AI-generated artwork is gradually getting better – much better than I expected since SLAB-2 swept the nation in 2022 with its iconic failure to generate the right number of fingers . The technology has become so good that companies are now willing to air AI-generated ads on national television.
These ads vary in quality. Honda has since removed its 2025 “Happy Honda Days – Rugged” ad, which featured nauseatingly distorted AI-generated backgrounds akin to an LSD travel simulation. Coca-Cola’s Christmas adverton the other hand, could possibly fool your parents or grandparents into believing that the movie was professionally filmed and edited.
Soon, perhaps in just a few years, AI-generated art and video could be almost completely indistinguishable from reality without explicit guidance. In 2022, I loved more than anything ranting about how terrible AI was, making fun of its mangled hands and dead expressions, but these reliable errors are starting to become less common. Although many illustrations of AI are still quite easy to spot and bite the thumb, it seems that this criticism that the technical quality of AI will always fall short of reality is about to disappear.
When the day comes when even the staunchest AI critics can’t immediately distinguish generated work from real work, it will be important to remember the real reason artificial intelligence still doesn’t deserve its place in the community. artistic. In other words, AI-generated artwork fundamentally lacks meaning compared to art created by humans.
Art is a mysterious thing that requires us to engage with it again and again, peeling back another layer each time we revisit it. The artist’s technical ability may be what catches our attention when we see a portrait on the museum wall, but it is their countless small decisions that result in a work of art and truly allow us to connect with it. a work.
Man-made art allows us to return to it with new knowledge and new experiences, appreciating the new emotions and decisions hidden in the work based on where we are in our own lives. When I was a teenager, I listened to 22-year-old singers talk about 22-year-old problems. I loved them then and I love them now because the songs change every year as you get older. As I learn new things about my own life, I discover these new things in the lyrics I have listened to hundreds of times. Today, these 22-year-old artists are closer to 28, releasing new music about their own new experiences that I will be able to revisit and relate to in years to come.
AI art has none of this. What you see is exactly what you get. There are no hidden layers, personal impressions or emotions that one can relate to. The “meaning” of an AI-generated artwork is its prompt, and anything we could possibly explain in the work is arbitrary. This lacks intentionality, which deteriorates our ability to connect with art and the world around us.
Consuming art with meaning leads us to ask “Why?” » and trains us to answer these questions in the context of a life and a culture. Even the easy questions, like “Why does Ice Cube want to ‘fuck the police’ if they are supposed to protect and serve?” lead us to think that perhaps what we think of as an institution that upholds safety and civility may not actually be what we get. This “Why?” ” leads to a series of questions about the NWA, Compton of the late 1980s, incarceration practices, and the legacy and persistence of racial profiling today.
While you can ask AI to generate a song about police brutality or a movie script about gender dysphoria or a portrait about the AIDS epidemic, you can’t ask anything more about what it generates . The significance of this portrait of the AIDS epidemic is that it is a portrait of the AIDS epidemic. Any additional nuance or symbolism is entirely accidental, stolen from real artists who made real works of art based on their experiences in the 80s. AI has no answers to these “Why?” » and when there are no answers, we will stop asking questions.
Art and culture are inseparable, and the way we approach art will influence the way we approach the world. True works of art allow us to take the time to find each element of meaning, which will send us out into the world with a desire to understand it. AI artworks can only be taken literally, training us to view the world as something to simply observe. Without the ability to analyze and reflect, these observations will lead to ignorant and potentially dangerous conclusions about the lives we live.
Man-made art enriches us and exposes us to stories and experiences that we may never see in our own lives. It builds tolerance and appreciation by opening conversations about what it means to be human, thereby strengthening our ability to critically examine things we may not immediately understand. Embracing this practice is one of our best tools to counter the recent rise of hate and misinformation in our country.
No matter how good an AI short film is or how impressively stylish a generated illustration is, there’s never anything real behind it other than the sentences that make up the prompt. There are no questions to ask, no life to understand, and no reason to revisit or reevaluate it.
If we accept simple art, we will lead a simple life. AI is already destroying our environment and our creative workforce – we cannot let it destroy our humanity as well.
Thomas Riley kind of understands what these Luddites are talking about. Send them by email to [email protected].
