Life Imitates AI

Back around the middle of the 20th century, there was a lot of talk about whether art imitates life or life, art. As I recall, most of us settled for the safety of a cop-out, “It’s a two way street.” Not wrong but a bit facile.

Obviously, art imitates life. Life is the painter’s primary model - people, places and things, their juxtapositions, their relationships, their interactions. Just as crucially, if not as obviously, life imitates art. Every work of art is a ‘proposition’; as such it functions as a lure. If a proposition is ‘meaningful’, it invites those who view it to live their lives differently. How so?

First, it shatters sacred taboos. Second, it offers a glimpse of alternative solutions to existential (or everyday) problems. Art motivates us to behave differently and, crucially, it gives us permission to do so.

More recently, much is being written about the possibility that cheap AI knockoffs will crowd out genuine works of art. I doubt it. In some respects Art and AI are antithetical. Art is ‘art’ only if it shows us something novel and unique about the world and our place in it. This is not something that AI can do today. 

If AI is ever able to tell us something hitherto unknown about the fabric of existence, it will have passed its final Turing Test. It is in our ability to create de novo that we demonstrate our ‘likeness’ to God; so if AI is ever able to do the same...

On the other hand, the very structure of AI, its anatomy so to speak, works against this possibility. AI can only know what is known, what it’s ‘trained on’, as my Bot ceaselessly reminds me. But who knows what epistemological structures may be emergent?

In any event, I am not concerned that AI will start producing work at the level of Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso or Matisse (if only!)…at least not in my lifetime. What AI generated art I’ve seen so far is not only not museum worthy, it’s objectively hideous.

The symmetries are tortured, the contrasts oversharp, the spatiality is muddled. AI ‘Art’ seems unable to blend or fade its colors; it is incapable of irony or whimsy. It wears its algorithm on its sleeve. So in my view, the idea that AI will replace true art anytime in the foreseeable future is inconceivable.

Except that it’s happening right now! But not in the way that the doomsayers predicted. AI has so far failed to imitate genuine art; but instead, art has begun to imitate AI. More and more, paintings generated by mere humans are starting to resemble AI generated images. AI has made artificiality acceptable.  It has given us permission – permission to be lazy, permission to live our lives inauthentically. “Make a live action movie that ‘looks like’ a cartoon!” Once upon a time, to say that something looked like a cartoon was understood to be pejorative…but today?

Whether or not we are seeing a real change in the underlying cultural aesthetic, AI is corrupting culture in a way that was not anticipated. The problem was driven home to me by a recent article in Scientific American; specifically: 

“Language generated by ChatGPT and similar AI chatbots has been appearing more frequently in recent scientific literature, raising questions about whether AI is used for analysis and not just wordsmithing…”

This reaction is predictable…but quite possibly wrong. The assumption is that the occurrence of language suggestive of AI influence is evidence that AI is directly responsible for some of the text. Maybe, maybe not!

Researchers have shown that AI created documents use certain phrases more frequently than other documents do. The incidence of such phrasing could be evidence of AI generated text. But just as possible, and much more disturbing - academics may unconsciously be enfolding AI-isms into their everyday speech. “Walk like an Egyptian, write like a robot.”

We trained our bots to imitate us and now, voilà! We are imitating our bots. No surprise! Our parents teach us their language, but we learn our language from our peers. “You can take the girl out of the Valley, but you can’t take the Valley out of the girl.”

Beyond language acquisition, all of us develop our own unique writing styles by copying (mostly unconsciously) the writing styles of authors we admire. If I look at something you wrote, will I find traces of Henry James or Hemingway or the New York Post? Does this suggest that your ideas are plagiarized? Of course not!

Image from left: Leonardo da Vinci, The Mona Lisa (digitally retouched to reduce the effects of aging; the original painting has darkened over time), c. 1503–1506, perhaps continuing until c. 1517, oil on poplar panel, 77 cm × 53 cm (30 in × 21 in), Louvre, Paris; The Mona Lisa, created by artificial intelligence. 2024.

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