We lost the battle

and the war. Time to give in to our new overlord, AI

In my occasional moments scanning the social media to see how close we are to armageddon today, the algorithm often serves me up arguments about whether AI art is art, or not.

“A high resolution photograph of a duck, in a seventeenth century costume, smiting a horde of slimy green frog creatures. It is night. On a mountain. In Spain. The duck has six fingers.” and it STILL can’t get the number of fingers right. “Made” in Adobe Firefly, burning up about a kiloton of frog and duck habitat in the making.

Of course it’s not art. You know that, I know that, and the people prompting “A high resolution photograph of a duck, in a seventeenth century costume, smiting a horde of slimy green frog creatures. It is night. On a mountain. In Spain. The duck has six fingers.” know that, deep down.

The prompt writers, though, quite an angry bunch it turns out, e-shout that they are indeed artists.

The nAI-sayers e-respond that they are not artists and are, in fact, thieves, and there subsequently flows a stream of drivel from all sides of the argument about what constitutes art:

• If you make art, you’re an artist! (I love a circular argument).

• Art is political! If your work isn’t political, it ain’t art! (alright, sunshine, I don’t have to see your work to know that you have a poster of Che Guevara on the wall of your bedroom at your mum’s house)

• You can only call yourself an artist if you make a living from it! (cool. Calling all the dead artists who are now world famous and sold three paintings in their lifetime)

• Anybody can be an artist. If you put pencil to paper, you’re an artist…. (this one… this one…oh god, make it stop)

I blame Marcel Duchamp and his stupid urinal. In 1917, Duchamp invented the idea that “having an idea” can be art, too. After everybody had a huge hissy fit for five minutes, “having an idea” became acceptable as an art form. He did write “R. Mutt” on the urinal, but that was the extent of the brain-hand activity.

Before that, people made stuff by controlling their hands with their brains. The people who were good at it got to be called artists, making art (I’m talking about visual arts, of course, but the same applies to music, literature, poetry, dance etc. etc. they rely on brain to hand/body actions to create… stuff). After photography was invented in the previous century, a flurry of new ways to paint appeared, and some Victorians got rather flustered, but the work was still created by people sending messages to their hands, and the Victorians eventually came to accept that impressionism was ok, really.

Until Duchamp, everybody knew what art was. Since then, people have been confused, and I have to wander round modern art galleries where most of the space is taken up with works by the “having an idea” people, being told by my daughter that I have “such an eighteenth century perspective”, while I grumble under my breath that I wish I had the brass balls to hang a piece of wood from the ceiling and call it art, and why can’t I see some drawings instead.

Let me be clear about something. I don’t regard myself an artist. I do sometimes call myself an artist as shorthand. In Portuguese, I will tell someone I am an artist, if asked, because “illustrator” still means little to most people (the tradition of illustration in Portugal is very different to that of the UK… one example is that Portuguese illustrators sign each illustration in books, heaven forfend! ). Even then, I have to clarify that I am an artista plástica because artista on its own can mean actor, a thing I’m really, really not. I’ve given up telling them I make motion graphics, because the only way to say it quickly is to say I’m an animator (something else I’m not really), and animador in Portuguese also means someone who runs children’s parties, and I’m even more very much NOT THAT. At most, I suppose I could be called a commercial artist (in English… in Portuguese that sounds ODD), but I am not an artist. I make stuff. I write stuff. I paint and draw stuff. I make my living drawing stuff, writing stuff and making things move on screens, much of it for other people. I am an illustrator, I am not an artist. Not really.

So, since 1917, the question “but is it art?” has been in the air, and now AI art has come into our lives, pushed on us by the tech bros who don’t give a flying keyboard about whose lives they disrupt in their pursuit of progress. AI art is just the latest Duchamp urinal, Hirst shark, Bansky self-destructing stencil.

If anything can be art, and nobody can explain what is art, then why don’t we just give up on the whole concept?

Let’s leave the uber rich to it, while they compete to pay the most for a banana stuck to a wall, and let them have the word art. Let all the people who think that “anybody who calls themselves an artist is an artist” continue in their delusion and forget the word artist altogether. Let’s allow the prompters of AI to call themselves artists while they actively push people who make things with their brains and bodies out of their jobs, and burn vast amounts of coal with every iteration and refinement of their prompts.

The words art and artist are lost and have been lost for a very long time. Let’s just be “people who make stuff by sending messages from their brains to their bodies with some innate talent and many years of hard work”. I know it will catch on.

I have quite a lot else to say, another day, about AI. Till then, look after the “people who make stuff by sending messages from their brains to their bodies with some innate talent and many years of hard work” in your life.