AI

I’m eons behind on the great AI art discourse, I know. This comic has come to mind repeatedly while I’ve been researching this book, and I was reminded of it again with everyone talking about AI making art. I don’t really have the bandwidth to argue about whether or not the things that these prompts create are art or not, and anyway 30 Rock settled that question for us.

“We know what art is: it's paintings of horses!”

Jack Donaghy

But I don’t feel like anyone’s hope for the future was that robots would be able to create songs, and paintings, and poetry to free us up to have more time for… I don’t know, email I guess? Aren’t robots supposed to do the drudge work of living, so that we can get on with the fun stuff?

It’s distressing. Aside from missing the mark on what we may have hoped the robot uprising would look like, art is a source of income for many of us. Humans won’t stop making art simply because a robot can do it. We’ve continued to make photorealistic paintings and drawings even though cameras exist, and we’ll keep making illustrations even though a computer can do it. Humans can’t help but to make art, and they’ll keep at it. But it’s a livelihood, and I wonder what will be the future of it. People have retrained and pivoted when the industrial revolution came and machines started to do the work we used to. When personal computers became available, most people saw them as a fad. A fun little novelty. I remember a graphic design professor telling me that he blew off his computer classes in college, because “no one was ever going to use one of those things for design.”

So I get it, people adapt. They adapt to new technology, and if they don’t, new technology will simply mow them down. Having read so much on the history of work, though, I wonder what the future of work will look like. Is all of it just coding? Is AI prompting going to become a job like social media manager did? Is anyone ever going to pay me to illustrate something with my human hands again? Did ChatGPT write this? I have a lot of questions, but no answers. I’ll leave you with this.