A.I. Art: The Hand-Made Tale

The rising Value of craftsmanship from the ashes of A.I. Art’s Great Depression

About 4 months ago, and for all eons prior, any beautifully rendered piece of art, by definition, signified someone’s hard-earned artistic mastery. It told a backstory of years, dedication, effort and skill. It was a physical testament to the better part of an artist's lifetime spent in struggle to hone a craft, as that was the only path available to humanity to create such beautiful work.

Today, with the sudden appearance of A.I. art generators like DALL-E 2, Midjourney and others, the entire concept of aesthetic expression has been unceremoniously and cleanly amputated from any skill whatsoever. The artwork produced by these systems, while technically plagiarizing the talents of artistic masters before it, has been suddenly stripped of a meaningful creation story.

All of a sudden, beautifully rendered art is no longer rare. No longer difficult to create or come by. No longer do highly rendered images signify anything akin to talent, skill, craftsmanship or mastery. Every creative impulse can be suddenly fully rendered en masse without so much as a clear vision. Indeed a text prompt is barely an idea. One can now generate pieces of fully-rendered art in seconds in a near-accidental way.

With typos.

Predictably these new tools are leading to voluminous sprays of well-rendered images fire-hosing through countless preening social media cannons in exponential multiples.

And as the most populous, mediocre belly of the bell curve, and everyone below it, madly rush to fully resolve a hundred beautiful art pieces for each of the infinite Ga-Jillions of cryptic, half-baked texts, tweets and dim-witted comments that routinely choke the very internet backbone, which is to say, a trivial, unending vomit of worthless junk, the obvious outcome of this high-aesthetic, talentless free-for-all is going to be a kind of unstoppable economic art depression where, wildly over-printed and issued, the very idea of well-rendered art will inevitably become utterly valueless.

In short, excellent rendering is no longer rare; subject to the same inflationary dynamics that plague weakened monetary systems.

The promise of course is that A.I. Art can unlock your ideas. That it can give life to everyone's concepts. No longer trapped behind the majority's skill-lessness perhaps everyone's conceptual creativity can see light of day.

Some will celebrate this communistic redistribution of aesthetic expression. But the thing few are acknowledging is that despite the outward appearance of the A.I. result, you're not getting what you wished for.

The Hidden Flower

As children every one of us had the experience of failing to draw well.

Further, I'm willing to bet that at one time or another, every one of us specifically failed to draw - a flower.

Upon finishing, yes, there was probably a kind of a flower on the page but good lord, in no way did that winding skid of crayon wax resemble the delicate, intricate beauty, the aspirational joy, color and vibrancy, the perfect form and expression of love spilling from your mind. That vastly more beautiful, aspirational flower was still confoundedly trapped in your 5-year old imagination. Your drawing was just a desperately poor approximation.

Many more poorly rendered flowers later most people tend to settle. Unwilling to spend the hours necessary to develop one's skill, they decide, “I can’t draw”.

We have all learned first hand, probably more than once, how impossibly hard it is to transfer our inspired, specific mental images into the coarse particles and gestures of any medium. A line. Charcoal smudge. Dabs of colored mud. Wax. Clay. Wood. Stone. Even pixels. Wielding control over these defiant elements with such expertise that the image in your mind appears before your eyes is a kind of super power.

And yet today, despite the surface appearance of its well rendered output, whatever the A.I. creates upon your typed, “/imagine prompt: a flower”, it is by definition NOT whatever was actually in your head. If you indeed even bothered to envision anything specific at all. Maybe that's part of the problem - with A.I. you can lean back in the lazy chair and wholly disassociate even from the work of having an imagination. Pure thought impulse.

"Flower please. Don't care otherwise. ...oh that looks cool."

What you get back is the aped flower mash-up of a thousand real artists who did bother to imagine something and spend life and effort learning a craft. As such, this flower is not yours. It will look nothing like the particular image you had in your head. It will be a very well-rendered flower, true. If you labor and toil, sweaty-browed over your lame, little six-word prompt (or dare you use twelve words? Imagine!), its unique character may even appear to be intentional – a point many already seem perfectly happy to lead on without clarification or attribution. And you’re probably much happier with that stolen someone-else's flower than the awful crayon version you drew at age 5 and would still probably draw today.

