Artistic Accelerationism: AI Art and the Aesthetic Development of Humanity
While looking at a piece of AI-generated art on Twitter, it struck me how aesthetically unique and captivating it was. It made me realize that I’ve never seen accelerationism explicitly tackled through an artistic lens, but that artistic accelerationism was a good description of my own aesthetic philosophy and I think it’s one that’s implicitly shared by a lot of advocates of AI art. (Accelerationism refers to a school of thought that seeks to speed up technological development and speed up human social development through the use of technology.)
In the Aristotelian tradition, art is not viewed as mere entertainment, but rather as a gateway to understanding universal truths and experiencing emotional catharsis. Aesthetics thereby isn’t simply a reflection of personal preference, but rather a science of how to evoke the desired understanding and emotional impact. As such, aesthetics is subject to the same system of self-reflexive improvement as any other science, and our understanding of aesthetics progresses over time just as our understanding of physics does.
The great artists of history have always labored to create new and different ways of understanding beauty, moving us away from the superficial beauty of a sunset or symmetrical human face and towards a transcendental ideal of beauty that grants us a much richer and truer understanding of the world and our place in it.
Great art has the potential to change someone’s entire life. It can spark new ideas they never would have thought otherwise and allow them to self-actualize into the person they didn’t even know they wanted to be.
It can take decades or even centuries for new art movements to reach their fullest bloom, and experimental artists often spend their entire lives fighting against the artistic establishment and their conservative notions of art and beauty.
But with the advent of AI art, new art styles and new notions of beauty can be artistically realized nigh-instantaneously and viewers can contribute their own re-interpretations just as quickly. Most of this new art won’t be very good and will be forgotten just as quickly as it was created, but art that is truly innovative or unique will still have the potential to go viral and inspire a new wave of artistic innovation, which will inspire yet more innovation.
Generations worth of aesthetic exploration and advancement could be achieved in mere months, quickly propelling humanity forward into new aesthetic experiences we can’t even imagine and granting us the potential to self-actualize on a level we never thought possible.
If you view art as a way to gain personal status and fame, things aren’t going to go well for you, but if you view art as a collective and collaborative process that everyone takes part in, the future has never looked brighter.
