The new creator: The role of the artist in an AI-infused future

A primer to orient the artist in the new creative paradigm

Approaching AI as an artist

I’m an artist. When I was a kid I was always drawing and writing. Characters, creatures, objects, scenes. I laid in bed at night imagining worlds, and I fantasized about being able to share them with other people. Not much has changed. My imagination wants to fall out of me, and I’ve learned that it doesn’t really care what medium it comes out in.

Why? Because, whether it’s a song, or a painting, or a story, it’s always only a transcription of something else; something ephemeral, and impossible to truly capture.

This sense of formless potential has allowed me to see the artistry in every medium that I’ve come across. I’m not an artist because I draw, or because I make music, or pretty pixels. I’m an artist because I try to capture these fleeting impressions and share them with others using whatever means are available to me. I’m an artist because I engage with a process, and through that process, I engage with myself and find a feeling, and try to draw it back through the event horizon of the imagination.

And now, as generative AI tools have emerged, I have watched as artists and other creatives around me have reacted with everything from skepticism, to fear, to profound revulsion. And I get it. I have to remind myself that I’ve been playing with these tools, and thinking about their implications for a few years already. I have already had my mourning period.

So, I’ll tell you what I see now. I see something that will take me closer to my dream. I see a new creative multi-tool. The suggestion of an entirely new medium — and it may be the most transformative medium yet; the crafting of goals and intentions.

But then the bad feelings come

On the other hand, I still feel the practical anxieties that are evoked by this new technology. Our global economy is predicated on a conception of human labor that is up-ended by these new tools, threatening the status quo. Today, art is intimately bound up with labor, capital and commerce. Our personal creativity is cast as our little oil field, and we fear that AI is drinking our milkshake.

These concerns are exacerbated by the ways in which AI is being represented and construed by commentators who haven’t yet integrated many of its implications, or its fundamental limitations. An adversarial stance, then, would seem to make perfect sense.

However, this technology is not a singular development. It emerges from the aggregated knowledge of mathematics and physics, cognitive science and neuroscience, computer engineering, material science, and so on. The genie cannot be put back in the bottle because it was never in a bottle to begin with. All we’ve done is assemble the pieces we already had.

So, of course we have to navigate the social and political dimensions of this technology’s rollout. Furthermore, we have to reckon with this pervasive sense of uncertainty, and re-calibrate our intuition about what is possible for us to accomplish; alone, and together, and with AI. There’s a lot to learn.

But we must not shrink away from this challenge. Instead, we must all embark on a personal journey that relocates us into this new frontier.

Your progress is not lost

A common concern I see is that an artist or craftsperson's hard-earned skills will become obsolete. Okay, let’s take this straight on.

I’m not going to sit here and tell a 3D modeler that pushing polygons around with a mouse is going to be a skill that will always be in demand. But if you like creating 3D objects and scenes, and you’re good at it, you will also be good at what’s next. Your talent is not in your wrist, or in your creative implements, your talent is who you are. Your perspective. Your choices. Your taste. Removing creative limitations won’t create more competition for you, it will create less, as everyone shoots off into their own personal attentional trajectories.

Another way to approach this concern is to consider that the AI products that are available now have been designed by a narrow subset of people who are trying to make a general tool that merely works. They don’t really even know what they’re making yet. As a consequence, they have a natural bias toward keeping the interface simple and unopinionated, favoring natural language. Therefore, the first applications were always going to cater to the masses. Interfaces have not yet been devised to meet artists and craftspeople where they are, in order to leverage their existing skills. But they will come. We will make them.

Until then, we have some time. And we should use that time to familiarize ourselves with what does exist. Our fumbling now will pave the way for competency later, and maybe even mastery. You don’t have to abandon your reservations, but even if your disposition is to reject this shift, you still must know thy enemy.

The AI will not replace you

The important difference between the art that you make as a human, and what AI generates, is that one of those things is produced by a human. This might seem obvious but it’s actually really subtle… you are a puny, limited mortal monkey and your works are scarce, and precious, and embedded in space and time and human relationships— contrasted against the detached creative potential of a boundlessly expanding immortal intelligence literally trained on all of human creation.

In a very real sense, these AI models are just externalizations of our collective unconscious. They can synthesize all of the space between all of our words, all of our works. They are the formula for describing all that we have implied. But they don’t know where our choices ultimately fall. They can’t predict what we will do next. And if they ever can, we will turn our attention toward proving their predictions wrong — because that is what we do. The artist finds a way.

And there’s a layer even deeper: AI is only involved in what you do because you do it. If you did something else, something no one’s ever done, AI would do that too. It will be bound to us like our shadow so long as we instrumentalize it. And I’d wager that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

But if the AI can do what we do, then what are we for?

So let’s step back for a moment to survey the future that is rushing towards us, and identify a few directions that the artist can explore.

The artist as a transformative force

Okay, I’ll say it. We are at the dawn of a New Renaissance.

In ages past, the mundanity of life was pierced by the presence of Great Art. Art was not a trinket or a decoration, art was a rare communion with something beyond one’s own imagination. Art was an oasis of strange intention. Art was a spirit that animated entire ages. The role of the artist as visionary, shaman, and provocateur was more than brand. More than aspirational. It was the purposeful shaping of reality.

