The Price of Everything…

“Signal-to-Noise”. Generated in Midjourney. Enough signal to think there’s intelligent life. Enough noise to remind you there’s not.

The promise of A.I. generated art is great. It represents the possibility of being the long-wished image dream machine. You tell it what you want to see and it magically creates it.

Here’s the rub… It’s stupid.

It generates an image by gradually interpreting a noise pattern that’s been encoded from a real image. Billions of real images, actually.

We’ve trained the computer to recognize things: faces, animals, buildings, fruit…

But it hasn’t a clue what any of those things are. Just that they aren’t the same thing.

We have visual representations of these ideas but no semantic understanding of any of them.

A.I. art has no understanding of the poetic meaning of an apple. The emotional resonance of a dark forest.

It only knows a relationship if one’s been assigned in one of the images that’s been scraped to create its vast dataset.

Otherwise, it only knows “apple” means love… or sin… if the word “apple” appears frequently near the idea of love or sin. Which are poetic relationships. Not literal ones.

It doesn’t knows “into the woods” from a narrative story perspective means “to go into the darkness of the unknown”. But, to A.I., darkness is a pixel value. A shape value. Not an emotional one.

A.I. is the largest content synthesizer ever with the emotional development of a slice of cheese.

I’m fascinated by generating images using these tools. I’ve spent many, many hours attempting to conjure images and ideas.

I inevitably leave frustrated. I can roughly describe an idea but it doesn’t understand what I mean when I say “collage”. It creates drivel. A series of seemingly sensical relationships between images that, on closer inspection, reveal that it’s all sizzle and no steak.

Drivel.

So if you’re one of the “sky is falling” critics of A.I., keep this in mind… it can create the simulacrum of art… even the aesthetic appearance of art… but it’s completely devoid of the semantic understanding of art. The appreciation of the juxtaposition of ideas.

You know… art.

A.I. art knows the appearance of everything and the experience of nothing.