But hear this, with AI, all you're doing is settling for that crappy crayon flower you drew as a child all over again. Sadly, you're no closer to expressing *your* specific vision, your idea, than you were then. An objectively better looking flower than the one you could draw happened into existence in front of your eyes perhaps, but no closer is it to the specific image in your mind. No closer are you to actual communication or creativity. No one understands your vision. You’re still just “2001: A Space Oddessy's” primitive man dumbly touching an unknowable monolith. You merely squeezed your impulse through a homogenized Playdoh Pumper and out pooped some flower-shaped log that you had no hand in crafting.

It’s not your flower.

No one will ever see your flower.

You're mute.

Because - you - lack - skill.

Prompt Hacking (LMFAO)

If you doubted for one second that A.I. Art is the medium of the Participation Trophy Generation, almost as if on cue, it's all laid plainly bare today by the 20 thousand preening Tik Tokkers bloviating endlessly about: “prompt hacking”.

A.I. Art is the medium of the Participation Trophy Generation

Prompt Hacking, or just as ridiculous: "Prompt-crafting". Sure. That's a craft. Give me a break. And congratulations- in about 12 minutes you figured out how to use the easiest art tool ever created by humankind, and somehow immediately thought, “I'm gonna make videos of myself explaining the easiest thing a human can do short of sticking two Duplo blocks together 'cause I guess I'm an expert now.”

You should all feel embarrassed. And past the waning of sheer novelty, which ended about a month ago by the way, there is no reason to post A.I. generated images on social media with the word “my” anywhere in the caption. Because it’s not.

It remains to be seen whether there is such a thing as "being good at AI Art" as opposed to "being bad at AI Art". I suppose it's possible there is a person in the world who is so supremely conceptually clever that their 6-word prompt concept results in significantly better results than the next guy. But more likely any such differences will barely mark the scale. The aesthetic bar has been raised, and then solidly flatlined.

The Rise of Craft

Despite the recent meteoric inflation of impulse artists, and corresponding devaluation of art, I have to think the rules of economy will nevertheless eventually find a footing. Supply and demand will find something to attach to.

I could be woefully wrong. But I like to believe value will still be sought. Even here in this colossal rat's nest of beautifully A.I.-rendered mediocrity, value will once again reattach to scarcity. As it always has. And no, Tik Tok influencer, it will have nothing to do with “prompt hacking”. But human effort will play a role.

For some the answer may be a more complex, extended use of A.I. art. Where the concept requires a larger palette, many pieces of art in some unique combination and a degree of effort that makes duplicating such work more difficult. In other words, it's not the art you impulsed into existence, but what you do with it once it's generated. You still have to do something very difficult, but rendering countless images, check. That’s one way this plays out.

But maybe more profoundly, as we witness the decline in value of highly rendered images, we will invariably also see a rise in the value of craftsmanship and more specifically a craftsmanship backstory. The backstory of human creation. The knowledge that the lifetime of a fellow human's effort was applied to honing a craft that resulted in this particular piece you hold in your hands will surely carry renewed value. All of a sudden only the value of that craft is left. And not because it's significantly better-looking than the A.I. version, render-quality is simply no longer the scale. But because it represents something more valuable and rare than A.I. can ever hope to deliver. Craft represents us, scratched into the surface of our mediums with hand and body. The human struggle. Effort. Skill. Sweat. Pain. Commitment. Truth. More than that, the dedication and commitment of a human life to this piece of work. THIS ONE was hand-made. By a master. A person, who's organic, natural flaws were overcome through challenge. That is what will make a piece valuable in the coming Great A.I. Art Depression.

To be fair, a lot of people will probably still opt for the voluminous A.I. junk. Just as they buy massively available particle-board tables from home-improvement stores today. But it's the artisan craftsmanship of a hand-carved, wood-worked table that will carry the higher value.

