1/ Having spent the last 4 years studying modern #AI, I’m aware of the progress made by @OpenAI and other players almost immediately. So, I’ve seen a lot of #DallE2 output recently, including this collection, sent to me by a friend: https://t.co/ko7RXgtRfC

🧵

2/ It’s an exceptional example of how remixing existing ideas and outputs leads to new forms that humans find pleasurable. Ultimately, that’s what #art has always been about: mixing and remixing existing ideas.

3/ But #art is about scarcity, too—an exceptional feat of human creativity, hard to produce and even harder to reproduce.

As we continue to develop groundbreaking #AI and make it available for free or via a cheap API call, humans’ capability to mix & remix becomes a commodity.

4/ And if it becomes a commodity, the human contribution shifts from production (i.e., the act of mixing & remixing) to curation (i.e. if #AI can produce infinite remixes on my behalf, who’s going to sift through them to pick the ones that, most likely, other humans will prefer?)

5/ to nothing (i.e., the #AI evolves to the point that it produces three remixes that already are guaranteed to be the most wanted ones by 100% of the audience without any human involvement).

6/ I’m not against generative #art, but I am concerned that the concept of “art” as we know it today will eventually disappear.

Why am I concerned? I don’t know.

7/ Maybe I’m simply used to thinking about #art in a certain way, and I don’t want to give up that familiar concept.

Or maybe, I fear that the new version of “art” I’m describing here will be “less valuable”, even if I’m not even sure what that means.

8/ Or maybe, I am unsettled by the idea that, in future, people will look at a creative output as a commodity and won’t spend more than 2s looking at it. Yet, already today, the average museum-goer doesn’t stand in front of a masterpiece for more than 3-4s on average.

9/ (or so I was once told by the staff of the Tate Modern here in London).

Maybe my concerns are entirely unfounded. Humans contribute nothing to the spectacle of nature, yet we find it highly pleasurable.

10/ Perhaps #art will just become like nature: something in which humans have no involvement that we can still enjoy. And yet, in this scenario, it feels like something has been taken away from us.