2024 09 07

With just a bit more data collection, we can make the world a better place! Chicago, Illinois. July, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

Art is making choices, argues Ted Chiang in his recent piece on Ai for The New Yorker, which I’ve seen making the rounds on social media. I always find that, after a shoot day in which I’m typically producing thousands of images, I am both physically and mentally exhausted. The thing that doesn’t get as much attention when creating art is the sheer brain power required while doing it. It’s a never-ending flow of small and large decisions which compound and add up, eventually becoming the final product.

The original quote in Ted’s piece which caught my attention was this:

“The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.”

Reading this makes so much sense and helps to explain why I’m quite negative on all things artificial intelligence. This also reminded me that I pay for a New Yorker subscription and should give the full text a read, which you should also do if you have access to it! Upon doing so, a few more quotes which I enjoyed are as follows:

“art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception. It is a mistake to equate “large-scale” with “important” when it comes to the choices made when creating art; the interrelationship between the large scale and the small scale is where the artistry lies.”

“Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium. But the creators of traditional novels, paintings, and films are drawn to those art forms because they see the unique expressive potential that each medium affords. It is their eagerness to take full advantage of those potentialities that makes their work satisfying, whether as entertainment or as art.”

…as Charlie Parker said: if you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.

-Clayton