The Gift of Limitation

Often those of us outside a medium look on at masters and say “look how good they are at that”, and we marvel at how well they wield the tools. But those positive, confident gestures are only part of what one should seek to see.

It’s harder to notice, but half of what makes a master is what the artist does not choose to do.

A fundamental transition in the development of an artist’s skill comes when one’s very ideas begin to change; the ideas and inspirations for their expression begin to develop in symbiosis with the specific features of the medium. When one’s concepts come to exploit not only a medium’s strengths - but also bend away from its weaknesses. This adaptation is a two-way relationship between creator and medium. Concepts based on these strengths and limitations is what mastery becomes.

And in our dash to employ A.I. to remove limitation from the creation of our expressions, I can’t help but reflect on this.

I have seen, persistently, how important the natural embrace of limitation is for any creative process. I have never, in my career or life as an artist, experienced a situation where limitations in my medium did not ultimately challenge me and thus make my ideas stronger.

It sometimes seems counter-intuitive but I have further seen, repeatedly, how a significant reduction in limitations leaves the creative process, and teams of otherwise brilliant artists, largely aimless, unfulfilled, and uninspired.

Not only do they help inspire, but limitations inherent in each medium, bring with them a kind of unique beauty that one might never otherwise have imagined. For example, I doubt whether, without any constructive limitations whatsoever, the world would have ever seen the mosaics of Gaudi in Barcelona. Who would have bothered to invent such beautiful works if no constructive limitation were present? Look at your favorite artist’s work, in any medium, whatever it is, and ask honestly whether such a thing would even exist without challenging limitations. The answer is probably not.

When I imagine a world of creative expression without limitation I like to imagine a world where the brilliance and uniqueness of each person is allowed to express itself freely - to invent and imagine, and share unfettered. And at first this seems good. But as I play it out honestly, I can’t help but cynically suspect we’d rapidly fall into a kind of homogenized soup of repetitive ideas. Not unlike scrolling through TikTok today where every idea and meme is incessantly rehashed and regurgitated ad nauseam. Where by definition uniqueness is laundered out as we share all the same references, tools, sources and touch points. Where inspiration is recycled from the last guy in an eternal human centipede of monotony, and little novel or unusual material is introduced through the cycle.

And I suddenly revere limitation once again.

Admittedly I vacillate on this subject. As an artist, in principle, I don’t want to be limited by anything. But I can’t ignore the value it brings.

Perhaps I am merely a creature of my generation, predisposed to the limitations of my lifetime. The degree of “hard work” that brought me here. And I’m just looking on at those meddling kids who didn’t walk as far as I did when I was their age. Perhaps I lack vision. Perhaps I am just some old guy yelling “It’s called a newsPAPER, dammit! These kids with their damned cellular phones!”

Or perhaps we need to acknowledge that humanity, we organic blobs that have strange separations in our lower-half which form legs, peculiar limbs peeling off from the body called arms, that further split the seams again to form weird, curled fingers, that these very strangely, specific creatures are, by definition, a limitation. And therefor maybe revering limitation is who we are.

Limitations in our mediums reflect our human condition. We are born into challenge. Face it every day. Our every waking hour is spent pressing, in one way or another, against challenge of countless sorts. So when that long challenge results in an artifact of great beauty or conceptual brilliance, it in some way becomes representative of our human struggle, and carries a sense of innate, beloved value over the automated, over-processed, and mass-produced.

We can feel it. In our limited and particularly arranged bones.

The True-Use of Humankind

The hypothetical doors of thought that A.I. art has suddenly opened into actual real-world challenges is a much larger topic. But in some way it gives us a real thread we can pull to consider what's coming.

From the moment the first primitive human uttered "Ug" humanity has been on a path to improve our communication tools and techniques.

Ever since, and with every advance in our technology our tools increment closer to enabling perfect communication where we share our thoughts and feelings in their native state.

Imagine a graph with a line that increments upward with each new medium and key technical advancement – our technical progress, rising over time. If "Ug" is at the beginning of our graph, then at the outermost end of the line - projected into our future - is the very end of our drive to improve communication, a future-state of perfect communication, where every thought and feeling is conveyed in its native state in whole and perfect resolution.

