Computer Dork Identity Politics

can computer be artist

I hate art that is made on the computer.

Let me be more specific, because I have read all of the pedantic arguments about AI art, including my own. I think that “computers” are just tools to make things, much like a paint brushes are tools to make paintings. Therefore, I am not saying that all art that is created using a computer is bad, or laying down some kind of curmudgeonly anarcho-primitivist orthodox take. I am using a computer to type this blog.

But I am using the computer the way I would’ve previously used a typewriter. This is an important distinction, I feel, and one that is admittedly self-serving. I think that when a visual artist is using a computer to design something that ends up getting made into a physical thing by a person (or a machine!) that’s also fully kosher, so to speak.

I’m talking about the kind of “art” that really bad articles like this one are referring to. Every time there’s a new piece of bad technology that helps bad artists make really bad art that appeals to people with very poor taste, there’s an intellectual magazine article about why it’s actually good. I would like to offer a counterpoint to this article by a guy named Matteo Wong: nobody is missing the point. It sucks.

I don’t mean to single out the author, though, because there are many such takes to be found. There’s probably a Dimes Square moron who does AI stuff and has a highly illegible justification for why it is provocative. It’s not provocative, it’s not interesting, and it’s not “experimentation.”

It is a simulation of art. AI and generative algorithmic tools simulate the process of an artist synthesizing the zeitgeist against tradition and creating something unique from it. Maybe a person can take that synthesis tool and further synthesize it to create some kinda unique statement about the computer. Maybe someone has already done that, and doing it with AI is just the same thing other techno-futurist artists have done in a better way with their hands in the past.

Since I’ve been alive, the media has worked really hard to make computer dorks into something else. Bill Gates and those guys were “pirates” even though they were actually in a room on a computer. Then they were disruptors. Now they’re artists because the computers they made can generate a picture of Spongebob humping the Christ and some dork can say it’s a “statement.” Identity politics for people who aren’t naturally interesting, and now their uninteresting products can crank out a million uninteresting simulated emotional expressions per minute.

Let’s say one has a reaction to a piece of AI created by an artist, therefore it has evoked a feeling and qualifies as “art” under the cheapest definition of art. The artist is an emotionally complex human being, but the “artistry” is channeled into queries typed into a little box on the glowing screen. Sounds pathetic, if you ask me. If you’re going to get tricked into feeling something, at least make someone put some effort into it. Doing stuff is hard. That’s why it’s so arresting when you see another human being — seemingly made of the same stuff as you — create something remarkable through sheer tyranny of desire. Why would you ever want to mass produce that feeling?