Jan. 26, 2025
I want to start making generative art again. I can’t say I ever did it that seriously but using programming languages to generate ‘art’ is a pretty fun to while away the hours, especially when one’s talents for drawing truculently refuse to improve. Of course, more recently the phrase generative art might be said to have grown to encompass the GPT-class models that generate images from prompts. So what would be the point of coding something, when you can make ‘proper’ art?
Well, for one, there’s next to no effort involved in writing prompts for AI generators, save for scratching your head when it doesn’t produce what you want. Generative art as I understand it requires you to have some understanding of the marks you want to make on the page, and how those marks might vary under randomness, and how they might interact with one another if they intersect. I’ll admit that’s a rather reductive definition, it certainly eliminates all the rabbit holes you might go down as you seek to nail down your ideas.
And so I’m coming around to the same feelings about AI generated art. It’s not so much that no effort is needed to generate the image - it’s not that tricky for most humans to apply a brush to canvas after all - but more that quality of the output depends on your ability to explore the medium and techniques to create something that is genuinely new. How do you escape the training data? How do you remix old aesthetics into genuinely new ones?
A lot of people are wary of creative acts being eliminated by AI. But I think it creates more space for true artists to show who they are and what they bring to the vast roiling pot of human culture. The algorithms train themselves on our culture, they don’t live it, experience it, or understand it. “DALL-E create me a picture of two cats in Paris in the style of Vincent van Gogh” produces an image, one that might satisfy a superficial knowledge of Paris or of van Gogh or even of the two cats you may have been thinking of. It doesn’t understand that Paris can mean all sorts of things to different people, that you can evoke a cultural memory of van Gogh in all manner of ways, and that those cats have the sorts of adventures that would totally take them to Paris.
So we have two roles for humans now. One is the age old role as the generator of art, of new styles, of establishing a foothold in the great wash of history. And another is for dilettentes like me who can say “generate this, generate that” while picking out the results that appeal to us the most.
To finish. I love Brian Eno’s “Ambient” albums. One has featured as an understated classic. Ambient 1, more commonly known as “Music For Airports”, is beautiful. Listening to it on a plane coming in to land over a night-lit London is one of my favourite musical memories. But ‘all’ that album ‘is’ is a series of piano motifs recorded on tape loops that were played back with random start times and at random speeds. I say ‘all’ but Eno himself had to have the vision for what it would sound like and the sense of aesthetics to pick out the results that were released. This is the human in the loop. You should try to be one too.