You ask
and the answer is probably clear to your mind, unless you choose not to accept what artificial intelligence is.
AND WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?
The name says it all: an artificial emulation of human intelligence, a process through which human intelligence is filtered, and the fruits of it, its data, accumulated over millions of years and carefully curated through a delicate process of selection, are gathered in one place, as a result, so that what took an eternity to be collected appears to you, magically, as a product of the AI, as if the software itself had reached those conclusions, which in fact it is only reproducing, repeating mindlessly, like a parrot.
And what is art, how could we sum up the concept judging from the info I’ve posted before and from our own experience?
Art is an act of creation. Of human creation. It is “a diverse range of human activities that involve expressing ideas, emotions, and experiences through various creative mediums. It can encompass visual arts like painting, sculpture, and photography, as well as performing arts such as music, dance, and theatre. Ultimately, art aims to evoke appreciation, meaning, and emotional responses in its audience.”
Art is a painting from Van Gogh:
that was not painted in the thirty seconds it takes AI to reproduce it, it cost him a lot of work to find the ideal mix of paints to achieve this frighteningly beautiful result.
Art is Tolstoy’s War and Peace:
“In captivity, in the shed, Pierre had learned, not with his mind, but with his whole being, his life, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfying of natural human needs, and that all unhappiness comes not from lack, but from superfluity; but now, in these last three weeks of the march, he had learned a new and more comforting truth - he had learned that there is nothing frightening in the world. He had learned that, as there is no situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so there is no situation in which he can be perfectly unhappy and unfree. He had learned that there is a limit to suffering and a limit to freedom, and that those limits are very close; that the man who suffers because one leaf is askew in his bed of roses, suffers as much as he now suffered falling asleep on the bare, damp ground, one side getting cold as the other warmed up; that when he used to put on his tight ballroom shoes, he suffered just as much as now, when he walked quite barefoot (his shoes had long since worn out) and his feet were covered with sores.”
that was not written overnight, let alone in one minute, but took years to be written to this level of perfection, where every single word matters and every single paragraph is part of the general story, where a Master of this craft is actually giving others all he could, the best of him, and in such a way that all who are lucky to read War and Peace feel not only the vastness of his spirit, but also a slight envy for not being able to create such greatness, such beauty.
Art is Richard Wagner’s music:
that was not composed by a bored teenager sitting in front of a computer eating French fries, but by a guy who studied music deeply, knowing every chord, every note, like the back of his hand, and who only through his solid knowledge was able to transfer to the world a truly imperishable musical work that anyone, anywhere, can admire.
Art is the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo:
which was not painted, magically, in thirty seconds, but instead took years to complete, until every detail of the majestic image was as perfectly finished and presented as its creator intended and managed to do.
I could give many other examples, but you get the point.
And the point is that art, valuable art, involves a whole WORK, it is not something created overnight, but rather represents an artist’s vision of the world, something that is the product of his or her entire life experience, not something that “fell from heaven” or simply and magically appeared in front of him. What the AI does, when it reproduces a song, a text, or an image simulating a painting, is to select, among the millions of pieces of information about music, literature, painting, etc., that exist on the web, those that seem to correspond best to the taste of whoever is manipulating the software. So, if you ask for a generic rock song or a generic image of a sunflower, that is what the AI will give you, but even this result did not come from nowhere, it did not arise from some truly creative process, it is just the result of a filtering that the program did. Among all the images or sounds available on the internet, it chose the combination that the user seems to be demanding. But the result is always, of course, artificial and generic. If something apparently original comes from AI, you can be sure that someone significantly intervened in its creation, so that what the AI did was just improve the result of the creative work of someone very human.
In conclusion, no, AI does not create art; at most it reproduces or emulates art. Art is created by human beings. If you sit in front of your computer all night and try to create something minimally interesting in literature, no matter how mediocre the result, it is the expression of your spirit, so it has some meaning. And it is better than an entire work written by AI, no matter how good it is. The creation of AI always looks like this image from “Blade Runner”
beautiful, impeccable, it reproduces a woman in every sense, but it has no materiality, it has no soul.
