[Art]ificially Intelligent
It’s been a busy couple of years for me; New Year’s Day 2024 has found me working on no fewer than six books simultaneously, speaking, teaching, and, well, recovering from the body blow that was October 7. In that time, I’ve been processing a lot of what’s going on in the world, not much of it exactly comforting. I launched one of my kids into the Marines, which has been his dream for a long time, and which has taken us as his parents a while to adjust to. But I’m happy to report that a very good person has just gone out into the world, so you can go ahead and thank me in advance. I’m mostly kidding — if we had anything to do with it, it was basically white-knuckling it through the roller coaster of parenting in the 21st-century. So for all of you who are trying to raise families and still be your full self as an artist, I am very much there with you.
A few years ago, I became a university professor, teaching Senior Illustration Thesis and Professional Practices to young artists in my native New York. A couple of years will need to pass before my students will not have endured college in the Covid lockdown era, and I really feel for this cohort who has had to endure isolation, the lack of in-person critique and mentorship, the forcing of harmful medical decisions by craven external forces, and the general insane noise of the culture at the same time. I worry about them; I fret over them; I want them to be OK. I want them to feel like they can launch into the illustration industry feeling confident and competent, having a sense of their own visual voice and their own personal philosophy, worrying less about competition or how to stand out, and instead trusting their instinct, surrounding themselves with encouraging friends, and taking risks in order to make that first move into the professional world. I try to set their expectations realistically: that for the first three or four years of our careers, we all do the equivalent of scrubbing toilets; it’s just how it is—and believe it or not, you can even learn a thing or two from scrubbing toilets.
Last spring, as the semester wrapped up, two of my students came to me to tell me of a bit of a controversy related to AI in our department. I knew this day would come, so I was glad that we were finally taking the first step into the breach. Not that I really knew what to do about it, of course, but here we are nonetheless. A student was accused of using AI for their thesis, which they vehemently denied. Regardless of the final verdict, it brings up important questions for me as an educator. How do I set limits on what students can do to ensure their artistic integrity, to discourage cheating, to make sure that they don’t try to make an end run around the agonizing hard work that other students are putting in? How do I cultivate an ethic in the students – especially because they’re coming to my class in their senior year — that makes the thought of using AI completely repulsive to them after they graduate?
Here, I must lay my cards on the table, and let you know what I really think about all this: AI art is theft. Pure and simple. All of those amazing digital paintings that you see online, all of those filters that make you look like a figure in a classical painting—the way that those are made is by stealing from other artists. AI steals and learns from existing work by real, human artists who put in the years, sometimes decades, of blood, sweat and tears that it takes to become a great painter, a great visual thinker. That’s why we love art—because it shows us the greatness our fellow human beings are capable of.
When folks use these things, even for fun, they are contributing to the global theft of other people’s work, not to mention all of the money spent on their education and their materials. The fact that an artist himself would think that it was tolerable to use AI tools to “create” a piece of art that they try to pass off on their own is unconscionable. I don’t know how that artist would be able to look themselves in the mirror with anything other than shame.
To be a painter, for example, you spend years learning how to make marks. Maybe that sounds funny to you, or silly, or indulgent, or modernist, or whatever. But I’m talking about things as subtle as training muscles in your hand to become so sensitive to the pressure of pencil on paper that you know how to make a line say as much as an entire shadow in the real world. Training your eye to mix a color so that you know that it’s entirely appropriate to get the right color of shade of blue by mixing orange into it.
In my own case, I spent the first fifteen years of my career slogging it out, making god-awful paintings for anybody who would hire me— and this was after four years of art high school and then a four-year illustration degree — only to become disabled in a car accident and have to learn to paint all over again with new materials, because my old materials were too difficult to wield with a paralyzed arm. Add onto that another two years of a graduate degree, and it was pushing 20 years in my career before I finally felt like I was making work that was truly mine, and truly worthy.
To think that by putting some search terms into an AI engine, some algorithm could take a piece that I put up online for my portfolio (and it has, including my writing), or that somebody bootleg-scanned in another country, and find a bit of it sucked through a straw into a hodgepodge of soulless art for somebody to pass off as their own—this is like so much vomit in my mouth. Do you see what I’m getting at?
I talked about this before in a previous episode of Vesperisms, but in the beginning of the thesis year, I forbid my students from using any digital tools for the six first weeks of our class. It’s vital that my students begin a process of self exploration and doing the painful work of learning what they hell it is that they think. I try to help them see the limitations of their digital tools, even if they ultimately choose to use them for their final artwork. I want them to re-discover that sensitivity, both internal and external. The way that it feels to draw on the subway, versus sitting in the middle of the woods. The way it feels to layer strokes of colored pencil to create a soft field, versus laying down a very immediate and urgent brushstroke of ink. The way it feels to use your entire arm to draw on a big piece of paper, versus only using three fingers to use a size 0 brush on a miniature painting. Because these experiences are going to affect what an artist feels comfortable doing over the span of decades. And if instead the student — or even a professional artist — takes a shortcut by typing parameters into a search field, they not only cheat the audience and cheat the artist they’ve stolen from, but they cheat themselves. How can an artist possibly live in integrity knowing that everything they’ve done has been obtained by theft? It doesn’t make somebody an artist, it makes them a base and worthless thief.
I said it.
I want to call on my readers and listeners, those of you who are interested in re-calibrating yourself toward an artistic worldview, to promise not to use these tools. I want you to promise yourself; I want you to promise the artists who are being stolen from; and I want you to promise those who view your work or read your words or listen to your music. At some point the deepfakes are going to become so good that you’ll be able to simulate dance performances, and stage plays, and movies as well. We’re pretty much there. I mean, you can live in that world if you want to, but count me out. Count me entirely the hell out of that. Let’s have done with every bit of fakery, every bit of pretense, every bit of trying to trick our own eyes into living in some kind of virtual reality even without the oculus goggles. The only ones we’re fooling are ourselves.
There are so many ways in which our society is becoming “polarized”, that even that word has been done to death. But let’s acknowledge this particular division, these two kinds of people: those who are content to live in a deepfake — whether that’s AI art, Impossible Burgers, Botox, endless TikTok scrolling, Instagram filters, cricket powder, canola oil, red number 40, and whatever rewrites they’re doing of Agatha Christie to make her less offensive (that bad, bad woman!), yada yada yada.
No.
That world’s for posers.
I’m going to keep using Kolinsky brushes, eating grass-fed steak, growing my garden, using butter, reading ancient myths and Victorian ghetto writers, listening to punk rock and building up the callus on my middle finger from endless hours scrubbing my pencil across cotton rag paper. I want my hands in the dirt, my bare feet on the ground, my eyes wide open, my kid’s head on my shoulder, the smell of a baby’s hair, whispers of love in the dark, and the bumps and bruises and euphoria of being truly alive, truly in my body, with you and I side-by-side living here in the real world.
Fight the power.
I have the sneaking suspicion, and I don’t necessarily say this as a value judgment, but just a statement of pragmatic reality, that the only people who are going to be able to get through this AI revolution are people who work in traditional media. People who make real things. People who play live music with bleeding fingers. People whose work lives in physical space rather than on a screen. But we’re going to have to fight for that. We’re going to have to decide not to wait for others to make space for us. We are going to have to be the ones to put on the shows, to get back into the garage with a real band, to grab three or four friends and stage our own plays, even if they suck. In short, to create work that is as physical and embodied as possible, to actively—proactively, as an act of complete resistance—refuse any artifice or any alteration of reality and get gritty and raw and real.
That’s the shape I think the next renaissance will take.