But to me, less interesting than the line itself, what I find deeply fascinating to consider are the two spaces both above and below that line.

The space above that line represents our remaining distance away from perfect communication, and thus the degree to which our communication is forcibly abstracted due to limitations in the medium. We have no choice. Our medium is simply abstract to that degree, at that point in time.

The space below that line however, represents our ever-increasing *freedom* to abstract our communications as we wish.

We cannot choose positions above the line except with advances in technology. But we can choose to move fluidly below the line, and utilize previous mediums and techniques at any time to suit our message. For example - in an age of 4K video, I can still choose to take still photos, or paint an image on a canvas. In the age of millions of available colors, I can still choose to make a B&W movie. In the age of lossless digital audio I can choose the warm static of vinyl LPs.

But coming to that choice takes time. For better or worse, like predictable clockwork, human behavior dictates that with each new advance in our communication technology, a corresponding rush to exploit that novel technology immediately follows. The urge to slam one's artistic expression into the ceiling of that novel tech seems overwhelming for human creators.

But then novelty fades, and communicators find new reasons to revisit older techniques and tools. To celebrate the true-use of those previous tools. So in an age of Computer Generated dinosaurs, alien worlds, and Pixar, one can still choose the hand-crafted artistry of stop motion animation as seen at studios like Laika. It's only after time and waning novelty of the advanced state that artists and communicators rediscover the inherent value, the "true-use", of those previous, more abstract mediums. To wit, a century after the advent of color film, artists still find good reason to embrace the abstraction of B&W.

The main point is, the previous state is never worthless, it merely relegates to a choice.

But today, as we see our technology ramping up exponentially, it begs a larger question for our future.

And sure this has been and is being discussed at length at every “Future Convention” across the globe in more depth than I can offer here. But anecdotally speaking, as someone who has spent a career tracking technology across a number of domains that I am interested in, this is the first decade of my life that I can feel it. I can viscerally feel the exponential nature of the curve.

For the first time, as the exponential curve inflects upward, I can see our technology become less tethered to humanity’s oversight and control. You can see the early signs as experts around the world take to these subjects in reaction, falling into line more like sports commentators and spectators than the visionaries and industrial leaders in control they once were; seeming at times as surprised as the rest of us as shocking, new advances pile on in rapid multiples. Particularly when you factor in A.I., it probably won't stay within our control for much longer.

In all likelihood technical advances will eventually allow us to communicate perfectly, true. But sometime subsequently - and we all know this instinctively -it will rapidly pass us by. Technology will surpass humanity's ability to keep up. It will inflect upwards exponentially, prove itself effortlessly better at prospering than we are, and leave our organic human condition and experience in the dust of irrelevance.

I'm not going to dig into the subject of the future evolution of humanity, that's not my area. Many have well-argued that a kind of forced evolution must occur where it will be critical that we merge with our tech as that’s the only way humankind, or whatever we'll be by then, can possibly stay relevant as a species or entity. Are you ready to sign up for that? That's above my pay-grade, and hopefully I’ll be blindly senile by then.

Mathematical basis for the positions on this graph have come from very near the part of my brain where I guess how many people might be actively farting in the city at any given moment.

The point is, what we all consider humankind today will inevitably become a mere state of abstraction, some quaint medium, below the line of progress, a previous state, old tech, not entirely unlike B&W film. At the very best, a choice. As once it tips above us, this is not a battle our humanity can win.

And I find this both fascinating and disconcerting. Because humanity, mind and body, is a state of being that I am personally quite predisposed to, the state I most identify with; what I feel most deeply loyal to. A state of imperfect, visceral beauty I most cherish, and one I dearly hope our future generations might still be able to choose.

At best- that's what everything we think of today as "human" will be someday: a choice.

Which finally brings me back to the value of craft.

Craft was once intrinsic to highly-rendered aesthetic expression. A requirement. Suddenly, today, craft is now below the line, a choice.

