Bear with me, there's a bit of an introduction to this post.
I started watching the classic Doctor Who series when the BBC made them all available on iPlayer last year. I'm now up to series 17 with Tom Baker - still the best - accompanied by Lalla Ward as Romana II. The second story of this season is called City of Death, and is set in Paris.
In the story, an alien called Scaroth was trapped on earth for millions of years when his spaceship exploded, also destroying the last of his race. His only hope is to guide the human race in their scientific development so as to eventually build a time travel device for him to prevent his ship's explosion. To raise enough funds for this, he forced Leonardo da Vinci to paint multiple copies of the Mona Lisa and hid them.
Scaroth's plan is to steal the original painting from the Louvre and then sell the seven copies to collectors, all of whom will think they have the original. The Doctor foils this plan by going back to the 16th Century and writing 'THIS IS A FAKE' in permanent marker on the back of the copies. Unfortunately it's one of these that is returned to the Louvre, much to the horror of Inspector Duggan, a detective investigating the art theft:
"They'll find out, when they X-ray it!"
"Serve them right! If they have to X-ray it to find out whether it's good or not, they might as well have painting by computer." Doctor Who
The Doctor's point is that the 'fake' was still painted by Leonardo - it was the result of his time, skill, experience and effort. Each brush stroke was made by the master himself.
Art or Artifice
Which does eventually bring me to the point of this post, and thank you for reading this far. I've recently been playing with Artificial Intelligence image generation tools, specifically a free one called Night Cafe. It's very simple to get started; the image accompanying this post was created by the Night Cafe AI in under a minute. All I had to do was enter the prompt 'da Vinci painting the Mona Lisa'. Ironically the lady herself doesn't appear too happy with this portrayal although that might be the dodgy fingers the AI has given her left hand.
Note that in the previous paragraph I said, "the image... was created by the Night Cafe AI..." and not that I created it. I just had an idea of something to accompany this post and tried the prompt four times before it generated the one I decided to use. It took five to ten minutes from logging on to downloading the final image. You could say that I acted as the art director for this project, setting the brief. The AI provided several drafts, from which I chose the one I liked best. As this is a personal blog, I'm retired and have no budget to employ a digital artist, I think this is a reasonable use case. Especially as I'm not making any money from it. But you can see the appeal for commercial sites to cut costs and use the same approach, which is a moral issue akin to the recent screenwriter strikes in Hollywood.
The perceived value of an image is a different debate. An interesting comparison is a recent caricature of myself that I commissioned from Tom Richmond, arguably the most famous caricaturist around. I sent Tom some ideas for setting and other characters to include and left the rest to him. It was quite expensive, I had to wait a couple of months for him to work through a number of other commissions from New York Comic Con and for the finished item to be shipped from the US. Quite the opposite of the free, quickly generated and immediately downloadable AI image. Which would I rather have?
It's a no-brainer, obviously I'd rather own a unique, hand crafted original item, physically handled and signed by the creator. That Tom's a well known artist who rarely does commissions nowadays is also a factor in its personal value to me. I have another caricature of my wife and I, drawn in charcoal by a street artist in Florence some years ago. He may not be famous but I witnessed his skill in making the marks on the paper. When I look at it, it makes me smile; partly because it's skillfully executed and funny but also because it reminds me of the trip to Italy and sitting beside the Duomo (do you know Florence, Clarice?) while it was done.
The Obstacle is the Way
I've found it amusing that many others using the AI to generate images refer to each other as 'artists'. I gave Tom Richmond some photos of myself and some ideas of things I'd like him to draw. That doesn't make me the artist. Neither does providing some keywords to an algorithm. While playing with Night Cafe I've regularly been surprised, impressed and occasionally disturbed. I've never experienced pride, satisfaction or pleasure.
Traditional methods of creating art are difficult, frustrating and time consuming. Learning, practicing, experimenting, throwing away, starting again, giving up, trying again; it's all part of the journey. The payoff is the immense pleasure and satisfaction at creating - actually creating - something that's incrementally better than you've made before; looking at it later and saying to yourself, I did that.
Will AI make traditional art redundant? The speed, ease and convenience of AI imagery will inevitably flood the market with cheaply produced prints and posters with a much higher profit margin. But as real art becomes more rare it can only increase in value. In the future you might visit someone's house and admire the pictures on their walls but in the absence of evidence to the contrary you'd have to assume it was AI generated and therefore of low intrinsic value. Real artists will have to find a means of evidencing the work is the result of human talent and effort whether that be interim stills or video recordings.
To paraphrase this post's title - and with apologies to 10cc - Art For Art's Sake, Provenance for God's Sake.
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