Art is Dead. Long Live Art. And DALL-E 2.
With the advent of AI-generated images, videos, and writing, we are forced to once and for all decide how much context actually matters in assessing a work of art
Does Context Matter?
Several years ago, I had a debate with several coworkers centered on the question: What is, objectively, the greatest song ever written? Of course, this is an absurd question (even though I stand by my answer, “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys, with which no one else agreed). Through the discussion, it became abundantly clear that everyone’s interpretation of what constituted greatness was subjective, and so the notion of trying to assess greatness objectively was a dead end.
In any form of art—be it painting, drawing, music, films, books—human beings ascribe meaning from the context in which that art exists. On the one hand, that context can be related to our subjective experiences of consuming the art. For instance, reading a coming-of-age novel while coming of age yourself might change your perspective on life, while seeing the TV show everyone loves a year or two too late might drain it of any significance for you.
On the other hand, context can also arise out of how a work of art was created, as well as the time and place in which it came to be. Would Citizen Kane, created today, matter as a film? Would the Beatles, as an up-and-coming retro rock band in 2022 be considered by anyone “the greatest band of all time”? Could former fans of now-disreputable celebrities ever view their work in isolation without factoring in the scandals they became mired in? Humanity has grappled with these questions since cave dwellers drew primitive animals on their walls.
Serbias artist Marina Abramovic once said, “If you make the best bread in the world, you’re not an artist, but if you bake the bread in the gallery, you’re an artist. So the context makes the difference.” But is that true? And how much does the fact that there even was an artist matter? If the best bread in the world was baked by a robot, would it be less delicious? If that best bread baked by a robot happened to be put in a gallery, would it have less value as art? And would the robot have less value as an artist?
Enter the AI
And that brings us to the summer of 2022, where it’s impossible to peruse the internet for more than a few minutes without coming across a reference to the incredible technology developed by OpenAI called DALL-E 2. The magic of DALL-Eis instantly obvious: it can take any combination of (allegedly) any concepts and combine them into a highly realistic and complicated image.
For example, if you ask DALL-E to create an “old worn paperback mystery novel of a dinosaur detective smoking a cigar”, you might get something like this:
Or, ask DALL-E to create something in a particular artistic style, such as “a German expressionist painting of a bar mitzvah”:
Taking it one step further, DALL-E can be used to generate these images in the style of specific artists. For instance, asking DALL-E to create “Pablo Picasso Mona Lisa” produces this:
We now live in a world where it is possible for machines to generate virtually the same output a human might create (and often, even more expressive and diverse outputs than humans do create). But what’s even more incredible is that it is now possible to create output humans would never have created. We can generate an infinite number of Picasso-esque paintings, half a century after the artist’s death.
And this trend will only continue, as more and more of the “art” being created each and every day can now exist devoid of any “context” in the traditional sense of the word. How can context exist if the art is being created by artificial intelligences with no awareness of society, norms, politics, trends, movements, etc?
If Context Did Matter, Does It Still Matter?
One might say that much of the beauty or ugliness we see in any form of art comes from our knowledge of where it came from. That’s why a child drawing a blue rectangle is likely to be recycled, while this 1962 painting by Yves Klein, IKB 191, can be considered a masterpiece of post-war French art:
Let’s be real though. If DALL-E had painted the above, would anyone even know?
Earlier, I posed the question of whether art can have meaning, or even exist, independently of context. Perhaps that question is moot, because with the rise of artificially created art, more and more art will be created independently of context. And so we, as a species, are forced to ask ourselves a different set of questions: In that new reality, which art will we value? Why will we value it? What will differentiate the great works from the bad ones? Will we finally reach a point where art can exist on its own, for art’s sake?
Movies, Books, Music, and Beyond
This phenomenon is hardly just relevant to images. A plethora of text-generating AIs have emerged recently, and one can imagine DALL-E type technology that enables one to take a shared work document and ask that it be transformed in mere seconds “to the style of William Shakespeare” or even “to the style of William Shatner”. OpenAI (the very research lab behind DALL-E) has started working on Jukebox, which promises to do for music what they have done for images. If this AI had written “God Only Knows”, would I still think it the objectively greatest song? Are we only a few years away from videos being generated in the same descriptive way? Will feature films and entire television shows follow suit?
I wonder, given how quickly this space is moving, if the next generation of children growing up and falling in love with music, books, and movies during their formative years will ascribe entirely different meaning to their art. How much will future older generations and younger ones disagree about not only which art is great (as all generations do), but about what greatness in art even means?
P.S. In my previous article, Why a Monkey Has Never Written a Shakespeare Play, I similarly discussed the philosophical question of what gives art meaning. There, I proposed a mathematical interpretation. And in the postscript, I referenced a Jorge Luis Borges story, “The Library of Babel”, that I thought captured the spirit of the discussion. A friend pointed out that I should have referenced a different Borges story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, which poses similar questions around the meaning of art and the importance of context. Of course, maybe he only thinks it’s the better story because of some personal experience he had. Is there such a thing as an objectively best Borges story? (Of course, the answer is yes, and it is, in fact, objectively, “The Library of Babel”).
