UCKIOOD

The Art World v. The Tech Bros: A Story of Arrogance, Hubris & Lies

January 26 2023

AI is just the latest in a long line of tech initiatives that have promised to revolutionize and disrupt the creative landscape. Artists, we’ve been here before. Stand your ground and ignore the blah blah. If you are doing your job right, it won’t affect you and your craft.

Another year, another tech wanker promising to disrupt the creative landscape. Everytime you look at the news at the moment, there is yet another story about AI and its potential to revolutionize the arts, whether it be in musical composition, the visual image or the written word. From The Guardian breathlessly exclaiming that AI has the capacity to ‘recreate the aura of a Leonardo masterpiece’, to The New York Times jizzing over ‘the swell of excitement’ in the AI investor community, and Artnet trumpeting how ‘the intersection of AI and art will create new mediums [and] shape culture’, you can’t move for People Who Are Cleverer Than Us pontificating left, right and center. 

To be honest, this all feels like déjà bloody vu. Barely a season has passed and artists are losing their footing in the tech slime once again. Fuelled ultimately by a lack of respect for and understanding of the arts (Who the fuck needs art, theater, music and literature? Quit whining and get a real job, loser), and a desperate desire to colonize and control the one area of modern life which has thus far eluded them, AI is just another episode in the tiresome cycle of disruption, exploitation and monetization of the art world by the tech industry.

Just twelve months ago, artists were trapped in the sticky and unsavory center of an NFT circle jerk. NFTs were heralded as the beginning of a new era of artistic empowerment, yet they immediately faced the biggest marketing and business problem ever known to man, namely that no one could actually explain in simple terms what they actually were. Hitting a wall of verbal tech waffle (fungibility, cryptographic receipts, digital tokens, blockchain), we failed to meet anyone who could actually explain how the fuck we were supposed to make our real life sculptures into NFTs. Render them against a sterile and futuristic interior like every other Fake Sculptor on Instagram? Convert them into a useless VR trinket for The Zuck’s Metaverse? No Thank. You.  

As far as we could see, the only artists making cash were the ones who were already mega-lauded in the field of digital art. And that the NFT landscape was just one massive money laundromat for wannabe crypto douches dressed in the Emperor’s New Clothes Spring/Summer Collection while exhibiting clear signs of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Inflated with zero knowledge to the point of bursting, every Insta-dude and his Pavlovian Dog were strutting around the place, bragging about flipping assets and raking in serious coin, bro. Even Artsy, Sotheby’s and Christie’s promptly heeded the clarion call of artistic visionaries such as Justin Bieber and Paris Hilton (alas, not joking) and rushed to launch NFT art auctions. It’s hardly surprising that we laughed wryly when, in the winter of 2022, news outlets roundly proclaimed that the soggy bottom had fallen out of the NFT market as quickly as you could whisper, ‘perhaps humans prefer to own art they can see and touch?’     

Unlike the opacity surrounding NFTs, AI generated art is easy for even an Art Dunce to understand and to dabble in. Even with limited coding knowledge, AI programs or ‘generators’ allow users to punch in random text descriptions - think ‘Tortoise Mondrian Blobby’ or ‘Lawnmower Lemons Picasso Beaver’. The machine promptly finds every image or visual reproduction - photo, print, painting, sculpture, cartoon, illustration, sculpture, film still - in existence on the web which matches those descriptors, and then mashes them together to create a unique digital image which, in some cases, can be edited even further. 

And therein lies one of AI’s first problems. For generators or pseudo ‘labs’ such as Nightcafe, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and DALL-E - which, incidentally, is backed by The Supreme Leader of The ManBaby Kingdom, Elon Musk - consent is a dirty word. To create these hybrid pictures (note: pictures, not art), billions of images are indiscriminately scraped from the web regardless of whether they are copyrighted or not. In this Crazy Cool Fun Experiment, artists and their original creations are the blindfolded lab rats shunted into the machine, the drugs are the generator’s algorithm, and the purulent third ears and weeping four eyes are the ‘innovative’ and ‘realistic’ masterpieces. 

Although unregulated Big Tech has form in regarding permission and copyright as mere trifles to be ignored, it appears this legal and ethical jeopardy has already threatened to decelerate AI’s operations - or at least take the shine off its reputation. According to Buzzfeed News, three visual artists in the US are now taking AI developers DeviantArt, Midjourney, and Stability AI to court for stealing and using their work without consent, and the Financial Times reported this week that Stability AI is also facing a lawsuit from Getty Images for unlawfully copying and processing millions of images for the company’s commercial benefit. 

It remains to be seen whether artists banding together and using their collective legal chops will defang these AI titans. Vague promises about artists and entities being able to ‘opt-out’ of future versions of AI technology is a hollow but hardly surprising gesture given the Who Gives A Fuck attitude of big tech. Passing responsibility from perpetrator to victim is pathetically predictable. And as we’ve seen before, isolated court cases without the backing of robust legislation can have limited effect in protecting the integrity and ongoing success of the arts. And let’s not kid ourselves that the US Congress or the UK and EU Parliaments, all dazzled by tech’s ability to turbo-charge their capitalist, neo-liberal agenda, will give the tiniest of shiny shits about this any time soon. 

But for us, aside from its legal woes, the probable failure of AI generated art lies in its laser-beam focus on the tool and, by implication, the wholesale removal of, for want of a better word, the human in a physical, intellectual, emotional sense both from the artistic process and product. 