But craft is human. And in the face of A.I. art, craft as a defining expression of humanity as we know it today; an expression of commitment and skill, a signifier of the dedication of a human life, of our organic reality, of hands, and body, craft is what I most identify with; what I feel most deeply loyal to. A state of imperfect, visceral beauty I most cherish, and ultimately a thing I dearly hope our current generation, you, will choose.

Update Feb 7, 2023

This post has only been up for a few days, and I've already had a ridiculous number of people complain that I didn't finish this story. That I did not provide sufficient thoughts on a way forward for creative people who earn, or hope to earn, a living in creative fields and careers. That I left these readers with some uncertainty and ambiguity, asking the question, "Well what should I do? What do you suggest?"

In honesty, I did write a final section, one that specifically addressed this point. The whole point of this blog was to give creative people tools. But as I was editing I kept getting to that point and somehow it just ended the piece wrong. To be frank it was a downer. It made the piece too long. It made me sad. So rather than make everyone I care about sad as well, I thought - to hell with it - people can do the math - and I cut the whole thing. And that's what you see above.

Since then I have had many private conversations with people who still had these questions, so I am somewhat reluctantly appending this post below with the ending I rather wished I could pretend didn't exist. It may not answer your questions as you hoped - but it's what I see.

Buckle up.

What Now?

I have a message for young artists in particular. Because a long time ago I was you.

Perhaps in your youth you never fit in. Or you fit in awkwardly, never quite connecting with the people or world around you. Other people always seemed to fit in better. Those people seemed to nestle effortlessly into the tidy, pre-set molds of industrialized education. They were more social, popular, more athletic, never bullied. Perhaps this way of being, this feeling of not fitting in, gave you more time alone. During this time you found outlets. You spent time in your own mind. You had adventures there. Private ones no one could see. You found ways to express yourself. You began to make things. You did this a lot because it was one of the only things in your world that felt good.

One day someone saw something you made and said, "Wow, that's really good!", and in shock or surprise, this moment of magic, your heart lifted. You briefly felt a connection outside yourself. You felt, maybe for the first time, a positive interaction point, a lever, some modicum of control where none had been present before. A button that had never been pressed. On the back of this moment perhaps you became more daring, you worked harder to find your voice, to improve your skill. To connect with the world better. As even more people noticed and expressed positive interest in your work and ideas you realized these things you could do were difficult or impossible for others, for all those well-adjusted people who otherwise floated through life unfettered. They valued what you did. And this exchange of creation for feedback became the door through which you finally entered a world you'd always felt outside of.

It made you whole. It helped you love and respect yourself. It became your self identity. What would life be without it.

When it came time to consider a career, it really wasn't any contest. The sheer idea that you could use this fundamental part of you, this thing you would do for free, and was so rare you could earn a living, made the decision for you. There was simply no other way. As if you'd know what to do otherwise.

If your story is even remotely connected to mine, I want you to know that I understand you. I love and respect the life you've lived. I love that you exist. And I love that you create. No matter your medium or stylistic and conceptual choices, your ideas and talent are beautiful and worthy.

I'm putting myself out there, sharing feelings in this way so that you understand the difficulty and discomfort I have with what is yet to come.

Because then A.I. art generators happened on the scene. Along with an inexorable promise of exponential improvement and scale that I can already see will overwhelm me in my lifetime. And I'm already 60. Chances are you have many more years ahead than I do.

I think you'd have to have blinders on, or a very linear view of technical development, not to see where this story runs. Either that or you'd have to have never really considered - seriously closed your eyes and imagined - what it feels like to experience an exponential curve in your domain. To have just discovered this A.I. thing and not yet understand that it's been near zero until 4 months ago and all of a sudden it's a product on your radar. That even as you try to internalize A.I.'s early implications, it's nevertheless dutifully, generatively, doubling its power in steady increments right before your eyes. To realize that the distance from right here right now, to a "WTF just happened?!", Roadrunner dust cloud, is only 2-3 more increments away.

