Alchemy
Alchemists in medieval times apparently believed it was possible to transmute matter into gold—or, at least, were attempting to find out if it was possible to do so through an early, rudimentary version of what would eventually become chemistry.
Typically, alchemists sought to turn lead into gold, largely because lead was common, and gold wasn’t.
Gold was precious, and if you had an unlimited supply of gold (or could turn a less finite supply of something else, such as lead, into gold), then you could make yourself wealthy—
—or that was the theory at least.
Personally, I’ve always wondered why alchemists didn’t think that through a little more.
It’s easy for me to say that, of course, with my 20th century education, which covered things like the economics of supply and demand. But it’s always seemed to me that infusing a market with an easily available supply of gold would be counterproductive, as that gold would immediately lose value in direct proportion with the infusion.
One real-world example of this phenomenon: salt. Salt was once a prized commodity, since it was very difficult to extract and transport, and because everyone needed it. It wasn’t on the level of gold, of course, but still rare and essential enough to make it highly valuable.
Today, however, salt is virtually disposable, for the simple reason that it’s incredibly common. Modern technology both made it easier to get, and less essential to have. Supply went up; demand went down; what was once prized is now almost literally everywhere.
These days, people aren’t trying to create gold out of other matter, but they are pursuing a slightly different version of alchemy: creating art from AI.
The materials are different, but the idea is the same: if the owners of AI can bypass the intensive process of procuring art, or music, or video, or any other sort of creative content, then they can, in a way, create their own gold.
Except: it won’t work that way.
In fact, it’s already working very much the opposite way.
The public reaction to AI-generated art, of every kind, might have been awe or joy at first. But the longer time goes on, and the more of this newly cheap material floods the figurative market, the more the reaction becomes decidedly negative.
The output of generative AI is novel, to be sure, and it can even be enjoyable at times. But what it isn’t any longer is: valuable.
An ever-growing segment of the population can now sniff out AI art. It’s obvious, when you know what to look for. It sticks out. It’s glaring. It’s immediately off-putting. People actively avoid it when they can, and instantly de-value everything associated with it.
I would be far from alone in saying that an otherwise excellent blog post can be ruined for me, only because it has an AI thumbnail image. A song I might have liked in a vacuum is dead to me, once I learn AI created it. Artwork that I previously found interesting is immediately and irrevocably meaningless to me the second I find out AI had something to do with its creation.
The market has long-since been flooded. The supply has been outpacing the demand by many orders of magnitude for years now.
Generative AI is not capable of creating gold, because gold is rare and difficult to come by, and that rarity is exactly what makes it valuable.
Art is valuable precisely because it is not easy to create.
I am interested in art—we are interested in art, in any and all of its forms—because a human made it.
The existence of the work itself is only part of the point, and materializing an image out of thin air misses the point of art, in very much the same way that putting a football into a Waymo to drive it up and down the street for a few hours would be entirely missing the point of sports.
The struggle that produced the art—the human who felt it, processed it, and formed it into this unique shape in the way only they could—is integral to the art itself.
The human behind it, and their story, is the missing, inimitable component that AI cannot reproduce.
That’s what I and so many others find repulsive about generative AI art; it’s missing the literal soul that makes it interesting to begin with.
Art is interesting precisely because a human made it. And that process is long, slow, painful, and beautifully unique. The human story behind the art is just as much a part of the work as the paint or the notes or the words or any other part of the medium.
And no, I’m sorry, but prompting your way to the finished piece absolutely does not count.
Good luck with that lead, though.