We are entering an era of upheaval that some are calling the fourth industrial revolution.[1] The rise of artificial intelligence, and in particular generative art, threatens to upend our social and cultural landscape, leading to a renewed conflict between mechanical technique, art, and culture. While some technologists are proclaiming the death of art,[2] a murder allegedly committed by generative AI, others are proclaiming a renewed dedication to the humanistic spirit of artistic production.[3] Where Walter Benjamin argued that mechanical reproduction caused art to lose its “aura,” its unique and authentic presence,[4] today artistic automation threatens to cause art to lose its very humanity.
Unlike prior technologies, AI does not place humans in the driver’s seat of the creative process. It removes them entirely. The artist does not use their hands or eyes to sculpt a scene before them, but merely a sentence, phrase, or a series of disparate words. By demoting the artist from imaginative creator to prompt engineer, AI transforms the artist from the originator of the image to a cog in the machine of prior images. The artist does not imagine the world, it is imagined for them by the algorithm. The artist does not remember their inspirations, the machine remembers. The artist does not create, she chooses options of what is created for her. (Part of the creative process, the misremembering of past inspiration, is lost). The imagination is deadened by the perfection of the dataset. The greater the dataset, the less the artist needs to imagine. At scale, the artist becomes redundant for basic tasks. The only saviour of the artist is the stopping of the machine and the return to a more primitive imaginary capacity of yesteryear.
It is this change to the artistic process that differentiates AI from prior technological revolutions. Far from mimicking the invention of the camera, for example, AI is not a tool or new method that can be used to make more innovative art. It is the absence of method and tools. It divorces the artist from the body, and the art from the human touch. Benjamin observes, for example, that when the camera was invented, it shifted artistic production from hands to eyes: focusing on capturing what one can see rather than what one can craft by hand.[5] Photography increased the speed and accuracy of making new artworks, but sacrificed the creativity associated with delay inherent in traditional methods.[6] Photographers captured the world as their eyes saw it immediately, whilst painters were limited to capturing the world as their hands could remember it.[7]
An AI artist has neither hands nor eyes, metaphorically speaking; they are blind until they see the final product. They type words but they do not sculpt, paint, draw or move the image. Their hands are deadened by the process of generation when compared to the artists of the past who were alive with motion during the generative process.
Unlike prior revolutions, where new tools were said to extend the creative process, AI art seeks to replace it. Already, the discourse has taken a cynical turn towards encouraging young people towards becoming prompt engineers.[8] I.e. encouraging them away from the individualistic pursuit of artistic creation by hand and eye and towards becoming a cog in the machine of artistic, cultural, and business content creation, merely regurgitating the images of the past.
AI “content” here can be distinguished from real art. Where real art seeks to enrich, “content” only ever seeks to sell. It is “a bland and homogenising force which gobbles up everything in its path- art, photography, the spoken voice, the written word.”[9] It transforms images into transactional media akin to adverts, making noise without purpose, reworking old ideas. Content is not about the individual artist’s vision for the work but about reflecting the collective hive mind’s desire (what people engage with most), more about the audience than the artist, more about collage and pastiche than originality – it mimics successful other content rather than resting on its own. It creates no emotional reaction beyond a simplistic “wow,” mirroring the aesthetic reaction to the kitsch, or the smooth quality of a Jeff Koons.[10] It has no edges or negativity, and it dwells in the realm of narcissistic self-reflection,[11] via hyper-personalization. There is no Other in new content, only reflections of the past and of the self. As Byung-Chul Han writes of Koons:
Jeff Koons, right now the world’s most successful architect, is a master of slick surfaces. In Koons there is no disaster, no carnage, no breakage, no cracks. And no seams either. Everything just flows in smooth and sleek transitions. Everything is rounded, polished, shined. The art of Jeff Koons is an art of shined surfaces. There is nothing in it to interpret, decipher, or think out. It’s an art of the ‘like’. Koons says that all the viewer of his work has to do is say “Wow!”[12]
AI is the new king of content town. Instead of upending the digital age, AI is retrenching its existing contours, with the business imperative of new art transformed to the new technological medium. The AI art generator takes seconds to create an image, making it the perfect artistic pursuit for someone with no time. The stressed out, bored, burnt-out office worker can generate hundreds of images in their lunchbreak, ticking the box of “being creative” for that day, without ever having to undergo the interrogation of their working life necessary to commit to real art. Here, AI art is revealed as the symbol of corporate power, the realization of the corporate dream that all art can become content, and that every image can become a sale, that every artist can be pacified, and that every employee can be controlled.
