Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence

Art, Artificial Intelligence, Arts, Culture, Society, Technology

AI-generic-slop is theft from real artists

CREATIVE ART

Intro: Art generated by online tools is painfully bland and is leading us down the path to cultural stagnation

Pablo Picasso, one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, admitted that “Great artists steal.” The Spanish genius assimilated African mask imagery into modern art, and many other greats throughout history have done something similar. Essentially, this is how creativity works. But behind their masterpieces are struggle, friction, and unique vision. Enter another entirely different beast, the theft by proliferating AI engines. These are killing creativity, harming real artists, and fuelling an epidemic of unoriginality.

By serving prompts to generators such as Midjourney or DALL-E, people can generate images on screen, in just a few seconds. Anyone can conjure up a Vincent van Gogh-styled still life or Leonardo da Vinci-inspired selfie and at once exhibit it online. Social media platforms such as X are filled with fans of this technology who declare: “AI art is art.” But this doesn’t make it true.

In fact, AI “art” doesn’t even exist – it is an illusion. AI models work on pattern recognition, not artistic decision making. While an “AI artist” may serve prompts to this technology, they cannot be considered the author of its output. It has simply been remixed from ready-made imagery without thinking, feeling, intent, or ingenuity. Absent from AI “art” is creative process, which should take more than a few seconds. This is apparent in the low-quality, generic slop that’s produced. Lacking a distinctiveness of style and voice, it can only offer a dynamic of smooth homogeneity.

It bypasses craft, which is what great artists develop – with brushes and paint, pencils and paper – over months, years, and even decades. AI artists celebrate the power of technology to make creativity accessible, and this forms their central argument and tenet as to why it’s so great. True craft, however, takes dedication, consistent practice, and experimentation.

John Constable not only worked tirelessly inside his studio but made countless studies en plein air – as revealed in Tate Britain’s current exhibition, Turner & Constable. Celebrating two of Britain’s greatest painters, it shows what being an artist really takes. On display are watercolours, oils and sketches, as well as paint-covered palettes, paintboxes, and even a sketching chair.

Among Constable’s masterpieces is his 1836 work Hampstead Heath with a Rainbow, where prismatic hues glide through menacing clouds. His technique looks effortless but was suffused with genius-level skill. And behind it, unseen by the average enthusiast, are more than 100 cloud studies he created in an attempt to capture their transient energy.

Where AI generates pictures in an instant, Constable was committed to an ongoing process; the experience gained through observation and documentation was ultimately of immense benefit to him.

Similarly, JMW Turner made around 37,000 sketches of landscapes he’d seen with his own eyes. Determined to evoke the raw power of nature – from blazing sunsets to howling storms – he pushed realism towards abstraction with an excitement that’s visible in his energetic brushstrokes.

In contrast to Constable and Turner’s radical compositions, AI’s aesthetic is flat, twee, and often old fashioned. Defined by a saccharine palette of candy colours and hazy tones, automatically generated landscapes are hollow, sanitised, and no match for Britain’s great painters and artists. Working some 200 years ago, they painted emotive, not idealised, places of both personal and historic significance.

What is more, both Constable and Turner began their paintings by looking, and really observing the world. This fundamental act is absent from the process of AI’s so-called artists who are more like a client giving instructions to a graphic designer than an artist painting at their easel. AI engines are also doing real harm to contemporary artists and their hard work.  

Among those who have already experienced its damaging effects is Australian painter Kim Leutwyler. She says her distinct style has been copied by app-generated portraits. “My issue isn’t with AI itself, but with the unethical way it has been trained without artists’ consent,” she said. “The right to opt in or out of having your data scraped for AI training should be fundamental, not optional.” This view is widely held across all of the creative industries.

AI, then, is pilfering from artists, the very people it relies on. It harms us all with its blandness. Rather than moving art forward, like Turner and Constable did in their day, it contributes to what has been termed “cultural stagnation”.

