The Death of Still Life & the AI Art Crisis
Artificial intelligence taking over the planet seems to be the new crisis everyone is talking about — especially in the field of art. There are a lot of discussions I’ve seen, and had myself, on what artificial intelligence essentially is, what its scope is, what it can do now, and how much improvement can be made in the future. It is also quite staggering how ChatGPT, a mere chatbot, crossed a million users in just 5 days & a mind-boggling 30 days to reach 50 million users.
For reference, the telephone took 78 years to reach that milestone. The radio took 38 years (to reach the milestone of 50 million years), the television 13 years, the bloody internet 4 whole years, Facebook 4 years, Instagram 1 year and 7 months, YouTube 10 months and Twitter 9 months.
The rate at which people adopt technology into their lives is clearly increasing. The more technologically capable we become, the more we discard in terms of human labour. The infinite series & calculus saved mathematicians the ridiculously long time for calculating the value of pi, calculators replaced the ridiculously long time to make large calculations in general, smartphones have replaced alarm clocks, calculators, notepads, sound recorders, etc. and high-end computers are now churning out Marvel movies with world-ending scenarios in 4K every Tuesday.
Very recently, AllttA released a track where he can be heard with hip-hop legend Jay Z, except that it wasn’t Jay Z’s voice at all — it was completely AI-generated. There is even AI that can create completely authentic music of any genre.
In such a world, is art really necessary? Was art just an unnecessary flex of our complex cognitive abilities, something we could have used more productively than just painting contorted images of the night sky & screaming distorted faces or realistic renditions of imaginary landscapes that exist within the mind of one person? Will artificial intelligence replace art?
The Birth & Death of Still Life
It is pretty established that I live a lot of my life locked up inside my own head. I dream up scenarios that will never happen, ask questions that no one in my vicinity would know the answer to, and try to answer them through research. For example, I often try to rationalize how tech YouTubers suddenly became entitled to make electric car reviews as if they have any idea as to how actual cars work, or how at some point in internet history, we decided 4chan was a great idea. In one such random train of thought, I got lost in a rather irrelevant topic, which spiraled out of control and culminated in this article — and that topic was, ‘Why do Artists paint fruits?’
I know, it is such a mundane topic to think about, but that got me thinking about the meaning of art & how the human mind changed its perception of the same over the course of its existence. However, more on that later on — I had dived deep into art history and found that this specific style of art, of painting ordinary everyday objects, was known as still art.
Still life is one of the most labour-intensive forms of art I have ever seen, and it is absolutely breathtaking to me when I see it after fruition. Hyper-realistic renditions of real-life scenarios with detailed shadows, multiple oranges blended in with one another to get the right shade of sunset for a 5 cm stretch in the sky — the amount of detail that went into these paintings is almost painful to imagine. However, artists all over the world largely agree that today, still life is arguably the most boring to paint and look at. As someone who hasn’t lifted a paintbrush and produced something worth anything ever before, still life to me seems like magic — how do you blend so many colours in such intricate ways and instinctively know when to stop to get the right shade? It is beyond my wildest imagination.
However, one of my friends, who is herself an artist, pointed out something to me that put this entire thing into perspective. The reason why still life is so boring to artists is that after all that hard work and dedication, what you end up with is a mere representation of reality through the human eye. There is no intrinsic meaning behind the brushstrokes, no conscious effort put into adding a bit of personal flair — the image dictates the art, and in turn, restricts the artist to, literally, colouring between the lines.
The point of art as a medium was to be a window into an artist’s mind, their surroundings, their life; a medium to express their thoughts in a personal way that defined who they were while expressing it. However, this is rather the evolved form of art as we know it, because if you think about art as having started from paintings, we have this:
This picture is the first known remnant of anything creative ever to have been found that was created by humans. It is estimated to be 45,500 years old. There is no note from the artist describing it, no meaning to be derived, no surreptitiously hidden undecipherable metaphors — it is simply a pig on a wall of a cave. It was probably just created by an unknown artist as a means of communicating to his tribe that this was what they were hunting.
Still life was basically just an extension of that same philosophy — a more sophisticated recreation of a landscape or a person with high accuracy and detail; a slate upon which an artist could practice their craft on so that they could perfect it. The expertise they would have gained would be what they would have used to create the art they really wanted to; the art we ascribe meaning to today.
I remember the first time I saw one of Raja Ravi Varma’s paintings when I was a child, thinking about how beautiful the woman in that painting was. I have always considered him a very great painter, and I still do. However, a lot of his work is rather boring. For example, his painting blandly titled Woman Holding a Fruit was a work of art, and even though it is seen today as a ‘European Naturalist representation of an amalgamation of eroticism & innocence’, I believe that this is nothing more than what the title says in that painting. This is, of course, my view of this painting. If you disagree and have a different opinion, it is well beyond my limits to stop you.
