Real AI Art
Right now we use the term ‘AI art’ in a very hasty and unthoughtful manner. The term makes it seem like the AI itself is the reason for the produced art when it is in reality still driven by the human urge to express ourselves. Humans are behind every facet of ‘AI art’—training data, creating models, prompting models. There is not a single moment where the AI actually makes a conscious attempt to fill its need to express itself, because it doesn’t have one.
So in order to get real AI art—if we ignore paradoxes such as not knowing if something truly is conscious or just pretending to be—it would have to come from the AI’s own urge to express itself, not because we tell it to. We would have to create conscious, creative, digital life, in order to get real AI art.
If we created this artificial life, with actual free will and creativity, its art wouldn’t make our art obsolete. That’s like saying the art of creative extraterrestrial lifeforms, if there are any, would make human art obsolete. Digital machines and extraterrestrial lifeforms can’t replicate authentic human art simply because they aren’t human—the same way we can’t authentically make alien art, or the art that would come from a digital consciousness.
So perhaps, the same way we can get a glimpse in to the mind of a person and a feel for how they view of the world through their creative output, the same would apply to extraterrestrial lifeforms and conscious machines, if we assume that intelligent creative beings share our type of creativity and our desire to express ourselves and break free of the loop of life. It is perhaps through their creative output that they would be best understood by us, and the other way around. NASA put music and art, among other things, on the Golden Record for a reason.
I realized now that this piece veered a little bit too much into sci-fi territory, but that’s fine.