The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Maybe you’ve heard about the AI painting that took first prize in a national art contest. Or the AI song that went high up on the pop charts. If not, don’t worry, you will. For awhile — a short time, trust me — us artists, musicians and writers will use AI as an assistant only. That’s what we’ll tell ourselves. Just eliminating some of the drudgery to give us more time for serious creativity. You betcha.

Creativity, we tell ourselves, is the sole domain of us talented humans, nothing that a bundle of circuits and chips could manage, no doubt a gift from the gods. Oh sure, the droid helper might be able to emulate, monkey see monkey do, but no way, NO WAY, could these silicon toys manage to create new original great art. Like us humans, the crown of creation, the Rembrandts and da Vinci’s, the Mozarts and Chuck Berrys, the Picasso and Warhols, the Tolstoys and Stephen Kings.

Sure, maybe they borrowed a bit from their predecessors, might even have stolen whole cloth, but that’s how art, capital A, evolves. C’mon, it’s a synthesis, leaping forward and upward on the backs of those who came before, from cave drawings of mastodons to the masterpieces of Pollock’s splattered paint, from the humble notes of a pan pipe to the eloquent silences of Philip Glass, from the first scribbles of verse to the Burger King jingle, just a steady progression toward our own enlightened era.

How could a bunch of wires and circuit boards possibly do more than merely emulate what homo sapiens do so naturally? So what if the cyborgs can write a decent opera in a nano-second or design a painting that looks wildly futuristic or carve a sculpture with laser cutters in the time it takes to say Michelangelo. Still doesn’t make it human art. That’s why we call it Artificial Intelligence. Then again … art is sort of Artifice, isn’t it? Nothing we real artists should worry about. Worst case, we can let AI do a little more of the creating. Not too much. Just a tool, after all. Like using a paint brush or a keyboard. Just a tool. Keep saying that. We might learn to believe it. Course by then it’ll be too damn late.

Some computer programmer recently entered his digital painting in an art competition — and took first prize.  Much to the disdain and outrage of the artists who lost to that computer generated artwork.  Now, to be fair, photoshop has been competing with photography for years and any photo can be turned into a watercolor or a pencil sketch or a poster at the click of a command, then printed on canvas or watercolor paper or poster board.

This particular prize-winning painting was hyper-realistic … but had elements of classic styles that gave it a retro modern artworkiness.  Obviously the judges were impressed, if not the competition.  Get ready for the Future, y’all, it’s already here, suitable for framing.  You don’t think Artificial Intelligence will analyze the entire encyclopedia of poetry, then create a moody amalgam that will stand up to its human created peers, you been spending too much time on Instagram.  These plucky binary bibliophiles will be writing sonnets, rap songs, plays and novels before you can say Billy Shakespeare.  Paintings, music, literature, they’re boning up on styles and techniques, analyzing what we humans prefer, copying this and improving that, next thing you know they got a bestseller, a hit song, a Pulitzer Prize, the next Big Thing.

I’ve been warning my artist cronies since I got my hands on photoshop, you need to up your game, move into the future before they have a chance to copy you.  Course, they may beat us there anyway, but I say give them a run for their circuits.  Sure, it’s a losing fight, but hey, if that wasn’t your goal at the outset, maybe you picked up the wrong profession.  Probably should’ve gone into Coding, program your own computer to do your art.  Just saying …..