Rewind ten years and sculptors like us were told that digital design and 3D printers were the future, that our skills would be rendered obsolete by the New Machine On the Block. Artists were urged to become ‘a divided personality, operating [...] between the chisel and the gene, between the machine and the organism’ - not our words, but the verbal diarrhea of bloviating TED-Bunny and ‘material ecologist’ (no, us neither), Neri Oxman. Even in polite society with people who knew less than nothing about art, we were bombarded with crass hypotheses that 3D printers were rendering us anxious for our livelihoods. We confronted cock-sure Nerd Boys who assumed that some of the most complex sculptures to ever come out of the uckiood studio had been 3D printed. Nope.

Don’t get us wrong - we aren’t complete Luddites. We saw that digital modeling programs, CNC routers and 3D printers could be useful in the development of ideas, the analysis of structure and the design of armatures. But ideas and armatures didn’t - and still don’t - constitute works of art. While they may have fooled some of the people some of the time, 3D printed sculptures invariably looked like absolute crap because the equipment was seen as a means to an end rather than a useful stepping stone in the creative process. The All The Gear & No Idea Brigade were conned into thinking they were artists, when actually they were glorified button clickers producing shockingly poor digital images which were then spat out crudely by the machine.  

Like its baby AI brother to come, the tool had well and truly taken center stage in the conversation. Not that this was - or is - anything new. Nine times out of ten, the first question to tumble out of the mouths of those who encounter our work is the inevitable, How did you make it? Dudes (and yes, it is mostly dudes) have barely clapped eyes on the sculpture before they start sharing their ‘expertise’ in routers, software, sanders, saws and jacks before moving on to a triumphant encore of fiberglass, PVC, timber, steel, adhesives, composites and resins. Given a convenient off ramp by the current and ubiquitous focus on method and material, they are unable or unwilling to indulge in the most basic art appreciation and instead seek refuge in an unreconstructed version of themselves. 

Children are invariably far better viewers. Not yet shackled by emotional barriers - or a grown-up obsession with fabrication - they engage fully with their eyes, hands and hearts without fear or reticence. Look at the shape and colors! It feels smooth! What is he doing? Why did you make her look like that? It makes me feel happy. 

And therein lies the main problem with AI generated art. Great art undeniably has a presence. A presence which is rooted in humanity. By virtue of the synthesis between the artist’s hand and mind - as well as the work’s sheer physicality - any art worth its salt possesses an aura which elicits a cognitive, sensory and visceral response whether we like it or not. Skilled artists employ lyricism which subconsciously triggers a range of emotional cues that humans have learned and processed over several millennia. Their art, as a consequence, makes us smile, laugh, cry, feel confused, anxious, and even nauseous. Anyone who has stood in the presence of a Rothko, Richter or Raphael, for example, knows that the magical combination of technique, texture, color, light, space and meaning creates a psychological and emotional reaction which can knock your socks off. Go to Storm King Art Center and stand in that expansive landscape surrounded by those huge Kadishman, Di Suvero and Serra sculptures and tell me you don’t feel your stomach drop in a confusing and confounding moment of I Don’t Know What The Fuck I Feel. 

Simply put, the humanity imbued in great art is what connects it to, and resonates with, its human viewer. And despite the viral hype and technological wizardry, this is precisely why AI generated art misses the mark. While being playful, fun and sometimes technically impressive, it often feels over-engineered, impassive and cold. For traditionalists, this may be because one can only engage with it via a screen - but such criticism would undermine the validity of all digital art which would be grossly unfair. Yet this pervasive emptiness is why, despite the grandiose ArtBollocks PR surrounding it, an AI work such as Refik Anadol’s much-lauded Unsupervised at MOMA (below) feels to be nothing more than a soothing video you’d see projected on to the wall at an upmarket day spa. Ooh, look at the pretty shapes and listen to the relaxing whale music. 

In its most basic form, AI generated art eliminates the human hand and reduces the artistic process and product down to the mere tapping of a keyboard and the whirring of a machine. Sure, if the product’s target audience were indeed machines then they’d be fucking mint. We’d happily roll over and admit defeat in the face of our Robot Overlords. But humans aren’t machines, and until the AI generators can themselves don the richly woven mantle of human evolution, AI won’t chuck out anything more than vaguely interesting Look What I Made Mommy! paint-by-numbers pictures. 

So, we ain’t worried. Just as photography didn’t kill painting in the 19th Century and 3D printing didn’t kill sculpture in the 20th, AI generators will not kill great art in the 21st.  

If you are worried whether your art and images have been used illegally by AI art generators, you can consult haveibeentrained.com. You can also check out the Concept Art Association who advocate for the future safeguarding of human-created arts and who are fundraising to recruit a lobbyist to protect artists against AI art generators. Follow the hashtag #ArtbyHumans. And, it goes without saying, please DO NOT use Lensa, DALL-E, Midjourney, Jasper Art, NightCafe, Stable Diffusion, Fotor, Deep Dream Generator, Dream by WOMBO, Artbreeder, Dawn or any of the other fucking AI art generation programs out there. You might think they are harmless fun, but rest assured you are shitting on your industry peers from a bloody great height and knowingly undermining the foundations of your own livelihood. 

You can see more blog posts from uckiood here.