When art becomes content, life becomes the carnival, as we learn to perceive reality merely in terms of theatrics and surprise.[13] Baudrillard elucidates the beginning of this shift from art to content at the start of the postmodern age.[14] With an ever-increasing consumeristic society, everything had to be turned into a sign, image, or symbol, for profit exploitation.[15] This created a “materialization of aesthetics” accompanied by “a desperate attempt to simulate art, to replicate and mix previous artistic forms and styles, and to produce ever more images.”[16]
Mark Fisher extends this idea by suggesting that we are in the “hauntology” phase of cultural development, where we are trapped in the aesthetics of the past, with no new ideas or movements to speak of.[17] No matter how many new images are created, without new imaginings, we cannot conceive of future societies that are radically different from our own. In other words, our imagination has become constrained by the dataset. AI art is the logical endpoint of hauntology – a time where art becomes a mere symbol or simulation of prior art alone.
The AI artist generates something in the style of Picasso or Rembrandt, attempting to bring back the dead, but in the process only kills off her own creativity. Artists now embody the character of Neo in The Matrix, trapped in a world of their own creation (or rather, their own generation), listless amidst a sea of information, staring into a mirror that can only show them the past. The AI artist uses words in the vein hope that the machine will know what she is thinking or contain enough dead artists to fulfill her imaginative request. Eventually, even living artists become dead in the jaws of the machine, swallowed by the dataset to be Frankensteined at will into something ‘new,’ like a baby stitched together out of the parts of old men.
I call this the necrotic fantasy of AI art: where a dead artist is used to keep alive the living, where art is said to give life, or at least a purpose to live for. For example, when Microsoft unveiled “the Next Rembrandt” in Amsterdam,[18] they did not seek out a new talented Dutch artist that could be compared to the Rembrandt of old. Instead, they used machine learning to study the old masters’ paintings to replicate them anew. The machine replicated Rembrandt’s style, subject matter, and technique. The commercialization of AI generators means that now anyone can do this. But to say that “anyone can be the Next Rembrandt” is the same thing as saying, “no one can be the Next Rembrandt.” To be stuck in the style and hauntology of the past is to admit that the future is dead: that no new movements, talents, or geniuses can ever emerge.
Emmanuel Flores, technical architect of Microsoft’s ‘Next Rembrandt’ project, stated at the time: “Rembrandt was my wife. I was living with him, I was sleeping with him, I was dreaming with him.”[19] This is the necrotic fantasy to bring back the dead made real. To reduce famous artists into data, to ‘hack’ the brains of genius artists to live alongside them again. There is something deeply insulting about this idea to new artists; the idea that a company would rather resurrect the dead rather than bothering to find someone new to talk about. This is, in part, because content cares less about the individual person than the corporate message. The gimmick of the Next Rembrandt is the point of the Next Rembrandt. ‘Gimmick’ is no longer a side effect or part of an advertising campaign – the artwork is the gimmick. The Gimmick is the entire point of the artwork.
Like many of the Dutch master’s own pieces of work… The Next Rembrandt painting invokes a deep emotional response, drawing you in with his expressive features, in particular his eyes, and making you wonder ‘who is the man in the painting’?
The truth is he doesn’t exist. Never has. This beautiful painting is 3D printed and the result of analyzing data from Rembrandt’s body of work.
– Microsoft’s Press Release.[20]
Historically, artistic movements required a fundamental break from the art of the past, rather than a continuation of new collages or old images regurgitated. The impressionists created hazy dream-like scenes radically different from traditional painting; cubists transformed the canvas into abstract shapes; digital art opened mixed mediums that challenged artistic convention. Artistic movements solidified over time due to the cultural context in which they arose, but also due to the individual lives of the artists, whose pains, joys, lives, and dreams created the “break” from the past – rejecting old symbology, methods and techniques that no longer represented them or their time. The history of human art is the history of groups of friends struggling to express themselves, in ‘circles,’ ‘cliques,’ ‘movements’ and ‘styles’. The human element always remained at the core of the work; for without these human connections, the movements themselves would cease to exist. AI art, by contrast, traps artists into the depths of the past. It creates no break. It creates no community. It merely performs the theatrical gimmick, for the ‘wow’ of the audience.
