Why AI "Art" Feels So Wrong

0:01 [music] slop.

0:04 It's what we've decided to call the countless AI generated

0:07 images and videos that have started to flood the internet.

0:10 And it's pretty easy to disregard most of the slop we encounter as annoying,

0:15 cringe, mildly amusing or fairly inconsequential.

0:19 But the same force driving the creation of slop

0:22 is encroaching on cultural artistic spaces like film and animation.

0:28 When I encounter AI generated images or videos,

0:31 I don't know about you, but I get a very strange feeling.

0:34 I have a kind of gut reaction that something is wrong with these [music] images.

0:40 There is part of me that is skeptical of this gut reaction.

0:43 Am I falling into a trap that so many generations have fallen into before me?

0:48 Am I, as the proponents of AI might suggest,

0:51 just reflexively rejecting the next logical step

0:54 in technological advancement because it represents an uncomfortable change?

0:59 Am I merely repeating the pattern started by Plato when he critiqued

1:03 the development of writing by arguing

1:05 that it would cause humans to cease remembering?

1:08 Or does my gut feeling that something is wrong about

1:12 art generated by AI speak to something deeper [music] and true?

1:17 Does it reveal something about what art is for us as humans?

1:21 And that whatever art is,

1:23 trying to generate it using AI violates that thing in some way.

1:33 This is Tilly Norwood, an AI actress created by Particle 6,

1:38 a UK-based company that builds themselves

1:40 as Europe's leading upand cominging AI production studio.

1:44 Tilly caused an immediate strong backlash from many in Hollywood.

1:50 Actors frustrated at the idea of being

1:53 replaced in an already competitive industry

1:56 with some seeing the artifice of Tilly as unsettling on a deeper level.

2:00 Emily Blunt reacted to Tilly by saying, "Please stop.

2:04 Please stop taking away our human connection." Even if the technology is not yet

2:09 developed enough for Tilly to show up in the next season of House of Dragon,

2:14 it's pretty clear that some in Hollywood are

2:17 not opposed to the creeping advance of AI.

2:21 Some talent agencies have reportedly been circling Tilly.

2:25 Ridley Scott has said he's trying to embrace AI.

2:28 And Bloomhouse's Jason Bloom argued in reaction to Tilly Norwood

2:32 that AI is here to stay whether we like it or not,

2:35 and that Hollywood shouldn't stick its head in the sand,

2:37 but should instead embrace AI as long as it can be done ethically and legally.

2:42 He made sure to clarify.

2:44 Ashton Kutcher called AI an amazing tool that we should learn to work with.

2:50 And this is the most common refrain in support of using AI in art,

2:55 that it's just another tool, that rejecting AI would be like rejecting

2:59 digital cameras or computer animation in film.

3:02 And it's this argument that the creators

3:04 of Tilly use in their response to the backlash.

3:07 I see AI not as a replacement for people, but as a tool.

3:12 She is not a replacement for a human being, but a creative work, a piece of art.

3:18 But is Tilly art?

3:19 Could Tilly really be used to create art?

3:22 Is AI just another paintbrush we can use to put strokes on the canvas?

3:26 Or is it something else?

3:28 There are many potential reasons to be critical of AI.

3:32 Environmental concerns, legal and ethical concerns, even mental health concerns.

3:37 And while I'm worried about many of these, my goal here is

3:39 not to address the entire complex issue that is AI as a whole.

3:44 I'm going to focus on one small piece of this puzzle,

3:47 a relationship between AI and art.

3:49 I'm focusing on AI and art because I think this debate

3:52 forces us to clarify our human relationship to this technology.

3:56 And it's part of the discussion that is important to me.

3:59 But we can't understand if AI can be a tool that artists can use,

4:03 if it's something we should totally reject,

4:05 or some balance in between if we don't understand what art is

4:10 and what its purpose is for humanity and society in the first place.

4:16 [music] In Cave of Forgotten Dreams,

4:21 director Verer Herzog takes us into the Chauveet cave

4:24 in France [music] to see the oldest paintings ever discovered.

