Why AI can’t create art
Every week, perhaps every day, I see someone on social media complaining about the use of large language models and diffusion models to generate images. This generative AI has become common on the Internet today, which is leading to an important discussion around art.
In this short essay, I’m going to argue that AI cannot create art because of the inherent properties of art. I don’t want to get into a moral or legal argument, but one that is perhaps more philosophical.
AI-generated images, like all images, is not inherently good or evil. It can certainly be used for fun things, like giving your family portrait a Studio Ghibli style. It can just as easily be applied to evil things. Unlike art, there is are no values being presented here by the AI. It’s a pass-through from the human writing the prompt.
Is it ethical to put your photos in a Studio Ghibli style? Can you copyright a style? If you pirate Princess Mononoke it’s a clear infringement. But if you take that as inspiration, is that okay? Can you define a style in such clear terms that it becomes copyrighted in itself? As we can see with this trend, maybe. But legally I don’t think there’s a precedent.
I’m not interested in the legal argument though. If you’re copying a style, it is inherently derivative. Generating images in someone else’s style shows a low level of personal creativity. You’re not adding any unique creative input.
Look at Starry Night, a painting so unique that it is still remembered for its artistic merits a century later. It has its own distinct style. It required a lot of human input and time. And we rightfully recognize that human effort and creativity.
Then look at the action figure AI trend that went viral a week ago and already feels old. It requires next to no work to create one of these images. In just a minute you can write out your prompt, get your image, and then share it with others. It requires next to no time to copy the trend from someone else and create your own. It leads to a trend that is highly ephemeral and then loses its artistic appeal. When images take so little work and so little time that everyone does it, none of it has the staying artistic value of a Starry Night.
Take a look at this iconic cut from Lawrence of Arabia. When it happened it was so original, so creative that decades later it is still regarded highly. While similar cuts can be done today, they will always be seen as derivative. They’ll never have as much artistic value compared to the first time it was done.
When we get into concepts like fan-fiction, which is common online, I do think those things often are low forms of art. You can do fan-fiction well, but often it tries to copy a style and thus loses its originality.
I don’t want to say fan-fiction is bad in any sense, but it isn’t regarded as highly as the original source material. I think fan-fiction provides people with a creative outlet. There can be good fan-fiction which allows a person to bootstrap a story using already-developed characters and settings. It gives people an outlet to be creative, which is more important than whether the creative work is actually good or not.
That is my argument. By making it so easy to generate images in a certain style, it creates an ephemerality that leads to fast trends where all images blur together and leads to none of them having staying power. Copying a style removes the human individual from the artistic process. At that point, shouldn’t art be more than just a trend that we forget about a day later?
I’m not convinced that the environmental impact matters. The energy and water use is minimal compared to using an AC or taking a shower. But I am concerned that ephemerality will lead to more ‘slop of the day’ and then we lose the opportunity to find art that can truly touch us.
I have been writing short sci-fi stories and you can read them at https://scifi.felker.dev.
I have been using AI to generate the cover images while I use my human creativity to write the stories by hand. I enjoy the writing process and I enjoy being creative. But while the cover images are images, I don’t think they meet the bar to be called art.
