Handmade with Love

Why I think the tide will turn against A.I. art

My wife, Lindsey, loves Seinfeld. LOVES it. She will happily watch an episode she has seen fourteen times before while she’s putting on her make-up because she loves it so much. I now enjoy it too, and at the end of a stressful day, we both relish switching off our brains and turning on the ‘show about nothing.’

Because of all of this, and because I love Lindsey, I recently presented her with caricatures on canvas of Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer. They now hang in our house next to other paintings I have given her over the years, including Indiana Jones, the cast of The Wizard of Oz, and (weirdly) Dateline’s Keith Morrison.

Here’s my point:

I doubt that A.I. will ever paint a quartet of sitcom characters as a gift for its wife.

This thought gives me a glimmer of hope. So many artists with whom I interact on social media are panicking about A.I., and I don’t blame them. There’s no doubt it’s hammering creatives severely. But I do think the tide will eventually turn. Although it will probably happen too late for many, I believe that, down the line, when the novelty of pumping prompts into a soulless image-generator has worn off, the world will rediscover the joys of handmade art.

‘Handmade’, to me, denotes love, pure and simple. It’s about the love of the person who puts their heart and soul into spending years honing their abilities, and then into creating something astonishing from a few simple materials. It’s about the love of the person who thought to commission the artist to create that thing, and then presented it to a loved one to be displayed and enjoyed in their home.

I think this is the message that artists should be spreading. Yes, our livelihoods are in jeopardy, but so are those in many other professions and industries. Complaining about the situation online is understandable, but it’s unlikely to cut much ice with most of our potential audience.

We need to talk more about why people should be commissioning art from human beings. We should enthuse about our inspirations, our processes, our favourite materials, our favourite commissions, and the struggles to get what’s in our heads onto canvas, onto paper, or rendered satisfactorily in clay, stone, or metal. At the risk of reducing the act of creation to a hoary old marketing phrase, ‘Sell the sizzle, not the sausage.’ At present, this is the only effective stratagem I can think of that stands any chance of countering the A.I. threat.

This might all be moot, however…

The other day, the news reported that a supercomputer has predicted mankind’s extinction. But this will not be due to A.I., apparently. One would think that such a computer must run on A.I. itself. So, if it really possesses the intelligence for which it is named, telling us that A.I. won’t decimate mankind must be in its own best interests. Did the scientists who created this supercomputer take this into consideration..?

The news item on this story was illustrated with artist’s impressions of a post-apocalyptic landscape. I wonder if they were A.I-generated.