4:30 JF Martell writing about the film in his book reclaiming

4:34 art in the age of artifice says in the images

4:38 this prehistoric people have bequeathed to us we get a glimpse

4:41 of something like a shared humanity [music] but we also gaze

4:46 into a stranger part of ourselves [music] something reaching

4:50 to the depths seeing works of art made some 30,000 years ago

4:56 there is a striking sense of familiarity there's something

4:59 in the activity of creating art that feels [music] instantly recognizably human.

5:06 An impulse which remains within us despite such a vast passing

5:10 of time and how much society has changed across that span.

5:15 [music] What we find looking at this art is the mystery

5:18 of who these people painting these images were and why they painted them.

5:22 [music] It's as if we discovered signs of alien

5:26 life only to realize the aliens are us.

5:29 that our own existence is just as mysterious

5:32 and startling as anything else in the cosmos.

5:36 Even if we cannot know what these cave paintings mean,

5:39 there is a profound and moving mystery in the question of their meaning itself.

5:45 These images don't just represent the existence of something or someone,

5:50 [music] but a self-awareness of that existence.

5:54 The existence of the art in the cave [music]

5:57 is existence expressing itself for others to see and hear.

6:02 What we don't often think about is that despite how much art has changed,

6:06 despite all the technological advancement and scientific knowledge we've

6:10 acquired since these cave painters first did their work,

6:13 we are still caught in this mystery today.

6:17 Art for us is still mysterious and true works

6:21 of art still express [music] the mystery of life itself.

6:24 According to Martell, art demands that we feel and think the mystery

6:29 of our passage through this body on this earth

6:32 in this universe and bears witness to the bafflement

6:36 that the mere fact of existence elicits in our brains.

6:40 What is the impulse that connects the intricate carvings in Anchorwatt?

6:46 these cave paintings and the cyine chapel

6:51 with the mournful beauty of Debus's arabesque

6:54 number one or the hauntingly poetic images

6:57 crafted by Andre Tarovski in the mirror.

6:59 [music] I see in all of them an attempt

7:07 to express something the artist experienced but struggled to quantify.

7:12 [music] an attempt to express a mysterious part

7:16 of life that cannot be put into words.

7:20 A desire to leave not just a mark on the world, but our mark.

7:24 [music] A mark that says something about who we are and our experience of life.

7:34 Art is the thing that allows us to communicate about these mysteries

7:39 to share between two humans the unquantifiable aspects of our existence.

7:53 OpenAI, the company behind ChatGBT, recently released Sora 2,

7:57 an AI model that allows you to easily

7:59 generate AI videos that sometimes look startlingly real.

8:04 But it is also a platform that allows you

8:06 to view an infinite stream of these artificially generated videos.

8:11 Scrolling through Sora induces a kind of dizzying, uncanny feeling in me.

8:16 There is, of course, something familiar about this.

8:19 It looks at moments like I might be watching a Tik Tok or Instagram reel,

8:23 but there is something alien and strange about it as well.

8:27 At times, it evokes a chuckle more at the nihilistic absurdity

8:30 of the thing itself than any given video or joke created by the platform.

8:35 But the overwhelming feeling I get looking at Sora,

8:38 other platforms that feature streams of AI generated images,

8:42 Tilly Norwood, or reading a poem generated by an LLM,

8:46 is a strange sense of emptiness.

8:49 There is, to me, a perceptible vacancy to the entire thing.

8:54 While the occasional AI image might initially grab my eye,

8:58 I'm not drawn in by the same curiosity I feel

9:01 when a human work of art grabs [music] my eye.

9:04 I do not want more.

9:06 I'm simply left asking why does this exist?

9:10 What is it for?

9:18 You can ask an image model like Midjourney to generate a cave painting

9:22 in the style of the Chauveet cave and you'll get something like this.

9:27 Setting aside the fact that this obviously wasn't skillfully

9:30 crafted onto the contours of rocks some 30,000 years ago,

9:34 it would be easy to critique this image

9:36 by pointing out which details it gets wrong.

9:40 Tallying up all the ways in which the AI images do

9:43 not measure up to the original in terms of quality or style.

9:48 But I think doing so would miss the point because this image,

9:53 even if it got the details right,

9:54 would still be missing something that the original paintings [music] have.

10:00 But what exactly is missing?

10:03 If this AI image isn't art, then what is it?