Anyone infuriated by Hollywood’s endless remakes of viewer favourites has a similar impact. It threatens both originality and individual thinking. And because future AI will only draw from more of this generated material, it will continue to create typical rather than unique visions.

AI art isn’t art, it’s a mirage, and it won’t be looked at for longer than a doom-scrolling second. In our world of efficiency and productivity, creative pursuits are one of very few remaining places where human endeavour is vital. Behind the brushstrokes of Turner and Constable are years of looking, thinking, making and struggle, and that’s what creative art is.

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Ancient History, Archaeology, Artificial Intelligence, Internet, Social media

What shaped our post-truth world

CONSPIRACY THEORIES

The internet and social media are full of lies and deceit. The reason should be obvious: the truth is often boring and sometimes discomfiting. Lies are better, more interesting, more apt to comfort the fearful.

Some fields of study attract lies more readily than others. Medicine is easy and profitable to lie about – not least because almost everyone is afraid of illness and death. So many medical problems feel intractable, while modern science seems so slow. Science’s emissaries seem so smug and, hence, untrustworthy.

Lying about religion can have a similar effect. The same with lying about war and politics. You can become very famous and very wealthy by spreading fanciful notions about these topics. World War Three is on the verge of breaking out – according to the cesspit of many unruly social media sites.

All of this is obvious and makes sense. Yet another subject could be added to this group. If you’ve not encountered it, it may come as a surprise: social media is full of blatant falsehoods about archaeology and ancient history.

For those who have a passing interest in archaeology, will have seen examples of this. Some of the most famous are widely known. The idea, for example, that all the pyramids in Egypt are connected, part of some immense underground structure left behind by a god-like race that has perished from the earth.

There are also stories about electrical batteries being found from more than 5,000 years ago. Which means that humanity must have experienced something even more technologically developed than today as far back as before the birth of Christ, and our understanding of all history must be rewritten.

And, next, we come to aliens.

For the ancient aliens connection, we must credit Erich von Däniken – he didn’t invent it, but he made it popular. The Swiss archaeologist, who has died aged 90, was probably the 20th century’s most-read author on the subject of an ancient past. But what he wrote was not true. Däniken’s books, most famously Chariots of the Gods, sold many millions thanks to its cocktail of occultism and alien talk.

He said that there were gods from the past who had lived on earth. And in addition to this, they were spacemen. The first book of his was published in 1968, a time of space fever, when the new-age and hippie movements were popular.

Däniken probably never printed a true word in his life. But that doesn’t mean we should dislike or despise him. His books sold millions of copies by giving people what they wanted; he was a novelist, or a spiritualist, dressed in archaeologist’s clothes. It is perfectly permissible to sell fiction in the guise of fact.

Däniken, however, was the progenitor of nastier things that came after him. The biggest social media accounts covering archaeology inevitably traffic in nonsense and lies. Some of the most listened-to podcasts and biggest documentaries talk about ancient aliens or provide narratives that defame real archaeologists as malign fraudsters engaged in a massive cover-up.

There is no doubt that Däniken’s work was an example of the partly-alien, partly-spiritual nonsense that permeates a lot of popular culture.

Many people make millions on the podcast circuit or on social media platforms by saying nothing more than archaeology and medicine are fake; and, by the way, that shadowy figures run the world. The internet is littered with such proliferation.

Däniken showed the shape of media to come. Nowadays, almost all discussion of archaeology on social media is swamped by insane theories, lies, and AI slop – just as “discussion” of politics, and medicine, and technology already is.

Archaeology led where everything else surely followed.

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Artificial Intelligence, Arts, Internet, Mental Health, Religion

Man’s worship of the machine: void of purpose

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

THE sometime 20th century supposition that man had supposedly “killed God” stemmed from the secularisation of the West which left a void. That was filled by many nation states who implemented a rights-based humanism of common purpose and shared endeavour. Today that purpose has withered, too.

