Is AI Art Real Art? Six Answers for Artists

Making Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence • Part Two of the Six Questions series

This article follows my last article, “Six Critical Questions for Artists,” in which I posed what I consider to be the six most critical questions facing creators amid the advent of powerful generative AI tools. The purpose of the questions was twofold: first, to remedy a persistent problem in the current dialogue characterized by facets of AI creation becoming conflated, such as freely bouncing back and forth between monetary and ethical concerns in a single unfocused argument. Second, to provide powerful points of reflection for creators navigating what making art really means for them, with an appeal for precision they may not have encountered before. In this second installment, I restate the questions and respond with key virtues of human creation that warrant its consideration as immutably valuable.

If anyone can do it, why should I?

The main problem with this question is that the decision of whether or not to create is tied to external validation around being seen as unique. The will to create is itself a separate drive oriented around a different set of goals. The goal of creating art or taking action on an idea has its own reasons for existing. One way to look at this is to initiate a test to show that the will to create stands apart from social validation for creating something. The experiment unfolds like this: you take away all possibility of social validation and see if the creative act can be realized without it, and the answer is, of course, it can. That drive to create, regardless of whether or not we are recognized as unique for doing so, is a drive to create in less fettered form and thus constitutes the real psycho-emotional ecosystem that causes us to feel that ‘to create is necessary’. Usually you see a need or some kind of natural conclusion to existing work that you feel you have a response to, something that ‘needs to be said’, regardless of who hears it, and moreover you feel called to be the interpreter of that which needs to be said. This is why we continue to create, regardless of whether our skills are seen as unique; we want to feel the engagement that comes with being an interpreter, and we believe in what that act will produce. If not even a single person responds, this should not change the calling to do this if it is a true calling. It is, of course, natural that we want it to reach an audience, but our will to create is not predicated on that because the true artist’s drive, as our experiment demonstrated, is not predicated on a requisite social outcome even if it was designed to be beneficial for society.

If anyone can do it, is it worth doing?

This question puts us in territory very similar to our last question, so we can refer to all of the same reflections but with an added factor: economic viability. If we cannot derive monetary benefit from creating something, we would still create for all the same reasons listed above, but our experiment in reflection would remove all monetary benefit from the creative act to show that, of course, the creative act still exists. If that creative act, stripped of the possibility of monetary benefit, holds no appeal to us, it is a sure clue that what we really wanted to create was a product, not a work of art in a given medium. Of course it is natural to want to be able to make money creating works, but a true will to create will persevere beyond a promise of financial benefit. So far we have two examples of removing the promise of reward to see what your will to create is really made of.

Did we decide that authenticity doesn’t matter?

I have gotten into many debates with people about this topic. AI creators stridently proclaim that people cannot tell the difference between AI-generated music and human music. So what is the point of telling your story from your perspective if no listeners benefit from it being human? The answer to this is also hidden in the previous two reflections but primarily the first. We create authentically because we feel called to become good at interpreting a story and show what we value in the hopes that those values will connect with others. The art of the creative act lies in doing that as honestly as possible. That honesty comes out differently for everyone; it could be changing mediums or genres all the time, it could be diving deep into the possibilities of minimalism. Our personal range of expression and interpretation is what we are offering the world, and it doesn’t make sense as human creators to offload central and foundational parts of the creation to automated processes. Yes, human authenticity matters and is a baseline agreement between the observer and the artist.

Setting aside for the moment the fact that current studies show human-created music is better able to elicit the emotions it was designed for, as well as the industry analysis that found fully AI-generated tracks show 25–40% lower save rates and 15–25% higher skip rates than human-recorded music, the human interpretive framework is capable of creating more distinctive work than generative AI tools can. Humans follow through on a creation in ways that sometimes change drastically mid-process. They have smaller sets of inspirations, and very often the mid-work explorations go off on unpredictable tangents. So the question is not whether or not a given work is better realized using AI or not. The question is whether or not the work would even be remotely the same relative to itself when created without generative processes. Comparing one AI work to a human work is never truly apples-to-apples. I think we would have to compare the difference between the creation of a single work made with and without AI to really understand what is gained and lost. I’d argue that the limited influences of a human creator and their slightly chaotic and inherently recursive process are what cause innovation to happen even at the smallest scale of sounding remotely ‘original’.

More on this in the conclusion.

The remaining three answers pick up right here: what actually distinguishes you when your style can be emulated, whether effort is irrational now, and whether we are all just algorithmic creators anyway. The full article, including the conclusion, will be on my Substack in a few days. It will be free to read with a subscription, and you'll get part three of this series when it is completed. If you decide to be a paid member you can also join the conversation. By adding comments to the post itself.

Coming out later this week!