BENJAMIN BAS

Every time I see a piece of AI “art” it irks me. Something about it feels uncanny, soulless, and cheap. But these are, besides subjective, empty terms. I can not in good faith use this as an argument against AI art, so I have to question myself as to why these feelings arise. When reading the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling, I found a line of thinking about art that resonated with me. In this piece, I will bring up some arguments against calling AI capable of producing art. First, there is the critique of the productivist way in which we approach the distinction of what art is. Secondly, I want to highlight Schelling’s conception of art and transpose it to our contemporary discourse. 

In modern times, we find ourselves in a discussion on art once again, now concerning artificial intelligence. Can AI replace man as artists and take over art production? The first objection I would like to make is regarding the contemporary notion of art. The question whether AI can replace man as artists reduces art to its product. This I think is a capitalist lens, we look at art as something that needs to be consumed, that exists merely to be consumed. But we can define this notion of art differently, as a process that necessarily involves human action, a purposiveness. Sometimes we look at a sunset, and we signify it as art, it is beautiful and evokes an emotion. But although nature for sure has the ability to be beautiful, I do not think it has the ability to produce art. Everything that nature produces is unconscious, it is not purposive, nature just develops and exists, but there is no purposive action in nature. For purposive action we need a consciousness, a subject. Art is, in the definition that I want to posit here, always purposive and thus the product of a purposive consciousness. Nature can make beauty, but only man can make art. But the element of purposive activity is not the only thing that distinguishes art from just a pretty picture, this activity is specific and results in a specific product. Something that is more personal, a becoming of self for self, a field of explication that leads to reflection and integration for the self’s identity, as Schelling would call it. This is of course very abstract still, so let us look at the way Schelling defines art and its product.

Schelling’s philosophy of art is not rooted in aesthetics, as most philosophies of art are. Art for Schelling was something special that could unify the tension that exists within man at all times between his subjective and objective nature. Man is a split being, according to Schelling, what makes man is the tension between his subjective and objective existence. This tension is an irreducible difference out of which man can be a conscious subjectivity, this difference is where our freedom lies. Freedom is the ground of human subjectivity, not as an ability or a capacity, but as its roots. The root of man is to be split, to have to make a decision about his de-cision. Freedom is not mine to have, it is I who belongs to freedom. So man is never a whole, he is always split between his subjectivity and objective nature out of which, through the means of mediation, consciousness can exist. Man has to produce itself as an object in the world, he can not merely naturally be one. There is this constant relation between objective positioning and subjective conscious interpretation of this positioning. This is why man is always in a sense disconnected from nature, he is forced to subjectively experience it, which is always mediated and not immediate. Art for Schelling is the bridge between these two poles, the product of art is that which reflects to us the identity of the conscious and the unconscious activities through an infinite opposition between them. It reunites the objective nature with subjective experience through an immediate opposition. 

The product of art is a manifestation of the splitness of man in a determinate object. What is brought into the world is not merely the product of a simple productive logic, it is not enough for the artist to say I used this technique and that is why this invokes an emotion. The product of art is in itself something that invokes interpretation without being able to be reduced to an objective meaning. It opens up a field of explication through its splitness, that forces the person that looks at it to reflect and internalize. It represents the infinite through a finite form, it opens up the possibility of infinite interpretation. 

Schelling gives as an example the mythology of the Greeks, that to him undeniably contains an infinite meaning and symbolism. He then contrasts this product of art with a product that merely apes the character of a work of art, it is only a faithful replica of the artist’s conscious activity, only an object for reflection but not for intuition. It lacks this infinite quality that the product of art has. This is what AI art is.

The process of AI art is completely logically defined, there is a network of interpretation that links words to a visual database and synthesises an “original” picture. It is a complete unconscious activity, and with that it lacks the opposition of freedom that brings rise to the infinite element that Schelling sees as necessary for a product of art. It behaves as nature creates, in a fully natural way, incapable of producing the splitness that is inherent to us and manifested in the product of art. 

Why it might fool us in convincing us that it is art, is twofold.

AI art generates these products out of databases full of true products of art made by artists. These databases, for instance LAION 5B, are filled with original works of art from artists around the world (that do not get any credit and cannot claim copyright as of yet). AI art synthesises things together from these databases, and these synthetisations can of course still emanate traces of originality and of the genius that the artists from the original paintings put into their work. But what the AI produces is not the building blocks but the synthetization, which is completely logical and thus an object of reflection but not of intuition. 

The other way we might be fooled lies in the fact that the AI art generator itself can be seen as a work of art created by an artist. The concept of AI art generator contains in a way the same infinite discussion, meaning, and symbolism that the Greek tragedies contained. You can see this already in the way that people are romanticizing the nature of this cold, logical generator. We ask it questions as like what does God look like, or what is the meaning of the universe, and in turn it creates pictures for us. These pictures we then immediately interpret, this is where the infinity in the AI lies. In short, the AI generator is art, what it produces is not. Its product is merely the imitation of nature, of the objective (in this case the product of art of the artists it is trained on), but that is not what art is. Art is a reflection of our fundamental ground of being. This is realized at the moment the artist reflects and sees that he alone did not produce this work as a merely conscious activity, but that it is a unification of natures unconscious and his conscious creation. The product that is the result of this invokes meaning through intuition. 

Sources:

Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism