI to make art; the technology is a creative void.
The latest, and perhaps highest profile, voice to make this argument was the acclaimed science-fiction author Ted Chiang, writing in The New Yorker last weekend. But, as I wrote in response yesterday, the claim that AI models cannot be used for art, because they reduce human intention, is wrong—artists and writers have experimented with algorithms and randomness in their work for more than a century, and AI is just another such tool. “As a result,” I wrote, “though he clearly intends otherwise, Chiang winds up asking his reader to accept a constrained view of human intelligence, artistic practice, and the potential of this technology—and perhaps even of the value of labor itself.”
Ted Chiang Is Wrong About AI Art
By Matteo Wong
Over the weekend, the legendary science-fiction writer Ted Chiang stepped into the fray, publishing an essay in The New Yorker arguing, as the headline says, that AI “isn’t going to make art.” Chiang writes not simply that AI’s outputs can be or are frequently lacking value but that AI cannot be used to make art, really ever, leaving no room for the many different ways someone might use the technology. Cameras, which automated realist painting, can be a tool for artists, Chiang says. But “a text-to-image generator? I think the answer is no.”
What to Read Next
- Even if AI can be a creative tool, the technology is also built on stolen art and writing. And despite an onslaught of copyright lawsuits against tech companies, “artists are losing the war against AI,” I wrote last fall.
- Generative AI may offer not just a tool for artists, but a new artistic medium, akin to photography and film before it. “Creative artificial intelligence is the art of the archives,” the author Stephen Marche wrote in a 2022 essay. “It is the art derived from the massive cultural archives we already inhabit.”
P.S.
One enormous internet casualty of the past several years has been true social networks—platforms that allow you to simply connect and keep up to date with friends. But despite Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X no longer primarily serving that function, the social network lives on in an unexpected place, my colleague Lora Kelley reports: Venmo.
— Matteo