Even setting aside the irreconcilable and unforgivable ethical problems with GenAI as a technology and how it was built, GenAI is fundamentally product-brained and constitutes a form of mechanical anti-intellectualism for these exact reasons.
The pitch for GenAI is this: product without process. Instead of having to go through the process of expression by which one creates art, you press a button and a finished artistic product is delivered to you. "See?" says the GenAI salesman, "you achieve exactly the same result with none of the effort!"
And let's say he is right. He's not right, of course, GenAI output is mathematically constrained to always be an average of its available data and categorically incapable of matching a person's actual soul. But let's say that he is right, and that the GenAI model has delivered, fully formed and complete, exactly the same end product as you would have created had you gone through the bother, expense and process of making it yourself.
An identical book, with all the same words you would have chosen. An identical painting with all the same colors you would have used.
Even if the model produces this perfect replica of your expression, identical to the level of ATOMS...
... it's still not the same piece of art as it would have been if you yourself had made it.
Because if you had made it, you would have been changed by the act of creation. You would have undergone an experience, and by that experience you would have been changed. Not necessarily in any particularly novel, meaningful or interesting way, mind you, most art produces entirely mundane changes in the artists who make it, but change nonetheless. Which is the point.
"If it takes 10 musicians twenty minutes to play symphony, how long does it take 20 musicians to do it?" is a nonsense question because the purpose of playing a symphony is not to reach the end goal of imparting a certain number of sonic pressure waves to a certain volume of air - the purpose of playing a symphony is to have the experience of playing the symphony! If you blast every single note of Beethoven's 5th out of a speaker simultaneously, the result would not be a more efficient and accessible means of delivering the product of "music," it would be ear-shattering white noise, and more importantly it would not be Beethoven's 5th Symphony. Beethoven's 5th is the process of playing it. It isn't the notes on the sheets, it isn't the CD with a recording of it, it isn't the pressure waves of air produced by its vibrations. The experience of the symphony is the thing that the symphony is.
The GenAI pitch is anti-intellectual in this exact way, and deeply conservative and reactionary at its heart. It is a conception of art that attempts to reject the process of creation. "Do not go through the process," it chides, "Do not change! Do not be curious! Do not experience it! Stay in place! Do not change!"
Generative AI art is, despite the very best efforts of its salespeople, still art. Some people quibble with that, but I don't think that's productive. The people who create it are still changed by the process. They still undergo an experience. The question isn't whether GenAI produces art, the question is what kind of art it produces, and what does that art do? If art is a combination of experience and change, what are those experiences, and how do they change people?
As multiple studies are rapidly beginning to find, they are... pretty bad. Relying on generative AI to replace your own creative process and function, and your critical thinking, changes you into a less capable and less curious person. It shapes the ways in which you are capable of engaging with the world, it changes the processes you are capable of putting yourself through.
This is nothing unique to GenAI - the rise of the smartphone has made us all forget how to memorize phone numbers, for example. GPS and the constant availability of mapping apps has severely stunted a lot of people's capacity for unaided navigation. We outsource to machines and automate labor all the time, and we have done for centuries.
What is unique about expression, however, is that it is a human behaviour whose purpose is not merely the product, and the benefits of expression exist far, far beyond its mere material outcomes. The process of expression is itself purposeful and beneficial to the human animal, and by removing the process (or, more accurately, by severely compromising and limiting it), Generative AI becomes degenerative, it actively impairs and atrophies those parts of the human experience which are enriched by expression.
A creative artist can play with GenAI and make something cool with it. Many already have! But they can do that because they take the tool and use it playfully as part of a process. They generate a base and start painting or drawing over it, they mix and mash various prompt outcomes to build collages. They engage with it experientially. If not for the, again, irreconcilable and unforgivable ethical problems with the technology as it exists, GenAI could and would be a fun toy or a useful tool for artists to use as part of a process just like anything else.
But we don't live in the world where that's what GenAI gets to be. We live in a world where it is subsumed to the interests of capital, and where GenAI is not only the financial means by which corporations mean to immiserate and destroy the livelihoods of workers in their hundreds of thousands, but also the vanguard of an anti-intellectual, reactionary cultural movement whose purpose is to poison the well of artistic engagement for entire generations.
GenerativeAI and the people and companies who boost it are anti-intellectual to their core. The political and economic forces which seek to force it into our lives have our worst interests at heart, and a world which relies on this technology for its art is a world which is incurious, immature, static, alienated, isolated and miserable.
