Thesis#
The desire to create is what makes an artist. That’s true for some people using generative AI - and it’s also why there will always be human artists.
What Making Art Is#
Making art is the human creative undertaking. The desire to create something, to express, to bring ideas into the world - that generative impulse is what makes an artist make art.
Many things are produced by people with artistic skill, often bringing that skill to bear on products with dual purposes: expression and function. Clothing is an excellent example. There is absolutely clothing that serves very little purpose other than to be aesthetic, and there is definitely clothing that serves very little purpose other than to be functional. Most clothing exists in between.
Before the industrial revolution, clothing was made by hand by what we might call artisans - makers who often had artistic talent. You would get production of goods with art infused during the process, because that’s what humans do when they make things. As cloth-making industrialized, we were able to separate the artist from the artisan. Machines operationalized the good production, but artists still produced artistic clothing. Now Chinese factories crank out dirt-cheap t-shirts that technically work, while artistic seamstresses and clothiers hand-make bespoke luxury clothing for the fashion runway or demure custom shops.
We have separated the art from the good. Both exist.
Function Is Unforgiving#
The key takeaway of this separation: function is unforgiving. If the thing does not work, it cannot exist in most contexts. Aesthetics without function is a luxury, and luxury is almost definitionally a minority undertaking.
Most goods only need, and are only wanted, to satisfy a task. It is much rarer that a good is primarily for satisfying aesthetics. Once you can separate the artist from the artisan and operationalize the production that the artisan used to handle, you end up with the majority of production being more or less purely functional - form as an afterthought.
This absolutely happened with clothing. It absolutely happened with dwellings. It has absolutely happened with most housewares and furniture. It is, in fact, what happens when humans manage to build tools and processes that operationalize and industrialize the production of a good that previously had to be handmade.
Portraits#
Consider portraits. Back in the oil painting days, before photography, portraits were a big deal. They were rare. They were labor-intensive. If you wanted a portrait of yourself, you had to shell out, and it was quite an ordeal to get one made. Once done, it was quite a piece - a centerpiece, a focus piece - because only the artistic artisan could make one for you.
Nowadays, we have cameras in electronic devices in basically every pocket. Everybody who wants a portrait of themselves can get one. They can get a piece of visual media that they can look at and see themselves.
The oil painting - professionally staged, framed, an heirloom piece hanging on the wall of your house - is still a luxury art piece. But most people who wanted portraits didn’t actually need the whole shebang. They just wanted to see themselves in a piece of visual media. And they can get that now with the tools and processes we have built into smartphone cameras. It’s trivially easy to get a technical portrait of yourself where you can see yourself.
So most people who just wanted the outcome - a piece of visual media in which they could see themselves - get that easily and don’t advance to finding an artist to pay for a professional heirloom portrait.
We are seeing this same separation today with visual media and generative AI.
Previously, in order to make a piece of visual media that other people could see - regardless of the purpose - you had to engage some form of artist-artisan combination. Maybe a graphic designer to produce the advertising copy for your company - function-forward visual media, but you were still absolutely using a human’s artistic talent to do it. Or maybe you wanted a book illustration, a comic, a particular scene. Either way, you needed the human artist-artisan combo.
Now that we have generative AI, many of those people can - just like they were doing with a selfie on their smartphone - get a good-enough visual rendering of their idea to satisfy what they needed. And they stop there.
Those people didn’t actually need art. They didn’t actually want art. They just needed a piece of visual media. And what we have now is the ability to separate the artisan from the artist once more, as humans have been doing since the beginning of technology, but in the domain of visual media.
Is It Art? Are They Artists?#
We will punt on “is it art?” because that is an age-old question that has always been hotly debated, whose answer has shifted time and time again and is ultimately subjective.
Instead, let’s look at the people making these things and ask if they are artists.
As you might infer from the separation of artist and artisan, indeed, some of them are not. The people who would have needed a professional graphic designer - the artist-artisan combination - but now can use generative AI to get the visual media that communicates what they need? They’re using the operationalized, industrialized visual media production pipeline.
That’s fine. We used to have weavers weaving things on looms. We still have looms, but the overwhelming majority of them are industrial-scale, and the people that work in those factories we don’t really refer to as weavers anymore. They’re just employees. Workers.
So the people using generative AI just to make the visual media that serves a function - where form is not the driving purpose - are not artists. Because they’re not engaging in the creative undertaking of desiring to manifest a vision in the world. They don’t seek to share the aesthetic outcome. They don’t seek gratification from the experience of creating. They just seek the finished product so that it may perform its function.
And that’s fine. That’s allowed. People who buy t-shirts from factories that make t-shirts are not engaging with artists. You can also get a t-shirt that was handmade by an artist somewhere. And that’s okay too.
The Artists Among Them#
But some of those generative AI users don’t see a tool that gets them to an outcome faster. They see a tool that allows them to manifest aesthetics that were trapped in their head before.
These people are no different than a photographer picking up a camera or - pay attention to how we call these now - an artist picking up a mouse or a Wacom tablet instead of a pen or a pencil or a paintbrush, because the digital toolset is more amenable to manifesting their vision.
Those people who see generative AI as “oh my goodness, I can finally create these visual experiences that I did not have a way to create before” - those people are artists.
They are artists because they seek, through the act of creation, to experience and share the experience. That is what drives the artistic process. Even after visual media creation is fully industrialized - even after most people are just having the machines make the visual media that they need for their outcomes - we need not fear the loss of artists.
There will still be humans doing it by hand, because they seek the experience of doing the creating as an end unto itself.