I really liked the your usage of the argument for automation but into creative fields, it’s convincing in a unique way!
However, I feel like the ‘burden’ or concern of ai replacing or transforming ‘art’ itself is more imposing than you give credit to, because it is fundamentally different from other kinds of skilled labor in its production. The concerns of AI as a threat to the purity of art as a social and human phenomenon breaks down to two main points. Firstly, that AI does impose some practical existential threat on human art. This comes from its model of learning from the collective body of human art itself, and actual instances of AI art that resembles human levels of creative expression, which is destructive to art. This leads into the next point, that art is a uniquely phenomenological and social thing. The technical means of producing art are not always rigidly separate from its means of creative expression, and are not always reducible to some raw mechanical input that can be automated or made more productive separately. Creative expression of art is a subjective product of human consciousness and experience, and the ‘raw talent’ which corresponds to those technical means of artistic production arises not as an objective mechanical process such as in drawing lines or producing sequences of precisely intonated notes, but as intentional means of conscious expression. Human art, in every stage of its production, is intentional expression of consciousness and human experience, while AI art amounts to its mimicry. In the year 2XXX, I can’t imagine that some AI model would not reach a stage of development capable of reproducing a work in exact likeness to one of Miyazaki’s, but it would never be ‘art’ because it is devoid of its subjective essence. The ultimate point of this is that the AI automation of certain tasks in the process of artistic production would necessarily appropriate its process of creative expression to some extent, if not entirely, for more efficient commodity production. This is what it means to say that AI art is destructive to artists, and ‘an insult to life itself’.
I really liked the your usage of the argument for automation but into creative fields, it’s convincing in a unique way!
However, I feel like the ‘burden’ or concern of ai replacing or transforming ‘art’ itself is more imposing than you give credit to, because it is fundamentally different from other kinds of skilled labor in its production. The concerns of AI as a threat to the purity of art as a social and human phenomenon breaks down to two main points. Firstly, that AI does impose some practical existential threat on human art. This comes from its model of learning from the collective body of human art itself, and actual instances of AI art that resembles human levels of creative expression, which is destructive to art. This leads into the next point, that art is a uniquely phenomenological and social thing. The technical means of producing art are not always rigidly separate from its means of creative expression, and are not always reducible to some raw mechanical input that can be automated or made more productive separately. Creative expression of art is a subjective product of human consciousness and experience, and the ‘raw talent’ which corresponds to those technical means of artistic production arises not as an objective mechanical process such as in drawing lines or producing sequences of precisely intonated notes, but as intentional means of conscious expression. Human art, in every stage of its production, is intentional expression of consciousness and human experience, while AI art amounts to its mimicry. In the year 2XXX, I can’t imagine that some AI model would not reach a stage of development capable of reproducing a work in exact likeness to one of Miyazaki’s, but it would never be ‘art’ because it is devoid of its subjective essence. The ultimate point of this is that the AI automation of certain tasks in the process of artistic production would necessarily appropriate its process of creative expression to some extent, if not entirely, for more efficient commodity production. This is what it means to say that AI art is destructive to artists, and ‘an insult to life itself’.
great essay. i'd never considered the tasks vs jobs point. makes perfect sense.