10:06 What do we call it?

10:08 To answer these questions, I'm going to draw on the distinction made

10:12 by JF Martell between art and what he calls artifice.

10:17 In our lives, even long before the advent of AI,

10:20 we have been surrounded by and inundated with designs,

10:23 photographs, paintings, illustrations, graphics, symbols,

10:26 videos, animations, and other creative works.

10:29 Within this huge landscape, we find the stuff we typically call art.

10:34 But we also find the same skills and techniques that are used

10:37 to create art used to create a lot of stuff that is something else.

10:43 Most of us would probably agree, for example,

10:45 that Van Go's Starry Night is a work of art,

10:47 but would probably not think of a stop sign

10:50 or an event flyer as art in the same sense.

10:55 Martell calls this other category of thing artifice.

10:59 It's important to note that artifice itself is not bad.

11:03 The distinction here is not a value judgment.

11:06 And there is obviously artistic craft and skill

11:08 involved in the design and creation of artifice.

11:12 Intent, creativity, composition,

11:14 color theory are all employed to create an effective road sign or event flyer.

11:21 So this distinction is not about diminishing the talent that is often

11:24 needed to create good artifice or the necessity of artifice within our society.

11:30 Martell says, "Artifus foregoes the revelatory power

11:34 that is art's prerogative in order to impart information,

11:38 be it a message, an opinion, a judgment, a physiological stimulus, or a command.

11:44 The distinction between art and artifice lies in the purpose they serve,

11:48 both for the creator as a means of expression and to the viewer.

12:00 When I look at a work like Edward Hopper's Nighthawks,

12:05 there is no obvious message or statement to be found.

12:09 Instead, I find a strange sense of [music] mystery,

12:12 a weird juxtaposition of limonality,

12:15 loneliness, and beauty that is hard to describe, but which feels familiar to me.

12:20 [music] I get the same sense from Hopper's morning sun.

12:26 Is this loneliness, despair?

12:29 [music] Is the warmth of the sun about to awaken her from this melancholy?

12:34 Or is it somehow the cause of it?

12:36 As if the warmth of its touch is making her long for something more.

12:41 Is the emptiness on her face,

12:43 which is reflected in the sparseness of the composition,

12:46 connected to the industrial landscape that clouds her view from the window?

12:51 Is Hopper suggesting that these emotions are the result

12:55 of the modernist environment that was reaching maturity in the 1950s?

13:00 I don't know.

13:02 But he captures here in these paintings a feeling that I recognize.

13:06 And in recognizing that feeling, I feel connected not just to the painting,

13:11 but beyond that to the human expressing feelings through the painting.

13:17 Now, let's compare Morning Sun to these images created by Carl

13:21 Largerfeld for a 2010 campaign [music] for the fashion brand Fendi.

13:26 There's obviously a necessary level of artistic

13:29 skill needed to craft and style these images,

13:32 [music] but unlike Hopper's original work, there is no mystery at their core.

13:39 [music] We do not need to wonder what the images are trying to express,

13:42 what the model is feeling, or what emotion the photographer is trying to convey.

13:47 We know the purpose of these images is to showcase the clothing,

13:52 to get us to associate these clothes

13:54 and the brand with the prestige of Hopper's art.

13:57 The images are trying to get us to buy [music] something.

14:01 While I like these images,

14:02 and I think largerfeld is obviously a talented photographer,

14:06 Martell would argue, and I'd agree,

14:08 that they are not art, [music] but works of artifice.

14:14 Artifice isn't made for the purpose of exploring some deep, mysterious feeling.

14:19 Artifice might use or evoke feelings,

14:23 but its ultimate purpose in using those feelings is

14:26 to convey information or to get the viewer to do something.

14:30 [music] Whether that's drink a Pepsi or yield to oncoming traffic.

14:34 And doing this can be important.

14:37 You don't want a stop sign to express the profound mysteries of the universe.

14:41 You just want it to clearly and effectively

14:43 convince the viewer to take an action.

14:46 Authentic art, by contrast to artifice,

14:49 takes us out of the realm of the utilitarian altogether.

14:54 instead of trying to get us to do something or convey information.

14:58 According to Martell, art astonishes and is born of astonishment.

15:04 Astonishment, he says, is the litness test of art,

15:08 the sign by which we know we have been magicked out of the practical

15:12 and utilitarian enterprises to confront the bottomless

15:16 dream of life in sensible form.

15:19 In this view, art is made and exists simply

15:23 as an expression of and way to encounter the mysteries of life.

15:28 And the astonishment that defines art can come in the form

15:31 of grand expressions of religious wonder

15:34 or more subdued subtle examinations of emotion.

15:38 It can come in something as small as attention

15:41 to the way light plays across curtains blowing

15:44 in the wind or the simple beauty of how

15:47 objects and color dance together in a room.

15:50 It can even show up in a self-aware study of the way large

15:54 expanses of tone and the texture

15:56 of brush strokes can evoke certain emotional states.

16:00 Martell explains that this astonishment comes not from transcending

16:06 the uncanny strangeness and mystery of our everyday experience,

16:10 but by awakening us to it.

16:13 Astonishment is not necessarily a conscious end goal

16:16 that the artist sets out to symbolize within the work.

16:20 It is the driving motivation,

16:23 something that comes through the process of creating art itself,

16:26 which is revealed both consciously

16:28 and unconsciously in the thousands of decisions

16:32 made by the artist in the act of crafting a work.

16:35 Each culture or individual has their own taste in what they value,

16:40 and a stylistic language that they use for expressing this astonishment.

16:44 What astonishes one person or culture may confuse or bore another.

16:49 But what all art has in common is this attempt

16:53 at expressing our own astonishment at some aspect of existence itself.

16:58 It can be astonishment in the face of profound joy or the depth

17:02 of agony that can exist in life and everything in between.

17:07 And while not every work of art will awaken this astonishment

17:10 in every viewer when art is serving its true purpose, astonishment is there.

17:17 [music] I don't know if the painters in the show

17:22 cave were expressing a sense of wonder, fear, [music] desire, worship,

17:27 or celebration when they were depicting these animals

17:31 that would have been their source of life.

17:34 Perhaps what led them to create these images was the way

17:38 all of those feelings about the subject coexisted inside of them.

17:44 We can only speculate.

17:45 What we do know is that there was something astonishing

17:49 in these painters experience that drove them to take time away

17:53 from all the activities in their lives that served a more

17:57 obvious survival function to engage in the act of expression.

18:02 And whether or not we get our interpretation of their images right,

18:06 [music] much of the value we get out of the images

18:10 themselves comes from trying to connect with what they were expressing.

18:16 So what happens when we have an AI generated image of a cave

18:20 painting or any other kind of image that looks like art?

18:24 It might be visually similar just like the Fendi

18:26 campaign bears a resemblance to the Hopper paintings, but as an image object,

18:32 I would argue the AI generated images do not carry

18:36 the same expression of life that true works of art do.

18:40 AI, unlike the cave painters and other artists,

18:44 cannot express astonishment at some aspect of life through

18:48 art because it is not itself experiencing that life.

18:52 It is not feeling astonishment which it

18:54 can then translate into the artistic process.

18:58 Anything it makes can only be an imitation

19:02 of the end result of humans engaging with the artistic process.

19:06 An imitation made with no understanding of what it is imitating or why.

19:13 You can ask an AI to generate an image

19:15 of what loneliness and alienation looked like in the 1950s.

19:19 And you might even recognize and resonate

19:21 in some way with how AI depicts those feelings.

19:25 But these images are not an actual artifact that reflects

19:30 the real human emotions that someone felt in 1950.

19:35 While Edward Hopper's paintings are, and I think the extent to which we might

19:41 connect with the emotion of an AI image is simply

19:45 the extent to which we connect with its ability

19:48 to imitate how human artists have already translated experiences into art.

19:54 It can generate infinite variations

19:56 of these imitations in every conceivable style,

19:59 but it cannot add to the corpus of art

20:03 something new born out of a direct contact with experience.

20:07 It does not have its own experience of loneliness to then express.

20:12 And what draws me to a Hopper painting

20:14 is [music] not the content of the images themselves,

20:17 not truly the end result, but what is behind them.

20:21 A painting is not just graphic wallpaper meant to decorate a room or a museum.

