AI should replace the scaffold, not the artist

I recently attended an engagement party where one of the bridesmaids was extremely crafty and made a beautiful two-tier charcuterie board with fruit, cheeses, and crackers, including little thoughtful details like tiny flowers for the bride-to-be. 

I immediately complimented her on how lovely a job she had done. She responded, "I just asked ChatGPT how to display them all, and it gave me this layout and even suggested the flowers." I couldn't help but react with disappointment, and I instantly wanted to take the compliment back, since I felt like I actually owed the compliment to a chatbot.

This conversation stuck with me, and I couldn't help but think about how I typically plan my own parties, as someone who has always taken pride in being the hostess with the mostest. I would be lying if I said that every time I hosted, all the ideas came from my head. Rather, the process typically involves endless hours of saving inspiration on Pinterest, which, candidly, I sometimes copied almost verbatim. 

Yet, I still find comfort in taking inspiration from other humans who thought of these things themselves, whether through their own original ideas or inspiration from others. There is a reason we say imitation is the ultimate form of flattery, after all. Historically, creative works have emerged as a natural evolution of the work that came before them.

The art of tradition

In philosophy, the most tangible example is how Socrates inspired Plato, who then inspired Aristotle. Though none of them held the exact same positions, their stances were inspired by the work that came before them and then adapted to fit their own beliefs, which, of course, have been followed by generations of scholars and thinkers since. 

Similarly, the development of art styles through the centuries shows an evolution that builds on what came before while also reflecting the collective experience of its time. From the Renaissance to the Baroque, for instance, certain techniques carried over, but the driving inspiration shifted to the Counter-Reformation's desire for emotional, persuasive religious art. 

This is known as cultural transmission, or tradition. What are the consequences when that is absent? To find out, we can look at nature. 

I recently took a cruise to Alaska, where I learned that octopus mothers die shortly after their eggs hatch. As a result, there's essentially no parental care beyond egg guarding, and because there's no mother around to teach them, every octopus has to independently rediscover everything. Despite having some of the highest individual intelligence in the animal kingdom, their progress as a species is stunted because each one has to start over. 

With AI, information would be passed down, but what happens when the driving force that inspires people is artificial? While it is true that AI has been trained on everything published on the internet and can analyze those patterns to generate outputs, it lacks the ability to form an opinion based on lived experience. Rather, it purposefully eliminates randomness and spontaneity, which are the strikes of inspiration and emotion that often make art meaningful.

Models' morals can cloud art

To make it all even more complex, AI also doesn't act completely free of bias or sentiment. By absorbing the materials it was fed during training, it learns morals and values that have either been explicitly taught by a human or inferred from the information it digests. An Anthropic report found that Claude’s values vary by model version and generation, with some leaning toward warmth more than rigor, for example. Those biases will naturally be reflected in the art it creates. 

For instance, a "warmer" model might render a prompt depicting a mother and child with added sweetness, emphasizing nurturing, smiles, and gentleness. A more rigid model, by contrast, might take a more literal approach, simply depicting its assumptions about what a generic or traditional woman and child look like, without much added sentiment, emotion, or character. How will these subtle differences shape our collective understanding of such concepts, and, more importantly, the feelings they evoke?

One of the most beautiful things about any form of art is the ability to make people feel something. Now we risk that the feelings conveyed by art are not even conveyed by the artist, but rather a happenstance of an artifact placed by the AI. Even in an ideal scenario where models are trained to be free of bias, which is nearly impossible, the result would be soulless art.

AI as an artist’s tool

The same week I was grappling with all of this, I was invited to the Google Flow film festival in New York, where I got to see artists create short films with the aid of AI. Challenging every notion I already had of AI slop and its inability to evoke real human emotions, I was touched by many of the films, and one even brought me to tears. 

The film titled Two Chairs depicted artist Dion Lee's inner struggle with deciding whether or not she wanted to have children. AI was used to add animations and visuals overlaid onto her videos, helping the audience connect more with her narrative. In this instance, AI was simply used to speed up the process of generating the content, but all creative decisions and control were left to the artist. When seen through this lens, you could argue AI can actually advance art. 

However, even these positive examples of AI being used properly don't cancel out the magnitude of the risk of losing the very essence of human expression and creativity that AI-generated "art" poses. Even AI users are becoming cognizant of this tradeoff, with a Pew Research Center survey reporting that adults under 30 are just as likely to think chatbots hurt their creativity as help it. 

How do we reconcile the two? 

We can answer this by looking back at how art was made in the Renaissance era versus now. In middle school, I was absolutely fascinated to learn that Michelangelo had to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel by hand, standing on wooden platforms and reaching up over his head for hours at a time for about 500 days. While painting beautiful art on cathedral ceilings has become much easier and more humane with technology such as hydraulic scissor lifts and ergonomic harnesses, the art form endures. 

The goal for artists, or any person determined to preserve art as one of the essential cornerstones of being human, should be to have AI replace the shaky wooden platforms, not Michelangelo. 

That is the only answer. The alternative is a world in which art, creativity and human expression become a synthetic, self-feeding loop, obscuring the beauty of human creativity, which would be an incredible loss for humanity.

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