Injecting soul into art and defying the laws of probability in the age of genericity
“Internet is dead. Internet remains dead. And we have killed it. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret: Marguerite on the Sabbath (1911)
The sign of the times
Forgive my bad sense of humour as I butchered the famous Nietzsche quote, but I wanted to approach today’s topic by briefly talking about the dead internet theory, which, if you’re not familiar with it, is an idea suggesting that during the past years, the internet has consisted mainly of bots and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation, minimizing organic human activity.
Maybe you have noticed that the internet isn’t particularly fun or interesting anymore. If that is the case, you are not alone. Many are complaining about the internet turning into a garbage pile of suggested and sponsored content, ads, annoying influencers, toxic discussions, algorithm mind-fucks, bot activity, click baits, disinformation and homogenised, hollow content.
Now that we also have content based on AI generated text, images and videos as well, the internet really has started to feel like a complete wasteland.
Welcome to a stupidly boring future
So the internet is now full of really bland stuff. Even most selfies, memes and Instagram reels are carbon copies of each other. TikTok posts are heavily relying on trends that revolve around repetition. The posts are unapologetic ripoffs of the previous ones. They are reflections of the contemporary culture and not limited only to Instagram reels and TikToks. Mainstream music, movies, and TV shows are just as repetitive, unimaginative and contentified.
I have to mention that I’m writing this few days after David Lynch passed away, so related to this topic, his death is a big loss. If things weren’t bad enough, we are now entering the future without him and it looks like there are no new lynches waiting around the corner. (It is also pretty clear that my secret dream can never come true now, which would have been a film adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest directed by David Lynch.)
Visual arts, including photography, follows this cultural movement and, in my opinion, seems to lower the quality of what most photographers are able to do with their cameras. Online trends seems to direct their artistic approaches because photography is now seen as content too. Many of us shoot only for social media and are allowing trends to influence the direction of our creativity. The bandwagon mentality renders photography excessively repetitive and unoriginal.
AI is blowing out the lamp of creativity
I’m afraid that we are on a direct course towards an era where individuality, artistic diversity and self-expression are replaced with a grey mass of generic boringness. I’m quite worried to to see generative AI functionality being applied to… well, everything. Individuality was in crisis even before AI and it does much more harm than the intended benefits, because we are now outsourcing much of our creativity by not relying on our own imagination. We are letting go of our intellectual self reliance. It accelerates homogenisation by creating an echo chamber of generic content.
As a benefit of a doubt, if AI can help us to solve some of the great issues that us humans are clearly not able to fix ourselves, such as the climate crisis, pollution, over population, stopping the current wars and preventing any other ones from occurring (especially those featuring nuclear weapons), bringing better healthcare and true equality, solving poverty, unemployment, homelessness, housing, world hunger and mental health crisis, the loss of biodiversity, stopping animal cruelty, deforestation and the destruction of the nature, then sure, AI is no doubt a hugely appreciated invention. Also a major assistance in science and medicine would be great. Perhaps some kind of new breakthrough in finding new physics. Fusion energy, for example, would be great. And what is taking so long with hydrogen cars?
It is in everyone’s interest to sustain a habitable planet, but we are instead heading towards a future that no one wants, so please AI, help us to fix our own mess if you want to be any good. We ruined our only planet and we don’t know how to make it better. I’d like to think that this is a technology that is able to help us to some extent, which is why it is so painful to see it being used for generating hentai.
If all this is too much to ask, let’s at least try not to ruin our culture with AI art, because in the mean time, while waiting for the world to turn into hell, it would be nice to be able to enjoy a rich culture. So can we at least bring some beauty to the world?
Why AI art feels soulless?
It is a common characterisation that AI imagery looks and feels soulless. I don’t know what it means exactly, but it feels right none the less. I think it sounds just about right, because AI art doesn’t originate from a human mind. A human-made artwork on the other hand, obviously, is a product of a human mind and it therefore tells something about the mind, giving it human agency. It is a product of someones imagination and creative efforts, so encountering the artwork is an encountering with the mind. It is almost like meeting the creator in person, which creates the sense of connection between you and the artwork.
Generative AI imagery can look objectively spectacular, but it is not a product of a real mind, so it doesn’t evoke a similar kind of sense of encounter. It is, after all, literally generic. Looking at it like this, could perhaps explain why it feels soulless. There needs to be enough human agency for the connection to happen. Maybe some advanced AI artists are able to somehow elevate their artwork with their own input enough to cross that threshold, but I’m sure they that is a rare skill.
Of course it is much more complicated than that, because we don’t always know whether something is created with AI or not. Our cognitive bias can be a decisive factor on how we perceive the artwork. If I’m lead to believe that an AI generated artwork is human-made and it is otherwise convincing enough, I could be biased to see some soul in it (and vice versa). Most of the time AI art, however, is not that convincing. I’m not saying that human made art is always convincing either. Both of them have the potential of being crap, but at least human made art has the potential of being soulful crap.
To defy the laws of probability
Luckily everything doesn’t exist online. Internet is almost like a separate “reality” and stepping out of it is a good reminder that everything is not digital. Leaving social media behind and focusing more on analog creativity (drawing, painting, film photography, playing an instrument, journaling etc.) is a sure way of grounding you back to this world. While you’re doing it, you’re creating works of art using your own imagination and, without perhaps even noticing, injecting your soul into it.
To go even further, to elevate your creativity above the average, go against the generic and obvious. If 90% of whatever artwork (let’s say photography for example) is generic, how hard it really is to stand out?
Even if it doesn’t stand out, so to speak, at least it is yours. We all take influences and build upon others works, that’s the collective nature of our culture, so it would be really difficult to come up with something completely new that no one has never seen before. It is none the less your take on it, as seen from your perspective and there is therefore enough of newness in it.
Not following social media trends is a good start. Instead by listening to inner voices and intuitions, organically lands you to an individual path.
To quote Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida: “The photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even possible; at the limit he must defy those of the interesting: the photograph becomes ‘surprising’ when we do not know why it has been taken.”
