How You Enjoy Art Has Changed- And AI Art Will Never Catch Up

AI Art has generated a lot of discourse, as people who spent years honing a craft through multiple self-esteem crises and terrible hours suddenly find themselves arguing someone who put down their printed copy of Elon Musk’s Twitter long enough to type in prompts into a search engine and call it an artform.

I’m not here to argue about the “soul” of art, so to speak. That kind of stuff often gets into a realm of philosophy described as “Fart-Sniffing” (by the great philosopher Fartsnipheles, no less), and there are very skilled people who live their lives with their legs fully submerged in the art life that you should listen to way more than a guy who totally promised to make time to draw this week.

Social Consumption

One thing I rarely see discussed in the AI Art discussion is how it also affects the consumer, so to speak. It’s no surprise that AI Art is the latest chapter in a saga that’s so overstayed its welcome I assume it was bought over by Disney. From the desire to turn recent events into scandalous documentaries to the threat of NFTs, it’s very clear that one side has a clear goal: turning everything into content.

That’s why people are so desperate to push AI Art- it creates content. An artist has a sense of shame- they’d never publish a new piece if they felt the hands were still wonky (our collective WIP folders can attest to this). But to the AI Art Curator (even that’s a bit too much credit), as long as they can get a dozen or so fakes out in time, what does it matter?

Well, it matters a ton, turns out. Because while people may not be looking at technical quality for most art, there is actually a specific style of consumption for art that AI Art can’t replicate: An actual interest.

AI Art has this conceitedness about it- the people who claim to make it are always holding for an applause that will never come- “Look, I can fill the Kim Jung-Gi shaped hole in your lives now, faster than he ever did”. But even if you at first mistake it for an original, staring at a fake will never beat the real thing.

It almost reminds me of a popular fake YuGiOh card- one depicting a fully assembled Exodia, often inscribing his ATK and DEF as Infinite, with an effect to clear the board. If you’d heard about Exodia being the ultimate monster, you might believe this was real- but even if you played this card in a real game, he’s still vulnerable to the predator of all boss monsters, Gameciel, The Sea Turtle Kaiju. The real Exodia is not weak to such turtles- its effect literally wins you the game.

That’s very much how all AI art feels at first: a shallow, surface-level deceit meant to only win over the most shallow of viewers. Once you get over the flash of “wow that certainly is a picture”, you realize the fact that no person made this means that there’s no interaction to be had with it.

The people who like AI Art don’t like or respect the medium in any way- they just want something pretty to decorate their Instagram accounts with. The Curators-pretending-to-be-Creators in turn feel a sense of self-importance for feeding that demand, now wanting praise from a type of audience that was never going to give it to them even if they’d drawn it by hand.

It Always Comes Back To Vtubers

Today, consuming art is a social process, whether you like it or not. It’s not sitting in a gallery swirling watered down drinks thinking about how best to launder money (that scene has been replaced by NFTs). Artists, like the normal people they are, put their lives on social media, and that framing informs the work they eventually put out.

I’ll use a recent example: I really like an artist named Mamalonii. They had a meteoric rise through the Vtuber fandom, doing art of Takanashi Kiara and Calliope Mori before eventually being contacted to even illustrate their music videos.

Here’s the thing- while yes, their work is impeccable, the reason I follow them wasn’t just for the final product. It’s the WIP sketches, as well as seeing their own tastes in Vtubers move around over time. What was originally purely just TakaMori (the name for the pairing of the two Vtubers) quickly expanded to add other new Vtubers like Ouro Kronii and even Takane Lui.

This is the benefit of supporting real artists- their lives inform their work in a way that some jerk with a failed copyright on prompts just doesn’t. Art is very much a series of decisions, and seeing that some of those decisions were “I couldn’t stop thinking about the anime girl with the sexy voice” is just as much part of appreciating it as liking the final product.

It isn’t just for fandom artists, either. Kekai Kotaki had a whole year where he was obsessed with doing ink sketches of knights. Sure, an AI could have probably produced mirror clones of a months worth of his knights in one sitting but they’ll never replicate the experience of opening your phone and seeing “ah yes, Kekai Kotaki has made another knight pun”.

Just Appreciate Real People, Man

Just like how NFTs still exist as Those Who Live In Death, AI Art will probably be around for a while, outliving the fad that they have any kind of credibility to them. For as much as I hate it, much like scam calls they’ll never truly be done away with. But I think part of appreciating and protecting real artists does involve some self-reflection on what about them we enjoy. It’s not just that they have an output, it’s that for many of these artists, they let you in on the process. Every artwork is a piece of themselves, and they share that with audiences, usually for free.

It’s a kind of openness that the corporate world would have you believe should be monetized- but the fact so many artists are happy to give it out is something special that needs to be protected.

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