AI content is boring
In his newsletter, The Imperfectionist, Oliver Burkeman touched on something I recognise about why I don't enjoy AI produced content:
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that interestingness is the very thing I feel falling away whenever I discover, or begin to suspect, that something I’m reading or watching was generated by artificial intelligence. It might continue to be impressive, or informative, but the flame that kept me fascinated sputters and dies. Which speaks to my point about the pursuit of your interests sparking the interest of others: once I realize the person who created the work wasn’t sufficiently interested to engage with it every step of the way, I can’t summon interest in the result, either. (And the AI certainly wasn’t interested in what it was producing; if there’s one human quality definitively lacking in an LLM, it’s the capacity to be interested in anything at all.)
Hear, hear. If you can't be bothered to produce the thing yourself, why should we care?
Update
Cory Doctorow in a speech about the reverse centaur critique of AI touched on AI and art which I think goes with the foregoing sentiment:
here's what I think art is: it starts with an artist, who has some vast, complex, numinous, irreducible feeling in their mind. And the artist infuses that feeling into some artistic medium. They make a song, or a poem, or a painting, or a drawing, or a dance, or a book, or a photograph. And the idea is, when you experience this work, a facsimile of the big, numinous, irreducible feeling will materialize in your mind...
What does this have to do with AI art? Art is a transfer of a big, numinous, irreducible feeling from an artist to someone else. But the image-gen program doesn't know anything about your big, numinous, irreducible feeling. The only thing it knows is whatever you put into your prompt, and those few sentences are diluted across a million pixels or a hundred thousand words, so that the average communicative density of the resulting work is indistinguishable from zero.
It's possible to infuse more communicative intent into a work: writing more detailed prompts, or doing the selective work of choosing from among many variants, or directly tinkering with the AI image after the fact, with a paintbrush or Photoshop or The Gimp. And if there will ever be a piece of AI art that is good art – as opposed to merely striking, or interesting, or an example of good draftsmanship – it will be thanks to those additional infusions of creative intent by a human.
And in the meantime, it's bad art. It's bad art in the sense of being "eerie," the word Mark Fisher uses to describe "when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there is nothing present when there should be something."
AI art is eerie because it seems like there is an intender and an intention behind every word and every pixel, because we have a lifetime of experience that tells us that paintings have painters, and writing has writers. But it's missing something. It has nothing to say, or whatever it has to say is so diluted that it's undetectable.
The images were striking before we figured out the trick, but now they're just like the images we imagine in clouds or piles of leaves. We're the ones drawing a frame around part of the scene, we're the ones focusing on some contours and ignoring the others. We're looking at an inkblot, and it's not telling us anything.
In other words, AI "art" does not meet the Glenn Gould test of enabling the "gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity." And that's not very interesting.
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