Culture ceases to exist when content becomes the only artform. With content, no new movements or deviations are possible from past referentiality. Referentiality becomes self-defeating when there is nothing new to reference. The meme only exists because of something new to meme about.
This culminates in the ‘sequel’ effect of Hollywood.[21] With no new stories or narratives possible in the age of content, the only possible artform is the sequel; repeating the storylines, plots and mythologies that ‘worked’ in the past. Art becomes formula and formulaic, more about impressing the audience than making them think or challenging their point of view.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe, perhaps the peak of content culture, breaks romantic plotlines down into 30 second increments of a 2-hour film, allowing emotional and human connection to breathe in short snippets of air in between a sea of action content engagement. It is not surprising that Hollywood seeks to embrace generative AI, or that scriptwriters had to fight so hard to resist it from taking over the studio. In the future, AI art will bring this sequel effect to all areas of our life; nothing original will exist anymore, everything will be a sequel to past referentiality.
The artist who is forced to become a prompt engineer loses everything that it means to be a real artist: their style, creative process, sense of play and ownership and authorship of the work. They are haunted by the artists of the past, who appear in their latest creations as dead mummies raising their hands. One such artist writes on reddit: “I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney overnight… I am not an artist anymore… all I do is prompting.”[22] Expressing anger at the company’s cost cutting measures, the artist goes on to deplore the state of AI art today, which forced them to live off the art of others: “I don’t want to make “art” that is the result of scraped internet content, from artists, that were not asked,” they said.[23] Not only does the AI art process infringe copyright, but AI art also keeps dead artists alive, creating a necrotic spectacle that competes with the living. The 3D artist using AI generators becomes a puppet driven by the work of others (allegedly unlawfully stolen work), rather than his own individual artistic talent. In a way, he is no longer an artist at all; he is not creative, but subservient to prior masters.
Finally, AI art can act as a mirror of its representational subject through its dataset. The mirror reflects society (including biases inherent in the data), along with the artist who prompts the generator. Prior artistic practices were criticized as being a mere mirror of society too, but AI exceeds prior art in every capacity of mimicry. Emerson for example, asks us to imagine an artist carrying a mirror through the street “ready to render an image of every created thing” in her path.[24] At first, when we see the mirror, we might be amazed by how the artist has recreated her surroundings in such amazing detail. Then, we might get disappointed, realizing that the image is merely a reflection of the world. An imitation of reality, rather than reality itself. The person looking back at us in the mirror is not some new being, but us.
While Plato used a similar analogy to critique artists, it applies even more to the AI artist. The spectacle of AI art is the spectacle of the mirror reflecting the database; the apprentice desperately trying to impress his master by copying his work verbatim.
The Greek myth of Narcissus tells us of how Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection because he imbued it with life, believing it to be real.[25] In the same way, we risk falling for the mirror of AI art. We may one day even come to prefer it, believing that the “hyperreality” of generated art is more exciting than the “desert of the real” (the blandness associated with everyday life), as Baudrillard claimed.[26] This comes to represent a profound psychological detachment from reality; a form of addictive compulsiveness towards more: more colour, more engagement, more images, more videos, more content.
AI art, in reflecting ourselves, is more engaging and interesting than another person’s point of view (a real artist’s), who may have profound differences to our own view. This is of course the point of the narcissification of culture. It is better to look at our own reflected beliefs than to challenge those beliefs. It is better to stay in our own little silo, echo chamber, cave. AI art promises that soon every artistic or creative work we encounter will be personalized; every ad, billboard, movie, TV show, novel, painting – nothing will be collectively shared, and absolutely everything will be tailored to our own individualistic perspective. In this filter bubble, we will succumb to the ultimate narcissisification; community will die at the hands of personalized content.