Compare that painting to Starry Night by Van Gogh. The first thing that struck me about that painting was not the painting itself, but the name. There were a lot of other things in the foreground of that painting that could have made it into the title of that painting — it could have been called The Rolling Hills, or The Village under the Sky, or anything else. Instead, Van Gogh intentionally decided to name the painting Starry Night, bringing the background to the fore — making it the central theme. What’s more interesting about the painting is that even though the painting is of a distorted sky, you can trace that sky to the specific night on which Van Gogh painted this, hence giving us the spectacle of that particular night through the lens of Vincent Van Gogh’s eyes.
This is not to say that Raja Ravi Varma was any less of a painter. In fact, his painting of Shakuntala is the only way I can ever imagine that character and her surroundings. It gives an insight into his mind as to how he viewed Indian ithihaas. This brings me to the next point as to why still life as an art form died — the invention of photography.
With the camera being invented, there was no longer a need for rich people to get their portraits painted or sceneries depicted in high detail — the camera could do that for you. This would have definitely put a lot of artists out of jobs, rendering their specific skills obsolete. However, does that mean that art just died? No, it didn’t. In fact, what is the first thing you learn to paint and draw in art class? It isn’t Starry Night or Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, it is still the same old fruits and vegetables they used back in the old days.
What was the point of this long drawling story of a long-dead art style, you might ask at this point. Well, this story wasn’t chosen at random. Let me explain.
The AI Panic
I am a writer who depends on my skill of stringing words together in creative ways to write blogs & website content. My livelihood depends on it. So, when I heard about this new chatbot that could potentially put my job at risk, I had to test it out myself to see what the fuss was all about.
I asked ChatGPT to write me a blog about something I had already worked on, types of atheism. I must say that it was impressively accurate in terms of the facts that it spat out, but that was about it. It did not understand the complex world in which the idea of atheism was born, there was no order to the facts that were presented, and most importantly, there was no intrinsic storytelling method in which the facts were woven in order to tell a compelling story about it. That’s when I realized the value of human involvement in the creation of art — it is the lens through which the artist shows us the art form rather than what the art is on an intrinsic level. This is why art pieces such as Barnett Newman’s Onement VI sells at 46 million dollars as opposed to just an AI-rendered wall of blue — there is a deeply human connection of the buyer with the art which prompted them to buy at that ridiculous price, something that AI cannot quantify into data and generate as an image.
So Artists are Safe?
Well, unfortunately not. See, for the average person, writing is just putting pen to paper. Anyone can write, right? I mean, most people cannot discern AI-written content from human content, and that is a fact. I can make the demarcations I made above because I myself am a writer, and can see the difference quite well, in the same way my friend did not feel awe-inspired by still life art. However, in the same way that AI cannot draw hands the right way, there are certain things AI cannot do in terms of writing content as well — and it is strangely the same reason.
See, I have been writing content for well over 2 years now, specifically for startups and mid-sized companies. I have tried using ChatGPT to see how it has gotten and I must say that the content is rather two-dimensional. Now I know that may sound purposefully ominous and obtuse, so let me explain further.
I’ll tell you the literal version of it with respect to the visual arts and use it as an allegory to explain the same in the content landscape. AI works by sourcing billions of images from all over the internet and piecing them together to form an image. However, since the images are two-dimensional and the AI has no idea of the context in which the pictures are taken, it simply does not understand how hands work in the three-dimensional spacial manner we are used to seeing them. Hence we end up with these weird images when it comes to hands and feet. This video will do a better job of explaining the concept to you.
Now, how is this the same thing with respect to art, you might ask. Isn’t content inherently two-dimensional? No, it’s not. Yes, you are writing on a piece of paper that is two-dimensional for the most part, but what you write is not just a bunch of words hastily put together to form a sentence — it is a carefully strung choice of words that mean something to you as you write, each word deliberately chosen to convey an emotion you feel. AI can give you a detailed story of a group of wizards who go to a wizarding school to learn witchcraft, but it will never leave you feeling empty the way you felt when Dobby died in Harry’s arms.
That said, AI will easily take over the jobs of mediocre writers who essentially just do the two-dimensional work that AI does. It is essentially how autocorrect killed the typist — it was simply replaceable. However, if you are a good artist with a good enough skillset, you aren’t going anywhere.
In fact, here is a simple test to show you that there isn’t really anything to worry about. If you get it, you’re going to survive. If you don’t get it, you’re going to be replaced pretty soon.
