History is, again, repeating itself.
The AI topic is trending, and there are people fighting against or in favor. “What AI creates is/isn’t art/novel/creative/…” and so on. Just pick your battle.
However, what we are maybe missing is that, again, history is repeating itself (yes, I repeat the sentence on purpose).
Why?
Let’s put it in a different context.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Marcel Duchamp was ahead of his time. His critique of the art regime of the time became the basis for contemporary art.
At that time, those who dictated what was or wasn’t art were the galleries and exhibition spaces. Only those art dealers and gallery owners wanted to exhibit was considered an artist. Duchamp then showed how banal the art could be; within those conditions, any object could be considered art.
Consequently, Duchamp comes up with the term “ready-made“: any raw material or object could be a piece of art. Industrialized objects such as the urinal and the bicycle wheel exposed by him became masterpieces. In his critique, artists lose their identity to become the one who shows something.
Art had become a game of appearances, where the title of the work could determine an entire artistic concept by itself. Doing that, Duchamp gave birth to conceptual art, where the work no longer has an aesthetic value, because its value lies to its meaning in a given context.
His concept of ready-made validates the intention of the work, which in fact becomes an open interpretation dependent on the repertoire of the reader, the observation of the critics, and the relation between the artist and his work.
What does it have to do with AI?
Contrary to the physical objects that Duchamp used in his art, we are now using zeros and ones to give shape to our own creations.
Since AI uses what is already available online and/or in its database, anything that we may ask it to generate will be a ready-made creation, almost like an industrialized product coming out from an assembling line.
So maybe just like Duchamp’s conceptual art, we are witnessing a shift in our ways of doing things: what AI creates for us will depend on our intention in a given context.
For example, a recent study showed that AI can be helpful in more standardized tasks, but will perform poorly in tasks that need deep knowledge and/or highly specialized skills.
Independently of your view (or side in the battle) of AI, one thing is for sure: AI is here to stay. It already transformed how we interact with the world and will continue to do so.
Now is our responsibility to define if what we prompt is a ready-made creation or if we actually have something to show.
Do you use AI in your work?
How do you think it can change your field in the short and long term?