The consumer drowning in the sea of content will become addicted to the feeling of drowning and overwhelm and crave the sensation of mind-obliteration. “People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think,” writes Neil Postman.[27] But it is not so much thinking as quiet introspection that we now lack. The time and presence of mind to step back and ask – do I even want all this content being fed to me? Do I even want to be engaged at every incremental second of every day? The psychological effect is that of the wanderer, emerging from the desert into the overwhelm of the city street, as Baudrillard writes:
When you emerge from the desert, your eyes go on trying to create emptiness all around; in every inhabited area, every landscape they see desert beneath, like a watermark. It takes a long time to get back to a normal vision of things and you never succeed completely. Take this substance from my sight!
AI art is heavily embraced by the corporate world precisely for this reason; it allows content to proliferate over challenging and unique pieces of work and allows everything to become a sale. Content is celebrated by the corporate world because it offers no threat to corporate power. It is innovation without critique, invention without disruption, and art without the human soul. It may claim to provide political support for certain movements – feminism, de-colonialism and so on – but in reality… it is only ever there to sell more product, whether the product is the art itself, or the consumer, whose data is the product to be consumed by the machine. Content is only ever about the like, not the dislike. As such, it cannot cause revolution or a change of thinking, or new modes, or artforms. It only ever entrenches the status quo. Something that only evokes a “wow” can never challenge systematic problems in society.
Some say that AI art is unique because it combines things that haven’t been combined before, like cats walking on the moon or an astronaut on a horse. This is one of the examples given in MIT’s introductory lesson on deep learning.[28] Putting aside that photoshop and other image tampering tools already allowed for these combinations, we can firstly ask if these combinations are useful, creative, or even artistic. The examples given are often of a silly meme image or a funny combination, rather than something truly challenging or thought-provoking. The same is true of the combinatory images: Harry Potter as a Bollywood Film, and other silly collage works on YouTube. We can admit that a collage might be unique in a limited manner of newness, but it will never be original.
For a piece of artwork to acquire originality, it requires the human imagination. Percey Shelley writes that the imagination is the source of human freedom, and that poetry is the root and the blossom.[29] Without human imagination, there is no creation – as Nietzche contended.[30] To create the world, we must imagine it. To outsource the imaginative process, the root, and the blossom, in Shelley’s phrasing, is not to create something new but to serve someone else. Letting the machine take control of the re-combinatory process rather than doing it oneself, is to voluntarily subsume oneself to external decision-making. It is to Frankenstein-monster oneself. It is to voluntarily gain a puppet master. That is, not only to cede agency, but to betray one’s own instincts: the artist’s inspiration must give way to whatever inspiration already exists in the dataset. The dataset subsumes the imagination. The artist becomes trapped inside the machine.
A stray sunset, a glorious puddle on the way to work, a new experience at the coffee shop: none of this is captured in the machine, nor will it ever be captured in the machine. The experiences that build up over the artist’s life are killed off and replaced by stock photography, the blandness of the periphery gaze.
Here, we might recall one of the English language’s greatest poems, William Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud”. It is a poem where the author wanders alone, miserable, until he stumbles upon “A host, of golden daffodils.” The experience profoundly changes him, and when we read it, it profoundly changes us too.
An AI generator is incapable of capturing this new experience of the author in the field unless it has already happened (or input into the machine’s data), and even then, only by prediction and simulation from the dataset; it captures what it thinks might happen. In other words, the subjective world of the artist is killed off to be replaced by the objective realm of the data. This is hardly a positive outcome for the artist or society, especially when new challenges emerge in the real world that cannot be addressed by the dreams of the past.
Others might raise doubts on my argument by referring to the core principles of postmodernism. Roland Barthes’ original essay “The Death of the Author” (1967), for instance, argued that a work of art could be divorced from the author’s intended meaning completely, and instead only interpreted by the reader or viewer to find their own meaning in the work. “The death of the author” is a convenient belief system for AI art, whose author was never alive to begin with. Instead of caring about the historical, political, social, or personal view of the artist whose work we admire, we can simply imbue the work with our own subjective meaning.
The death of the author has always been a narcissistic fantasy by definition, but it is also a celebration of ignorance: there is no need to learn about anyone other than oneself. Or alternatively, that one’s own truth is more important than the actual truth in the world.
