Existential Quiz: AI Art is Real Art

Again, there's one and only one right answer.

At present, you can use generative AI to construct poems and stories with ChatGPT. You can use it to make images with Davinci and Dali. You can use it to create entire songs with Udio. Soon, OpenAI will release Sora, which will enable users to generate photorealistic videos from text prompts.

Question: Should images, movies, music, screenplays, etc. made by generative AI be considered real art?

Choose the best possible answer below:

• A) No. Real art takes skill to produce. It takes absolutely no skill to type a bunch of words into a prompt. Try again.

• B) Yes. Photography is an art, isn’t it? But when the camera first came out, I’m sure there were people who said that photographs didn’t count as art. Think of all those poor people who spent countless learning to make landscapes and portraits with oil paint. Then somebody shows up with a camera and BOOM. Furthermore, it takes skill to draw a perfectly straight line between points, doesn’t it? But in Adobe Illustrator, two clicks suffice to draw a perfectly straight line. Today we take auto-tune for granted in songs. We also have Photoshop and CGI. Heck, even a musical instrument allows us to hit notes perfectly, which the human voice might otherwise struggle to do. If we don’t consider all of this as cheating, then we can’t consider using generative AI as cheating, either. 

• C) Yes. All art made by generative AI requires prompts. And some prompts are better than other prompts. A director or a producer of a movie may not actually know how to work the camera or audio or editing equipment. But that person may still have a creative vision, and that person may spend the day “prompting” others and telling them what to do. In a sense, a movie script is a gigantic prompt that tells actors and those on set what to do.

• D) Yes. Generative AI inspires the spirit of play. Art flourishes in play. The technology brings the creation of art (and not simply its consumption) to the masses, and by so doing makes the transcendence that art affords more readily available to all. With generative AI, art is no longer something that “they” do (“they” make art, “they” write novels, etc.).

• E) Yes. The term “real art” is an oxymoron, anyway, kind of like “jumbo shrimp.” The word “art” comes from “artifact,” which simply means a “thing made.” Art has a long history of producing illusions. For more on this, see E. H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion.

• F) No. I insist. No. It’s not real art. There’s nothing you could tell me that would convince me that generative AI could produce anything close to the Sistine Chapel or Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I don’t want to watch or listen to something that a machine made. It is the human touch that matters, the fact that a human being struggled to bring this thing (whatever this thing is) into existence.

• G) Both A and F are the correct answers.

• H) B, C, D, and E are the correct answers.

• I) None of the above.  

Thanks for reading, whomever you are. If you think others might find this interesting or thought-provoking, why not share it with them? And also, why not leave a comment or a question or a provocation below? If you’d like to read another existential quiz, go here. For more on art, transcendence, and the “they,” read more Walker Percy, especially The Message in the Bottle. Some chap on this reddit thread pointed out how AI will make everyone into an artist. An interesting thought. Perhaps you disagree?