Leaving aside the whole debate about the ethics of AI art and copyright, I think one of my biggest gripes with the AI art industry is that generative AI art has this natural tendency towards producing weird and surreal imagery that I actually think DOES have a lot of artistic merit and potential if explored and leaned into as one of the unique strengths of the medium.
Like, when AI image generators were at the stage imbetween the vaguely recognizable imagery produced by neuralblender and the type of generators we're seeing today, they were producing really fascinating imagery that I'd argue had value as a contribution to the art landscape that was entirely unique to AI, since the weird surreal quality of the images was the result of Machine Learning programs interpreting words and images in a fundamentally different way than humans do.
Like i'd argue shit like this indisputably has a place as its own artistic style/medium, it's surreal and weird in ways which are completely distinct from what a human artist could produce because its unique strengths come from details that are inscrutable, ambiguous, and hard to parse to the human mind, which a human artist would have an extremely hard time mentally visializing, let alone translatong into an art piece.
But since the main selling point of AI art for both the people making these generators and the teach aficinados who are a little too into them is that AI art can serve as a cheaper/faster replacement and/or alternative for the work of human artists, progress is measured not in terms of how well they can use and explore the distincly non-human quality of AI art, but instead in terms of how well they can supress it to make it more closely mimic the work of human artists. So all advancement in the tech is geared towards progressively getting rid of the things I find artistically interesting about the medium instead of towards leaning into them as strengths that give it a unique, artistically worthwile style.
Like, I don't think AI art is inherently "soulless" or devoid of artistic merit, but I do think the focus on trying to make it increasingly indistinguishable from art produced by humans strips away the things that gave it artistic merit to me. This thing can produce imagery that is weird and wild and hard for us to even conceive but the profit motive's tendency towards rewarding homogenization has neutered that to turn it into a factory of increasingly bland, generic, serviceable imagery.
One of the ways I’ve been thinking of AI art is through the arborescent (representational) vs rhizomatic (abstract) framework. The explanation I’m familiar with comes from Deleuze and Guattari: basically, when you take an art form you can see it as trying to represent something else (e.g. a still life painting), or you can explore what it does when you discard its need to represent something else* and just explore what paint can do that no other medium can -- the basis for many breakthroughs in abstract art.
And I think this is really the issue that you’re pointing out: AI art is specifically being driven away from its abstract capabilities in order to get better at representing things.
Now, there’s nothing bad about representational art in and of itself -- I’m not one of those snobs who uses it to determine what’s “real art” or not. But I think that the overwhelming push towards training it to be representational rather than abstract is tied to the goals of using it to mimic other art forms (e.g. photos and paintings) in order to undermine people who use those art forms professionally, because representational art is more interchangeable than abstract art. Not completely interchangeable of course -- there’s multiple reasons we use photos rather than painted portraits even if they’re capturing the same representation -- but the point of rhizomatic art is that it’s based on exploring the capabilities of its medium. What those capabilities are is specific to the medium, and you can’t just copy & paste them across different media. This isn’t profitable to people who want to mimic a photograph.
Which is basically what you were getting at -- AI produces abstract art due to a function of its medium, specifically the fact that machine learning produces patterns that would never occur to a human.
Something I think is interesting about AI compared to other art forms is that its abstract and representational modes are in tension. Any painter of a still life could learn to paint abstractly. Ditto photography. But the more you train an AI to “correctly” represent things in its art, the less useful it is for generating abstract art, because you’re directly pushing the medium and changing it in one direction or another.
I don’t have a snappy conclusion to this post, just wanted to put these frameworks into people’s brains. Keep AI Art Weird 2023!
*the arborescent/rhizomatic terminology is because representational approaches work like a tree, with the trunk as the original thing and the branches being different representations of it. This is different to the rhizomatic (like potatoes) approach, where the plant can grow in any way and anything can connect to anything else.