By contrast, if we assert with the modernists that the artist does matter – their context, their emotions, their society, their life, then A.I. Art… no matter how beautiful, no matter how new, will always be meaningless. Without an artist, it can have no meaning because it has no intent. Instead of the postmodern view, we can return to Proust’s view. Art gives us access to the life of the artist, and that it is through the artist’s life, rather than a dataset, that we reach the infinity of human experience:
Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each its special radiance.[31]
Compare this infinity of perspectives to the “you loop” that AI algorithms trap us within, the hyper-personalization where the machine reflects a version of ourselves back at us. A Black Mirror episode takes this idea to generative art. The protagonist, Joan, signs up to a streaming service and is surprised to find a show titled “Joan is Awful” about her life, with her likeness on the platform. The new TV show has an actor playing her, repeating scenes from her life in dramatic fashion. Hyper-personalization of TV and film in this manner seems the logical extension of the personalized business model we now encounter. In the future, generative art will put viewers into their own TV shows. Viewers, becoming the stars of the TV shows they are watching, will close the loop of the narcissistic fantasy: the self as a product to consume.
“Culture presumes an environment in which deep attention is possible,” writes Byung-Chul Han.[32] But the hyper-personalized, content-fuelled art that AI art brings down upon us, is not so much about attention as overwhelm, and hyper-stimulation. The AI artist generates thousands of works an hour, sifting through dozens of choices and modes, optimizing for peak performance. This hyper-stimulation is a flood of information, numbing the senses and obliterating the idle calm of the traditional creative process. In the hyperreal, everything becomes more intense than reality. Everyday life is replaced by simulation, by an influx of images, by codified dreams.
*Note: this work is a pre-print.
[1] McKinsey & Company, ‘What are Industry 4.0, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and 4IR?’, McKinsey (2022); Klaus Schwab, ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution: what it means, how to respond’, World Economic Forum (2016).
[2] Alquézar Mancho, Renato CSIC; Romero, Enrique, ‘Generation of art works using deep neural networks’ Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña (2016).
[3] Chikarkova , M. . (2024). Artificial intelligence and digital art: current state and development prospects. Skhid, 4(3), 9–13. https://doi.org/10.21847/2411-3093.2023.4(3).294658
[4] Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935) (Penguin UK 1991).
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Cameron Shackell, ‘Prompt engineering: is being an AI ‘whisperer’ the job of the future or a short-lived fad?’ The Conversation (2023); Bernard Marr, ‘The Hot New Job That Pays Six Figures: AI Prompt Engineering’ Forbes (2023).
[9] Thomas J. Bevan, ‘Content Versus Art’ The Commonplace: Substack (2021).
[10] Byung-Chul Han, Saving Beauty (Polity, 2017); Byung-Chul Han, ‘The Sleek: Beauty in the Digital Age’ (2016) <https://arquitecturaviva.com/articles/the-sleek>.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Byung-Chul Han, Non-Things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld (Polity, 2022).
[14] Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (Verso, 1990).
[15] Ibid.
[16] Douglas Kellner, ‘Jean Baudrillard and Art’ (UCLA, 2006).
[17] Mark Fisher, ‘What Is Hauntology?’ Film Quarterly, 66(1), (2012) 16–24. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.16
[18] ‘The Next Rembrandt’, Microsoft (2016) < https://news.microsoft.com/europe/features/next-rembrandt/>.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Kathleen Loock, ‘The Sequel Paradox: Repetition, Innovation, and Hollywood’s Hit Film Formula’ Film Studies (2017).
[22] Sternsafari, ‘I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney over night.’ Reddit: r/blender (2023) <https://www.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/121lhfq/i_lost_everything_that_made_me_love_my_job/>.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet (Virginia Commonwealth University, 2002).
[25] P. Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses (Brookes More, Ed., 2021).
[26] Jean Baudrillard, Simulation and Simulacra (1981) (University of Michigan Press, 1991).
[27] Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) (Penguin Books, 2005).
[28] Alexander Amini, ‘MIT Introduction to Deep Learning | 6.S191’ <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDX-1M5Nj7s>
[29] Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Poetry (UVA Press, 2017).
[30] Ibid.
[31] Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Volume 6 (Random House, 2003).
[32] Byung-Chul Han, Non-Things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld (Polity, 2022).
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