This reading was something that I went searching for mainly because I wanted to see if someone other than one of those "AI Bros" had attempted to sell an AI artwork through an actual art market rather than through something like a craft show (I have and will continue to sell at craft shows, this is not saying that they are bad, but the oversight at many shows has been lacking recently). Part of me was surprised that an ai work had sold as early as 2018 and then I remembered that people still really like Banksey as a "political artist" even though he's made millions and hasn't done anything as useful as Nan Golden in his entire career, even with his Walled Off Hotel that is no longer in operation because of the genocide in Gaza.
I think there is something to be said that this ai piece sold for a whopping $432,500 and I'm not sure how I feel about it being sold at a prints and multiples sale as a printmaker, but I am going to try to be as impartial as I can even though that has never been my forte.
In the context of our conversation of what is digital art, I think that there is a lot that can be taken from this article. Obviously it aids this idea that digital art is literally anything digital, but I do think that there are some things in this article that make me question specifically who the artist of this piece was, and it doesn't really get addressed in the reading in my opinion. The artist that is credited to "making" this piece is a program called GAN or the Generative Adversarial Network, it even goes so far as to add it's signature to the piece which is some sort of math formula.
And the artist collective that helped create this piece - Obvious - claim that the artist or the 'Generator' is GAN while they - Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel and Gauthier Vernier - are simply the people who chose which pieces to show based on if the viewer or the 'Discriminator' are able to tell if the piece was made by a human or a machine. It's an interesting concept for sure, and Obvious claims that making GAN create these portraits shows that "algorithms are able to emulate creativity."
I disagree with this line of thinking though. Sure, there are some things that are interesting in the piece, the fact that it doesn't fill the entire canvas so it mimics sketches by the old master artists from the Renaissance, and the signature is definitely different. But I don't think that there is a way for me to not tell this it is created by a machine. There are no facial features, it appears to be attempting to mimic pointalism, but I'm seeing a weird wannabe "painting" version of a Chuck Close that isn't as well thought out. The fact that the article, which is in and of itself biased due to the fact that the piece was sold at one of their auctions calls it a painting, which it most certainly isn't, at most it is a seriograph or digital print, but I'm curious to know about how archival it will be in the long run because of that.
I'm definitely coming off as harsh here, but I'm just not convinced about AI in the future of digital art. My opinion isn't super important here because as I've been shown in this article, it's already part of the narrative and that inherently means it will have a future, but as we are seeing with ads and commercials using ai art, it doesn't fool the eye and I do not believe that it legally should be allowed to. We should know whether a company is willing to pay an actual artist to make an advertisment because it would certainly dictate whether or not I would by a product from them ever again. We are seeing a huge influx of protests from SAG-AFTRA Voice Actors in video games because they want to be properly compensated, but they don't want companies to be allowed to utilize ai voices. I definitely think that there are places for ai, video games use ai to generate a population in things like GTA and Cyberpunk 2077, they may use it to generate backgrounds of some kind in video games, but in the art world, there is not reason for us to be fighting with computer algorithms and attempting to convine people that those works are just as valuable as something that was made by hand.
There's an argument for that too, certainly. I'm not trying to condemn what most people would think of as digital art, people who create works on their iPads or through adobe are still valid artists because their work wasn't created using programs that have been known to steal other artist's work to create some sort of log that it can pull from. Even with Obvious utilizing portraits made between the 14th and 20th centuries and the whole idea of copywrite laws and how none of those portraits would fall under them, there's something inherently different from stealing features and brush patterns from those with a computer than someone who is trying to learn how to paint by mimicing or copying those paintings. Maybe it is because the computer itself doesn't have it's own thought and it is made by someone manipulating the computer that I don't like, but nevertheless, ai is part of the digital art narrative now, and no matter what the outcome of public opinion, it will never be able to be separated from it.
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