Curate, connect, and discover
One thing I’ve had to grapple with during this surgence of AI is that not everyone wants to be an artist or creative. I’ve always just assumed people take other jobs to sustain themselves, but truly many if not most people don’t want to do something creative with their life or leave any sort of lasting impact. Most people just want to enjoy life to the fullest or at the very least just survive. My understanding as art being the ultimate dream is my own experiences clouding my judgment. Despite this art still defines our culture an insane amount along with being a representation of the times. As silly as it is to say stuff like “Seinfeld” reveals us a look into 90s culture just as a more seriously taken art piece like the “Merchant of Venice” can give us a look into the late 1500’s/early 1600’s. Most importantly to me it’s an expression and a look into a part of the human experience. AI is more or less a pattern machine. It takes what it's been fed and finds patterns to make something ““new””. There is no motivation behind what it’s doing. No need to scratch a creative itch or want to share and express one's life. It does what it does because it was told to. With this realization it not only delegitimizes the point of art but also shows that in the end these soul crushing recent events comes not from the AI but still the greed of the richest amongst us (I swear to god if I get one comment about that stupid game) and the misunderstanding of art by business people. Even if AI art was just as good as a lot of human art, it is not, it still betrays the very core of what art is. Despite what the CEOs of the biggest media companies may think, art is not just entertainment but an important part of the human condition. Of course for the many creatives in every corner of the world but also for everyone in between. More than likely you’ve seen a piece of art that's connected with you. It’s shown a part of you or your experiences that you may have not been able to explain or maybe it’s made you feel for someone in the story evil or good, personal or universal. Isn't that kind of amazing. That us humans’ empathy sense is so strong that even to a character we know isn’t real we can still have an emotional reaction as big as crying or laughing or tensing up or whatever. AI has none of this. It is not a being capable of emotion, free will, or expression. We can not allow these old greed bags to take more from us than they already have. We can not have tech bros decide our culture. We can not have the representation of our culture be made by an emotionless, moralless, and uncreative being incapable of moving things forward. Only by taking the old and rehashing just enough to seem distinct enough. Some may say that humans themselves have no originality but I disagree with our distinct ways of taking old formats and archetypes, then mixing, adapting, and changing the very foundation of the original work. We are not a pattern machine but a remixing artists that take many different ideas and motifs, add a bit of our own likes and experiences and make something wholly distinct from its inspirations. Don't let any billionaire tech bro tell you differently.