Nietzsche said: “We have art in order not to die of reality.”
That statement seems to now be oddly prophetic. I’ve heard it said that art imitates life, or perhaps life imitates art.
Either way, the deluge of A.I. art is a most alarming reflection of the current state of Western civilisation. Machine Learning has been trained to emulate art and is now threatening the end of art itself. By embracing artificiality, we are cutting the cord that binds us to reality.
By scraping and amortising art into a generalised iteration, A.I. Art is a reduction to the mean. It is an absurd facsimile of real artistic skill that should be scorned and rejected as a corruption of truth, beauty and goodness. People who celebrate such art are revealing their own cultural bankruptcy.
Francis Schaeffer claimed that the advent of postmodernism has resulted in society sinking below what he called The Level of Despair. The notion that life is meaningless imbued postmodern art. Art then hollowed out to become subjective, ugly, and divisive. Commercialism led the way with art whose only purpose was profit. It is ironic that commercial artists now complain they have to compete against an adversary that is quicker, cheaper, and more convenient than they are. Commercialism has always competed along these lines and unsurprisingly artists now find they are being left behind.
A.I. art seems to be the culmination of the modernist decline into oblivion. We should not be astonished to realise that when we rely on a machine to express our art, we have betrayed our humanity. Ultimately, mankind will be revealed as a husk animated by technology, and expendable at the will of a soulless digital master.
We consequently live in existential dread because most of the edifices of our existence are now interned in the digital realm. A.I. has the power to manipulate or extinguish it at the flick of a switch.
I would argue that the problem of A.I. is exacerbated by corporations greedily competing to bring these digital gods to market, whilst rushing helter-skelter to destruction with their fingers in their ears.
Let’s get real.
A.I. might be here to stay, but the only antidote to this dilemma is a return to art hand-made by humans, for others to enjoy and reflect upon. We need to reduce our reliance on artificial art of any form as commercial property, and reject the unaccountable corporate avarice that drives A.I. We need to consciously rediscover the culture we had in our families, our homes and our communities.
This is True, Beautiful and Good. Living an authentic life is an art, and without it: we surely will die.
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