Our loss of faith in God has been coupled with a loss of faith in each other. The void has opened up again and we are using technology in an attempt to fill it.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s creation of the world wide web was meant to herald an era of human flourishing, of rich cultural exchange, and global harmony. Knowledge was to spread in a way the printing press’s greatest advocates could only have dreamt of.

But rather than usher in an age of hyper-rationalism, the internet has exposed an age of debased religiosity. Having been dismissed as a relic from a bygone era, religion has returned in a thin, hollow version, shorn of wonder and purpose.

Look around today, for all is clear to see. Smartphone use is almost ubiquitous (95 per cent of the population own one, with as good as 100 per cent of 16-24 year olds). Artificial Intelligence, from chatbots, recommended search engines, or work applications, has become an everyday part of life for most people.

Our use of these technologies is increasingly quasi-devotional. We seem to enact the worst parody of religion: one in which we ask an “all-knowing” entity for answers; many outsource their thinking and writing; it is ever-present, shaping how we live our lives – yet most of us have only the faintest idea how it works.

The algorithmic operations of AI are increasingly opaque, and observable to a vanishingly small number of people at the top-end of a handful of companies. And even then, those people themselves cannot say in truth how their creations will augment and develop for the simple fact they don’t know.

Whether videos with Google Veo 3 or essays via ChatGPT, we can now sit alone and create almost anything we want at the touch of a button. Where God took seven days to build the world in His image, we can build a video replica in seven seconds. But the thrill is short-lived, as we are quickly submerged under a flood of content, pumped out with ease. There is no digital sublime, no sense of lasting awe, just a vague unease and apprehension as we hunch over our phones, irritated and unfocused. Increasingly, we have become aware of our own loneliness (which has reached “epidemic” proportions).

And perhaps the strangest of all, we accept AI’s view of us. Once, only God was able to X-ray the soul. Later, we believed the high priests of psychology could do the same, human to human. Now, we are seeking out that same sense of understanding in mute lines of code.

A mere 18 months or so since the tech became widely available, 64 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds in the UK have used an AI therapist, while in America, three quarters of 13 to 17-year-olds have used AI companion apps such as Character.ai or Replika.ai (which let users create digital friends or romantic partners they can chat with). Some 20 per cent of American teens spent as much or more time with their AI “friends” as they did their real ones.

Digging deeper into the numbers available, part of the attraction of socialising in this way is that you get a reflection, not an actual person: someone “always on your side”, never judgmental, never challenging. We treat LLMs (Large Language Models) with the status of an omniscient deity, just one that never corrects or disciplines. Nothing is risked in these social-less engagements – apart from your ability to grow as a person and be egotistically fulfilled. Habitualised, we risk becoming so fragile that any form of friction or resistance becomes unbearable.

Where social media at least relied upon the affirmation of your peers – hidden behind a screen though they were – AI is opening up the possibility to exist solely in a loop of self-affirmation.

Religion has many critics of course, but at the heart of the Abrahamic tradition is an argument about how to live now on this earth, together. In monotheism, God is not alone. He has his intermediaries: rabbis, priests, and imams who teach, proscribe and slowly, over time, build a system of values. There is a community of belief, of leaders and believers who discuss what is right and what is wrong, who share a creed, develop it, and translate sometimes difficult text into the texture of daily life and what it means for us. There is a code, but it is far from binary.

And, so, while it is possible to divine in the statements of our tech-bro-overlords through a certain proselytising fervour, there is no sense of the good life, no proper vision of society, and no concern for the future. Their creations are of course just tools – the promised superintelligence is yet to emerge and may never actually materialise – but they are transformative, and their potentially destructive power means they are necessarily moral agents. And the best we get are naïve claims about abundance for all or eradicating the need for work. A vague plan seems to exist that we will leave this planet once we’ve bled it white.

There is a social and spiritual hunger that a life online cannot satisfy. Placing our faith in the bright offerings of modernity is blinding us to each other – to what is human, and what is sacred.

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