20:26 I don't look at his work to see a city street or a woman sitting in a bed.

20:32 What draws me to Hopper is his perspective [music] on these scenes.

20:37 The way he captures certain feelings through

20:39 how he constructs [music] and paints the everyday.

20:43 He saw the world in a certain

20:45 way and expresses that perspective through his work.

20:49 [music] and his work connects me with another human's experience,

20:53 while the artifice only connects me with the arbitrary elements

20:58 of style that Harper may have used to communicate his experience.

21:02 [music] I believe much of what draws us to art is the artist's perspective.

21:07 Literally getting to see [music] how their way

21:10 of seeing the world gets encoded into their work.

21:14 AI fundamentally does not [music] have its own perspective on the world.

21:18 There is no way of seeing that it can then encode in a work.

21:23 At least in its current iteration,

21:25 it can only produce [music] imitation of existing perspectives.

21:29 That might work for the creation of artifice, but I think it leaves out one

21:32 of the most significant reasons we are drawn to art.

21:40 The heart of this issue is not just found by evaluating the end results.

21:45 It's also found by looking at how the works are made.

21:49 The artifice of AI generated images or text

21:52 is baked into the very way it is created.

21:55 Beyond conveying information and commands,

21:58 Martell argues that artifice works in service of creating consensus.

22:04 Consensus is the statistical world of useful knowledge,

22:08 generalization, habit, custom, and ideology.

22:11 Works of artifice reinforce consensus by representing reality

22:16 as though everything had already been mapped out.

22:19 The machine learning algorithms that generate text and images literally work

22:22 by using statistical and mathematical analysis to try to create predictive data.

22:28 An AI generated work is not created using the artistic process.

22:32 It's created by visualizing consensus found in data and information.

22:37 AI uses this consensus to reverse engineer an image in order

22:41 to meet the desire or expectations that we give it through the prompt.

22:47 The AI is a visual expression of the very

22:50 consensus that Martell argues is antithetical to art.

22:54 So while we might use it to generate something new in the sense that it

22:58 might be a particular arrangement of pixels

23:00 or words that has never existed before, it seems to me that AI cannot be a means

23:06 by which true astonishment and mystery are captured and transmitted.

23:11 Because true astonishment and mystery are not pieces of data or information.

23:17 They are something much stranger, felt, and experienced.

23:21 True art is the part of life that cannot be turned into data or information.

23:27 That's the whole reason why we encode these things into poems, paintings,

23:31 or songs in the first place instead

23:33 of just describing them using logic and reason.

23:37 But why should we care so much about the distinction between art and artifice?

23:41 If we lose sight of the dividing line,

23:43 we risk becoming victims to two unfortunate misunderstandings.

23:48 First, we might treat works of art as artifice and lose out on allowing

23:53 ourselves to experience the astonishment and connection

23:58 that authentic art has to offer.

24:00 Or we treat works of artifice as works of art and leave ourselves vulnerable

24:06 and exposed to the ways artifice is

24:09 trying to influence our thinking and behavior.

24:12 Our society is currently in the grips of both

24:15 of these misunderstandings beyond the ways we're manipulated by advertising.

24:20 We fall prey to all manner of propaganda.

24:24 And we simultaneously devalue the power of art

24:26 by frequently asserting that everything is artifice,

24:30 that there is no room for something greater that can truly move us profoundly.

24:35 Martell argues that in our modern world,

24:38 we are often closed off to allowing the forces of art to profoundly affect us

24:44 as a defense mechanism against the manipulative

24:48 power of all the artifice that surrounds us.

24:51 But this very guardedness that we use to protect our mental health

24:54 in such an artifice saturated world has turned into an apathy towards art,

25:00 something we need to thrive and connect as humans.

25:05 We put on ironic detachment and see

25:08 being unaffected by authentic expression as cool.

25:12 While we view those who are moved by something as weak,

25:15 sentimental and romantic become insults.

25:18 This jadedness has affected even the artists themselves who often only

25:23 engage with anything sincere through a layer of detachment or irony,

25:28 not wanting to be seen as cliche or sentimental.

25:32 The cost of all of this is high.

