Some time ago I saw a very thought provoking internet poster that spoke on art. A very tiny discussion but extremely intriguing to me.
Someone very snidely posited that every time you have wealthy kids that don’t need to work, they become useless and they play at and waste good money on some form of the arts. And precisely because not everybody can be very good at the arts, we get subpar artists. Besides which, they don’t move society along because they’re not productive members of the society as their illustrious sires.
To which someone countered, and I concur, that instead of being disparaging, why don’t we examine how curious it is that when humans don’t need to work for survival, we naturally gravitate towards the arts?
Doesn’t that speak at something primal within the framework of our very being? That over the course of history, perhaps moved along by the industrial revolution, we have somehow got to a point of evaluating all our lives' worth by how productive we are. Is this what we were made for? Is work all that there is to us? Are our lives to be measured solely by the economy and science of it all? Cogs in a wheel. Until the day we retire. And then die. Which, bleakly, is the best case scenario. Some people don’t even make it to retirement, after all.
In Sommarøy in Norway, as a publicity stunt for tourism, the locals have decided to do away with conventional time zones. The 24-hour clock is discarded. People do what they do. I’m sure there are some rules in place to stop society descending into chaos, but for the greater part of it, they apparently don’t operate in the strict 24-H rhythm. I mention this because of one very important outcome: they survive. Things still work.
So why are we so obsessed with being productive that it seemingly becomes all that there is to us? People should have some time to themselves. People need to de-stress, de-toxify, de-clutter. There are always more important things than things – people, family, friends, us.
And art.
It’s funny I was chatting with Atu the other day and Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli came up in the conversation. Miyazaki has proclaimed his disdain for AI art. He calls it an “insult to life itself”. This goes out for ChatGPT and all those other AI products that imitate life but without soul. Very sci-fi territory.
I think it is curious that we somehow thought with the rise of AI, we were imagining robots and the computers doing our calculations and our manual works for us. Sci-fi imagined lifelike robots of various designs that have rendered human labour unnecessary. Sci-fi dreamed of androids that could do the menial works of humans at better speed and strength than flesh and blood ever could. And what do the humans do? They turn to arts. Sci-fi is filled with beauty as far as the human society goes. Human society becomes artsy and fancy again because the machines are doing everything for us. Of course at some point, we enter dystopia but that’s the other end of the spectrum. Inevitable, one might even say.
In real life, however, the rise of AI has come to mean rise of AI art! What is human art that is time consuming and imperfect and expensive going to be valued at when AI can mass-produce art? How is a human artist going to compete with an AI that can combine the works of oh I don’t know Vincent Van Gogh and Sandro Boticelli and Leonardo da Vinci maybe in a matter of seconds and come up with its own Master Painter, with its own USP no less? Depressing to think about.
Art is how humans become immortal. Art is how we still remember William Shakespeare and Whitney Houston and Maggie Smith and Michaelangelo. It is not an indication of a person gone soft. Art is the soul of humans. Whenever humans don’t need to hustle and fight for survival, we have always naturally turned to the arts. Science and arts are not even all that different. It’s only when we quantify science that we divorce them.
It is interesting to think about what that soul will evolve to when it is AI that produces our art for us.
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