It's like wading in the ocean, watching the calm waves roll in, turning around momentarily to call to your friends only to see their horrified faces as a wave you didn't realize was swelling, slams your back and knocks your face into the dirt. That's the feeling of an exponential curve.

We have spent a decade slowly rattling up to the top of the A.I. rollercoaster inflection point at what's felt like a linear speed, only to be feeling, just right now, the slightest increase in speed at the very top. It still seems calm up here; we enjoy this little incremental increase in speed as our car tips over the peak - it's a great view. But the drop comes on fast, and pal, it's a mad dash into a future of uncertainty and insanity.

Generational A.I. is not going to feel like any technical domain you have ever experienced. It's not going to feel like tablet computers, or iPhones which arrived on the scene and progressed in what felt like a linear pace, often slower than our appetite for updates. Not like the advances of Photoshop or any of the other creative apps we use. In A.I., once its improvements, generation over generation, pick up to meet your appetite (and it will soon), it's not stopping. You suddenly won't have this stable tool that you can learn and get good at. One that you can internalize and build easily into creative flows. Because in mere months, weeks, days its improvements and sophistication will suddenly outstrip even your ability to just be aware and understand what it does. It will beat you.

For all eternity great craft, skill, mastery, served as walls of a kingdom. Like a defensible stronghold in the hills over a battlefield. The natural difficulty for others in achieving that capability gave artists a way to distribute and protect their ideas contained within. The ideas were presented within the safebox of craftsmanship. They were one and the same and inseparable.

It's why in legal circles, a mere wordmark (a company or product name - the concept) is harder to protect legally than one which includes visual design elements. The design serves as a unique, protectable identity. A Trademark.

Like word marks, ideas are notoriously difficult to protect and to own outside the expression of the art one creates. So the whole promise of this easy A.I. art medium, that makes its own art, and enables us to get our ideas out and profit from those ideas is flawed.

Sorry - the unfortunate reality is that A.I. art diminishes your ability to claim ownership of ideas. With A.I. there is nothing unique about it. There is no stronghold left. You own less than before. It's not even your art.

What working or aspiring creative professionals need to face is that the large land-mass of profitable art careers that we have lived on for so long, (if you have any vision for future advancement in your view-field) has just shrunken to a small island that most of us will simply no longer fit on in the future.

What do we artists and designers do in the future? Probably the biggest marketplace for creativity on the horizon will exist in the metaverse. At least for a while. Where demand for an unending river of new environments, skins, awards, NFTs, currency, unimaginable other digital stuffs will surely float some number of creative talents. Even so, as all this work will, by definition, be digital, it's a short reach to see how the countless variations demanded here will at some point simply be generated by A.I., much the way NFT artists already proved they were willing to regurgitate in countless thousands months ago.

It is with some horror, I realize that - every - thread - I - pull unravels this way. Every path I follow ends at the same cliff’s edge. A.I. replaces us. And in so doing relegates all of us to mere consumers, less creators.

The only thread I have pulled that doesn't end this way, is in our possible, reactionary reverence for craft. The willingness to let go of our pursuit of "easier". To accept that to be human means working hard while one fails painfully before overcoming the lack of skill.

It abhors me to say this. My own children are both wildly creative, as are so many of you. And already each of them has visions of a prosperous creative future that I continue (out of pure habit, and frankly just not knowing how else to exist) to nurture to the best of my ability, even as I can silently, effortlessly imagine specific A.I.-based tools that could accomplish every bit of expression and creative originality they strive for; with technology available today. I catch myself hoping the panic behind my eyes doesn't show through my loving smile and unwavering encouragement.

I desperately hope someone, or future events, will prove me flat wrong. I haven't wanted to be wrong many times in my life, but this is one. And I apologize for my cynicism.

Ultimately I hope you see, this overarching message is not even the story of A.I art, it's bigger than that. This is a story of choice. To remain as part of, and revere humanity, or to literally surrender and merge with a vastly superior technical inevitability.

Faced with a race I can never win, against a force we won't rule as we are, one must consider the choice between Human or A.I.

And so I accept that I cannot make the sun, but I can make fire very well.

And I find fulfillment in what I can do well.