25:34 Cynical artifice posing as art concerned only with its own commercial viability

25:40 or ability to persuade or influence people and numbed out audiences unable

25:45 to truly connect with the rare artists and works that do manage

25:49 to get through the landscape of cynicism and exist as works of authentic art.

25:56 I focused here mostly on images generated entirely by AI.

26:01 But what if AI was just one small tool used

26:06 in the process of making a larger work of art?

26:10 This is at least currently the question that faces most filmmakers.

26:14 I don't think any small piece of artifice

26:17 within the larger work necessarily corrupts the entire thing.

26:22 I don't personally think that just because a small amount of AI

26:24 was used on part of Adrien Brody's performance in The Brutalist

26:28 that we should treat the entire film as if it

26:31 has no artistic merit and that it should be called Artifice.

26:36 There seems to me an obvious gap

26:38 between that and Tilly Norwood becoming a reality.

26:43 And perhaps, as Jason Bloom suggests,

26:46 if we can iron out the ethical and legal issues with AI tools,

26:51 we might be able to use them as a tool in our toolbox

26:55 in the same way that CGI and digital cameras are used.

27:00 But I think we should be very hesitant to do so because what makes art a work

27:08 of art is not just the end result but the process we use to get there.

27:12 True expression in art emerges from every

27:15 tiny choice made in the process of bringing

27:18 that art into reality as a representation

27:20 of our experience and perspective on life.

27:24 The artistic process is something both conscious

27:28 and unconscious that reveals itself through each brush stroke.

27:33 Through accidents and how we respond to them,

27:35 through collaborative decisions made by humans,

27:38 through the way the environment we make the art

27:41 within subtly influences each choice in the process.

27:45 Each decision or accident we make in the process

27:48 of creating art is an opportunity for meaning,

27:52 perspective, and experience to sneak into the work,

27:56 even when we're not consciously planning for that to happen.

27:59 Any aspect of the process that we use

28:02 AI for then necessarily removes you from the process.

28:07 But you and your perspective is the very source of what makes something art.

28:12 The prompt is not a tool you use to express yourself through.

28:16 It's a way of describing an outcome you want to achieve

28:20 and having something else try to achieve that outcome for you.

28:24 In the documentary series Mr.

28:26 Scorsesi, Leonardo DiCaprio shares a story from the making of the Aviator.

28:31 In one scene, both he and Scorsesi

28:33 knew that something wasn't working about the performance.

28:37 And Scorsesi after many takes told him that, but did not

28:41 want to tell him what to do to make it work.

28:46 Because Scorsesi knew it would be more valuable and more authentic

28:50 in the performance if DiCaprio found what worked on his own.

28:55 Scorsesi did this because as an artist, he understands that the process matters.

29:00 that even when working with a human,

29:02 sometimes giving them an explicit outcome to work

29:04 towards can be antithetical to the artistic process.

29:09 If the essence of a work of art is often found

29:11 in the very process of attempting to get to an outcome,

29:16 AI disconnects us from that process.

29:18 So, if we want the machine to make our art for us,

29:22 it strikes me that we may not understand the purpose of the art we're making,

29:27 that the true value of that art is not

29:30 a perfect outcome that we imagine AI will help us achieve,

29:35 but the process we take to get to an outcome.

29:39 And when we use AI, we risk undermining the very

29:42 process that allows deeper meaning to emerge through our work.

29:47 A typewriter might have made writing words more efficient,

29:51 but it did not write the words for you.

29:54 AI risks doing too much.

29:57 And in that process, artistry loses out.

30:01 If you want to make true art rather than just artifice,

30:05 I think you have to engage with the artistic process.

30:08 Not so that you end up with a perfect finished work

30:11 at the end that makes the experience you're trying to express comprehensible,

30:17 but in order to have a work that brings

30:20 the audience along on your attempt to express the incomprehensible.

30:26 This is why looking more closely at a work of art reveals deeper meaning,

30:32 while looking closer at a work of artifice often

30:35 reveals it to be less meaningful than it originally seemed.

30:45 But I must admit, while I have not yet encountered an individual

30:50 AI image that feels like a work of art to me, sometimes I do feel a kind

30:56 of dreadful astonishment at what these images represent.

