Will people enjoy AI art?

thoughts on Walter Benjamin

One interesting conversation I had at the Civic Future conference was about whether people will actually enjoy AI art. I think they will, assuming AI art continues to improve, and noting that I don’t know how long it will take. Some people already are enjoying it, but will it become widespread? This is all very speculative, but I want to try and think it through using some ideas from Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

The argument against AI art is that people don’t want machine art; they want art that was made by a human. Put aside the fact that although this argument was made in the past (such as by Tolstoy or Ruskin) it was never really central to aesthetic ideas.

Whether or not AI is currently producing art people want, or whether it ever will be able to, in principle it is quite possible. Art has been mechanised before and people enjoyed those works. The replacement of human craft with machines is part of the history of art. Mechanised art has been accepted and loved in the past—why not now?

My conversation took place in a room of mock William Morris wall paper, twirling cast-iron fixtures, and the like. It was not, in itself, a delight. But it descends from the nineteenth century tradition. A lot the mechanical art of that time—plates, tiles, architectural ornaments—is much loved, even though Ruskin vomited into the bushes outside the Great Exhibition.

I do not find myself unable to enjoy the high artistic standards at the Wildlife Photography of the Year exhibit, even though the eye has replaced the hand and because technology has allowed for images to be edited. Displaying an highly edited photograph on a screen doesn’t entail the same loss of genuineness as a video call with a person. The screen photo is still in Walter Benjamin’s “realm of tradition” and is not a mere incident of the original in the way that the postcards in the shop are, which never have the quality of genuineness.

Benjamin distinguished between art that was once parasitic upon ritual and modern reproducible art that was divorced from ritual. An AI newly ritualistic art may emerge. Not just from the development of AI religions, but all sorts of quotidian interactions. If AI art comes to have “cultic value” rather than “display value” then it will be valued perhaps quite highly. I don’t find Katherine Dee’s dolphin pictures very inspiring but she does and they are perhaps less intended as display art than cultic art of some new form we don’t fully understand yet.

Benjamin said the face was a cultic resistance to photography’s display value. Remembering the dead is a key function of portraiture. Isn’t there something similarly cultic about Ghibli slop and the way old family photos are brought to life, however strongly “display” based such images might currently be? Any future AI art that follows this line might be further removed from traditional human culture, and more and more the product of fantasy imaginations and new social groups online. The converting of the inner life (nostalgia, grief, yearning, half formed dreams of a future self) can be just as much in tension with the “aura of genuineness” as those early photographs of people’s faces.

Benjamin was worried about the lack of uniqueness in mechanised reproductions; AI users will be able to move away from mass reproduction into an art that is entirely about the unique prompting of the user. There are aesthetics in many corners of the internet—forums, fandoms, discords. Every echo chamber can produce a new genuineness. If you want art that has Benjamin’s “aura”, a “presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be”, working alone with an AI could provide that, for a given level of capability.