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Notes -
Will AI bring back beauty?
Looking at midjourney's top pieces of art I am struck by the beauty in them. They contain detail, high degrees of realism even when depicting surrealist themes. They tend to be symmetrical and often portray idealized versions of reality. AI art tends to portray archetypal depicitions of its motifs and often excludes blemmishes, dirt and grime.
Compare it with corporate memphis a primarily human generated art form that has gained significant traction in the public space in the past decade. This is the most expensive painting painted by a living woman.
Compare the buildings drawn by the AI with the best exterior of 2022 in Sweden according to architects.
AI gives people what it gets positive feedback from. It gives people what they want. People want visually stunning rather than the output of the art community.
I'm loaded with cognitive biases against AI, though I've swallowed the bitter pill of it's ever-possible potential. But I think among those images it's notable that some genres are easy to imitate.
Let's dispense with corporate Memphis which is surely about as good as Microsoft clipart from what the wiki shows.
Midjourney does futurist, fantasy and animation guff very well, the house I find particularly evocative and it is a great blend of realistic and fantasy. The mock stop motion animal style is pretty good though a hint of something not quite right is there (particularly the cat). Least good are the humans-something uncanny creeps in, though I said I was biased. Doesn't help they have that HDR style which has been overdone in the last decades. Particularly bad is the Indian girl, though the blue hair girl 'passes' as far as I'm concerned but then it's quite low res in the face and additionally cliched Californian type art.
But all of this is to say it won't be that long before it's as good as the real thing in most styles in in imitation and enough variation in the imitation will create enough novelty to be considered as good as genuine art today.
So, what then? Surely it will just become over commodified, lose peoples interest and become devalued. People will play with it for a while and get bored, but otherwise we will become more attentive to the actual art (and not the image). Art and sculpture still require humans hands, though bit by bit I guess they'll succumb with various printing technologies. Then we will move to arts that require living, breathing humans. Drama, dance, ballet and live music will become more popular and people will reconnect with the 'vibe' of humans and life. Of course AI will come for that,and some of us will be captured by the addiction of non-reality and give up on caring about the really real. But others will be drawn to greater contact, with AI providing the contrast needed to point in the direction of the true.
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