31:02 If we peer into this endless hall of mirrors

31:05 constructed by some of the largest corporations on Earth,

31:08 which attempt to reflect everything we've ever created back

31:11 at us and ask why, what do we see?

31:15 When I look at it this way, I see a work that astonishes me with its absurdity,

31:20 surrealism, emptiness, and glut.

31:22 [music] An attempt to create a work

31:25 that encompasses everything humanity has created while simultaneously

31:30 trying to remove [music] as much of ourselves

31:32 from the creative process as we possibly can.

31:36 I see humanity trying to abandon its own involvement in the act of creation,

31:42 leaving itself with only its desires, its prompts,

31:46 waiting to be filled with increasing accuracy, precision, and speed.

31:51 And maybe this attempt reveals a hidden desire for self-negation.

31:58 that [music] perhaps our desire to remove ourselves from the creative process

32:04 itself is born out of a belief that we are fundamentally flawed.

32:08 [music] That we must overcome those flaws

32:11 by creating a machine that transcends our imperfect abilities.

32:16 One that can infinitely meet our needs with the touch

32:19 of a button without ourselves or another human being needing to be involved.

32:25 that can put an end to the unbearable mystery of it all.

32:32 But what if we have it backwards?

32:35 What if our involvement in the process, as messy as that may be,

32:40 is the very thing we desire and are trying

32:43 to satisfy with this endless [music] cascade of novelty,

32:48 information, and increasing productivity?

32:50 [music] What if we are seeking a machine that can perfectly fill our prompts

32:56 when what we truly desire is for ourselves to be prompted by an artistic vision.

33:03 To care enough about something,

33:06 an experience or perspective on the world that we want to do

33:10 the creative labor ourselves to falter

33:12 through the decisions and learning process,

33:15 finding the expression of that astonishment in each brush stroke.

33:21 What if what we want [music] is

33:22 an artistic project where no shortcut is fulfilling?

33:26 Because the project is not a means to an end,

33:29 but fulfilling as a process in and of itself,

33:33 as a part of life, which is not a problem to be solved,

33:37 but a mystery to be astonished by.

33:42 Imagine with me that perhaps 30,000 years ago,

33:45 the Chauveet cave painters finished their work,

33:48 put down their torches in charcoal,

33:50 gathered around the fire together afterwards, and one of them said,

33:53 "Wouldn't it be great if we could create

33:54 something that would do the painting for us so

33:56 that we wouldn't have to do it?" It sounds

33:58 absurd to us when we hear them say it,

34:00 but in many ways, that's the world we're living in today.

34:04 In the interview where Jason Bloom said,

34:05 "The industry needs to embrace AI," he also said,

34:08 "The consumer does not care if what they're looking

34:10 at is AI." And at first I thought he's obviously wrong.

34:14 Some people like myself do care about whether

34:16 or not what they're looking at is AI.

34:19 But on closer examination, I think he's right.

34:22 A consumer does not care about whether or not what they're looking at is AI.

34:27 A consumer is just looking for whatever might be

34:29 available to fill the craving they have in that moment.

34:33 Whatever might draw them in, appease them, and amuse them will do the job.

34:37 And there is certainly money to be made in giving consumers what they want.

34:41 But we have to ask ourselves, are we just here to appease consumers

34:45 and to consume or do we want something more?

34:49 Appeasing consumers is not the purpose of a work of art.

34:52 If you are creating to appease or experiencing

34:55 something for the sake of being appeased, you are within the realm of artifice.

35:00 Art is not made for consumption

35:02 but for the sake of expression and connecting with yourself,

35:06 others and existence through that expression.

35:09 While there is a place in this world for the creation and consumption

35:13 of artifice and that artifice can bring us a lot of joy and pleasure,

35:17 if we lose sight of the special role that art can play in our lives,

35:21 both as artists and audiences, I think we lose sight of a valuable part of being

35:26 human that has been with us since the chauvet cave.

35:29 We cannot escape our desire for the connection

35:32 provided by authentic art by getting better,

35:34 faster, and more efficient at making art of this.

35:41 Getting a clean shave is one of those things that always

35:44 to me feels like a little bit of a risky endeavor.

35:46 I used to be like, how bad is my face going to be mangled this time?

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37:33 Thanks again to Henson for making this video and mustache possible.