Perhaps it’s the commodification of art craft, or our alienation from mystery, but some force has brought us to a place where it feels heretical to say that art does not answer to economics. What a perverse inversion of the true source of value. The shark can’t swallow the whale, no matter how voracious its appetite.

This vision of the artist confronts, and compels us to react (or in our non-reaction, react). We are fundamentally tethered to our time and place, so our work orients and perhaps even directs its viewer. You are this. This is like that. That is a lie. The viewer is moved, not just emotionally, but in subtle dimensions beyond description.

Into this trickster’s hands are thrust the tools of illusion and manifestation and synthesis. We can find many traditional artists like this in our galleries and public spaces; Painters, graffiti artists, sculptors who aspire to arrest our attention, and freeze us in contemplation. Their art is the transformed perspective. Does this new technology not unearth fertile soil for their incitements?

The artist as an explorer

In the vast, uncharted territories revealed by AI and LLMs, artists assume the mantle of explorers. This new frontier, teeming with the unknown, calls to the artist’s inherent desire to learn, to chart the unseen, and to bring back tales of what lies beyond the horizon. While most people content themselves to live within the confines of the familiar, the artist, armed with fearless curiosity and creativity, strikes out into the unknown realm— not as a conqueror, but as a voyager, seeking to understand and interpret the language of this new world.

The journey of the artist-explorer is not one of mere observation but of deep excavation and discovery. It’s about how way leads onto way, where each input from the artist nudges the AI to reveal another vista into its endless domain of potential outputs. This exploration is not without its challenges; it requires the artist to learn, adapt, and evolve. To think beyond traditional mediums and methods. Their art is their curiosity. And in this challenge the artist finds the purest form of exploration. Each choice is a step into the most vast unknown at our disposal.

The artist as an explorer inspires future attitudes and media and memes. They navigate the possibilities and map out the emotional and intellectual landscapes that they find, bringing back insights that can inspire, provoke, and enlighten society. Their explorations demystify. The samples they bring back illuminate the imagination.

Through their ventures, they not only expand their own creative horizons but also provide a powerful signal for other humans; a human found something of interest here in the infinite expanse — you might find it interesting too.

The artist as an organizing principle

From the growing infinity of generative potential, someone has to trigger some sort of instantiation. In the same way that we’ve always had to draw form from our imagination, hands will have to reach into the generative space and weave together some fabric that is receptive to human life. Whether you’re a creator, or a curator, or a critic, humans will choose which coordinates of the infinity we want to live in. We’ll take these fragments of possibility and architect them into something that is greater than the sum of its parts.

For me, this is the most compelling narrative for the future of the artist. You, the artist, have no bounds. You are not the dreamer, you are the dream. Your aspiration is to create something wholistic that rushes to meet the observer (or shrinks away from their gaze, if you wish). Your art is not inert, but dynamic, and participatory. It’s beyond your ability to render in charcoal, or pixels, or polygons. It’s beyond your ability to completely control or foresee.

Instead, you embed intentions in a myriad of artifacts and spell-like intimations. You create the signposts and outposts in a frontier of your own design. You wear in trails that others may pave into roads. Your art is the way you move, and the impressions you leave behind. Your art is in the eddies of recognition and interaction that form in your wake.

You will take this tools and you will build worlds. You will create at scales, or levels of definition, that you never previously could have imagined. You won’t have to find your audience, because they will be led to you by AI who can see your constructions like a lighthouse in the night.

Into the unknown

The emergence of AI redefines how the artist can fulfill their role in society. In this new age, artists are called upon to adopt roles that are both ancient and unprecedented. The artist as an explorer, the artist as a transformative force, and the artist as an organizing principle — each of these roles signifies a different facet of our emerging relationship with AI, yet all are unified by the pursuit of expanding the bounds of human creativity.

In this AI-infused future, artists are not displaced; rather, they are indispensable. They are the visionaries who can see beyond the data, and the algorithms, to reveal the profound human truths that these technologies can help us express. The artist’s touch — imbued with intuition, emotion, and subjective embodied experience — remains irreplaceable, drawing definitive forms from infinite potential.

However, this journey is not without its perils. As we embark on this path of co-creation with AI, we must also confront the risks and challenges that will accompany our reliance on, and integration with, such powerful tools. The democratization of creative tools risks diluting the perceived value of professional artistry, while the rapid evolution of AI capabilities poses ethical dilemmas concerning originality, authenticity, and economic realities. There is a delicate balance to be struck between harnessing AI’s capabilities to expand our creative horizons and ensuring that this does not lead to a homogenization of expression or the undermining of artists’ livelihoods.

It is for this reason, we have to engage with these tools now, with attention and intention, so that we are informed enough to help guide us collectively toward a better, more harmonious outcome. If we handle this well, AI tools and collaborators will unlock and amplify the potential of the artist.

As is often the case, the artist holds the key to unlocking our potential by doing what artists do; by showing us a human truth that isn’t in the training data — because it can’t ever really be fully expressed in the first place.

— dxxmsdxy