June 25, Robert Hunt, director of global theological education at the SMU Dallas Perkins School of Theology, for a commentary outlining a difference between the way Artificial Intelligence might generate “art” and how trained human artists follow a different process and produce different results. Published in Inside Sources under the heading Skilled Artists Create Art; ‘Creatives,’ No: https://tinyurl.com/3uva6tt6
The word “artist” derives from the Latin “ars.” It refers to skill or craftsmanship. In popular understanding, an artist has creative ideas and the skill and craft to make these ideas manifest in works of art.
But in Silicon Valley culture and the tech industries in general, the word “artist” has been replaced by “a creative” or “creatives” in the plural.
A creative, in Silicon Valley parlance, is a person who makes Instagram videos, TikTok videos, YouTube videos, podcasts, and other social media content. It is “creatives” who manufacture content to fill the endless need for anything that will keep eyeballs on screens so that data can be collected and advertisements sold.
The word “artist” derives from the Latin “ars.” It refers to skill or craftsmanship. In popular understanding, an artist has creative ideas and the skill and craft to make these ideas manifest in works of art.
But in Silicon Valley culture and the tech industries in general, the word “artist” has been replaced by “a creative” or “creatives” in the plural.
A creative, in Silicon Valley parlance, is a person who makes Instagram videos, TikTok videos, YouTube videos, podcasts, and other social media content. It is “creatives” who manufacture content to fill the endless need for anything that will keep eyeballs on screens so that data can be collected and advertisements sold.
Even if they would love to be artists, such creators are already being pressed into using mechanized processes to earn a living. Social media demands a constant inflow of new material, whether creative or skilled. In the rapidly emerging world of artificial intelligence, creatives need only generate the appropriate prompts and then let a computer provide all the skills. Even that takes little skill. Any of the chatbot AIs can also generate good prompts from bad prompts. Now, anyone with a few minutes can be a “creative” manufacturing content to cram the hungry maw of social media.
It is telling in this regard that Amazon now restricts individual authors to uploading three books a day. This limit slows down the production of the AI-manufactured content.
This situation results in the inexorable pressure of AI-generated content pushing actual artists out of ever larger realms of media as it expands the already vast wasteland of popular culture.
Some artists have pushed back; criticizing the use of generative AI to create “art.” They highlight the role of emotion and of feeling in the creation of art and point out that AI has no emotions. But that isn’t all that is missing when artists are reduced to creatives.
To convey an emotion in any medium the artist must acquire genuine skill. And that is forged in the process of practice. Practice is what allows a potential artist to become skilled, to possess a craft, to become an actual artist.
AI doesn’t practice. AI models are trained, altering their internal states in response to outside prompts to identify patterns in language. It consumes lots of energy but does no work. There are hundreds of billions of dollars in equity invested in AI, but absolutely no sweat-equity.
Moreover, and this is too easily forgotten by some artists, art exists only in a network of human relationships. Art is not just a product of an individual’s creativity and skill. Art emerges in a relationship between the artist and those who have the practiced skill to appreciate, engage with, and are themselves changed by the artist’s work.
Art emerges in a community, as only in community do humans attain their full humanity through the creation and appreciation of art. Such community doesn’t exist when a viewer or listener is pleasantly distracted or briefly entertained by an anonymous collection of colored pixels or digitized audio ephemera. And ephemeral it is since it has no real human creator and warrants no human engagement.
Still, AI-generated pseudo-art should worry artists and, indeed, all of us.
Children raised to be satisfied with the artificially generated amusement emerging from a clever prompt are developing a limited skill set that is little above what any 1-year-old can accomplish by crying for their parents to feed them. These children will lack the skills of social engagement and interaction with the natural world that is both emotionally fulfilling and critical to their own health and the health of society.
We can all be creatives. And it is a pleasure to see AI take our ideas and do something we could never do. But if this is our “art,” then we are falling well short of our human potential — a potential reached only in practice. To reach that potential together, we and our society need artists. We need, and are morally obliged to support them at theaters, galleries, museums, exhibitions and shows where their work is displayed or performed.
Otherwise, we become that other demeaning term for human beings: consumers.
Except that we are now immersed in AI “art,” and we are being consumed: mined for data and suckered by click bait until we are pulled away from our fellow humans and our own humanity.
Robert Hunt holds several titles at Southern Methodist University: director of Global Theological Education at the Perkins School of Theology; affiliate faculty in the Simmons School of Education and Human Development; and Hunt Institute for Engineering and the Humanities Fellow. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.