AI Is Actually Good For Art

this is here for archival reasons, but an updated and much better version of this essay is available here.

This is a follow-up to my previous piece, everyone else is wrong about ai art, sorry. I think it’s reasonable to not be entirely satisfied with my explanation there for why I’m optimistic about a future filled with AI art, so I am expanding on my thoughts here.

Here are the three ways that I think more advanced AI could be good for art and culture.

It can democratize more mediums

Feature-length movies, animated cartoons of any length, and video games are examples of mediums where it's very difficult to make a finished piece with one person, or only a small number of them. Teams are good for various things, but they also encumber you — they require capital, overhead coordination work, and the smoothing over of disagreements in artistic vision.

Something wonderful happened to music in the 00s, called “fl studios is good now”. When I was in grade school, two kids just a few years older than me met on an internet hobbyist forum for producing electronic music. With very little formal music training, and mostly the computers they already had, they were able to create little tunes to share with others, and talk shop. Porter Robinson and Madeon went on to make the glittering, soaring, melodic EDM that defined my adolescence. They picked up music theory as they went, started collaborating with each other and other artists, and they have continued to make music that is really fucking good. But at the start, they were just teens messing around in their bedrooms.

I want that to happen to more mediums! I want edgy cartoons clearly made by emo teens but they have the production value of the old Disney movies. I want them to explode all over the internet and for us to treat them with mild disgust the way we all treat, like soundcloud rappers. (I also happen to think that soundcloud rappers can be very good, but that's beside the point.) I want video game production to be as accessible to any fifteen year old as recording bedroom pop or shooting a video for TikTok. Yes, the variance is going to be high, and the median is going to be crap, but why care? It's already like that for music/books/youtube uploads/everything else. We have the curatorial technology for dealing; the good will float to the top, and we'll all be better off for having more variety to choose from.

Give me more! More strange, uncompromising movies, video games and music albums created in far-flung locales. More art that makes me go "oh my gosh something is deeply wrong with the creator <3"!

Or, like, is there a video game you've always wanted to make? Wouldn't it be cool if you could just direct it, with agents doing all the bullshit coding? Wouldn't it make you want to make cute personalized birthday video games for your friends?

I just think it’s good if more modes of artistic expression aren’t gated behind technical expertise with film cameras or game engines, proficiency with actually playing a musical instrument or colour theory. I think powerful AI can make it easier for people to get started, and they'll pick up what they require as they go along.

It can make other artistic mediums do interesting things in response

Once cameras could capture realistic likenesses cheaply, it freed up painters to explore other directions with more deliberation (or perhaps desperation). That's kind of how we got impressionism¹, and everything afterwards:

Rather than compete with photography to emulate reality, artists focused "on the one thing they could inevitably do better than the photograph—by further developing into an art form its very subjectivity in the conception of the image, the very subjectivity that photography eliminated".

A similar story plays out with theatre and film, though to a smaller and messier extent:

Throughout the century, the artistic reputation of theatre improved after being derided throughout the 19th century. However, the growth of other media, especially film, has resulted in a diminished role within the culture at large. In light of this change, theatrical artists have been forced to seek new ways to engage with society. The various answers offered in response to this have prompted the transformations that make up its modern history.

In the first case, portraiture was an attractor that many painters were historically pulled into. When demand for that suddenly dissipated, a vivid artistic movement bloomed, and that’s how we got our Monets and Turners and Van Goghs. In the second, film took over the role that theatre had as cheap entertainment for the masses, and then theatre, too, went off in weirder directions (though I'm less, uh, confident? that that's a good thing since cards on the table I'm not actually an enjoyer of experimental theatre).

But isn't that second case kind of interesting? Doesn't it make you wonder what films could be like, if the medium writ large was freed in turn from being the cheap entertainment of the masses?

Artistic mediums, as we understand them, are a mix of technical constraints innate to the medium and incentives that are not. Getting rid of some of the incentives can make the medium more… pure? It enables its practitioners to explore the breadth of what it is technically capable of. And then they can bring the good discoveries back to more traditional uses of it, and we are all enriched by the process.

AI is going to find certain niches that other mediums are currently squished into, and it'll be the kick they need to stretch out fully and do more exploration. I look forward to the results.

Regarding film and theatre, there's also a pretty interesting bi-directionality that ended up happening. Personnel and technologies continue to flow back and forth between the two mediums, presumably for the better (though to some theatre snobs' discontent). You could imagine some filmography technique emerging from AI-generated media that seems obvious in hindsight but is lateral to where film is currently heading. Then that technique makes its way back into traditional filmmaking. I think that would be pretty cool. More shrimp Jesus in all of the movies, that's what I always say.

The actual devices of AI art

This is the one I discussed the most in the previous essay, and I will attempt to not repeat myself too much. In short, I'm excited to see what are the actual AI-native features that we can exploit for storytelling and connection and big damn displays; what happens when we let AI actually be weird instead of forcing it into the shape of traditional mediums like blog posts and static images.

Beyond experimental documentaries, it can do lots of other things! Like, ummmmm, making an impression of your sixteen-year-old self from an iPhone backup and then letting you talk to an LLM roleplaying as them. Oh uhhhh having every diagram from Da Vinci's notebooks zoom towards you ominously like you are a tiny fish in a terrifying white sea of predatory wooden contraptions and anatomical sketches.

Okay, look, I fully admit that all of this is like, slightly cursed at the moment, and not very good. But early cinema was also sort of bad! The technology was very clunky and hard to use, and we hadn't quite figured out the meta yet. The exact same goes for early video games, and early radio shows, and presumably early everything else. The tech gets better, the creators update on what works well, a body of knowledge gets slowly developed over time of what the best practices are and what should be avoided. If you were at Lumiere's first screenings, and someone is like "You like this medium? You're bullish about it? Tell me how good it's gonna be in a hundred years in exact detail, right now," you'd also be kind of at a loss. It takes, like, thirty years for us to figure this shit out. Let it cook! Just let the AI cook. Certainly nothing bad will happen from just letting the AI cook.