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| Hugging Faces' Stable Diffusion image of "Skyscraper rising over jungle 1950's paperback style" |
Phil Johnson is a video producer at Vox who made a recent You Tube video on his personal channel called "I found the perfect metaphor for AI Art" that is getting some views. The preponderance of videos on AI art are evangelistic demonstrations of its mushrooming proficiency, made by mostly enthusiastic embracers of it, and are presented-- with very little skepticism or curiosity (or certainly information) about the workings of it-- for the benefit of would-be users. Phil Johnson's video is for the rest of us. The borrowed analogy referred to in the title, which Johnson sweetens with Dad humor, is to the history of lace making, a highly skilled and specialized human art form developed in 16th century Northern Europe, the practice of which was assumed in the Industrial Age almost entirely by machinery. In the process lace was transformed from a rare luxury commodity prized and enjoyed almost exclusively by the wealthiest to a material widely available and affordable to all with a loss of quality according to Johnson discernible only to the most careful observers.
Let's set aside the possible objection that Johnson's characterization of the differences between machine-made and human-made lace as trivial is perhaps a bit too eagerly dismissive (and his acceptance of the coming analogous comparison of AI generated art to human art a bit hasty). AI is expected by experts to be commandeering computer graphic design in very short order in a very similar fashion. For the time being still the domain of highly skilled and talented humans, AI generated design, Johnson says will sooner than we think dominate the field of art, obviating the need for multitudes of highly trained professionals for what has until now been assumed by those not paying close attention to be an exclusively human function.
He then proposes that as with lace making, we prepare ourselves for the coming transition from almost exclusively human produced computer graphics to nearly complete domination of the field by computers by thinking of it as a process of Elizabeth Kubler Ross's Stages of Grief: First Denial (This can't be happening!), then Anger (I'll be damned if this is happening!), Bargaining (I'll give you a dollar if this doesn't happen!), Depression (I guess no one but me cares that this is happening.) and finally, Acceptance (Oh well!). If you think about it Johnson is urging Acceptance of the victim's death before the murder has happened.
I confess to some major skepticism about the capabilities that AI programs are exhibiting in the generation of original images. Are we comfortable it's not just diffuse mechanized collage, if not plagiarism? From my vantage given that they begin from phrases typed into a text box to the results of image searches presented in a graphically coherent meta-image I can’t get over the hump of thinking that even if I didn’t find it basically hideous to look at for the most part, it’s offensive to me that I'm basically being urged in the video to just accept that it is close to being “good enough” that there can be any sort of recovery of what is lost when it comes to dominate the visual aspect of what we produce and consume from now on. Make no mistake, owing to simple economics combined with the dearth of imagination, will and character of those who commission art, AI generated art (much of it as cheaply and thoughtfully made as Dollar Store lace) will become the dominant visual force whether we accept it or not. And for that reason we will accept it due to inoculation by visual overload which will result in an erosion and atrophy of our will to fight it long before the opportunity to reject it has expired. And then we’ll just wonder how our souls are being sucked, being no longer able to recognize the oppressive dissatisfaction of our visual yearnings in spite of the assault of artificiality of everything we look at.
Phil Johnson seems to be a journalist and it's tempting to take at face value that his voice is authoritative on the subject of the video. And perhaps it is. Nevertheless it's easy to overlook the fact (a fact which is utterly absent from every corner of the video) that acceptance is a choice. It just happens to be the choice that the perpetrators of AI on the public would prefer we all make.
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