An ex Australian Prime Minister once stated that ‘life wasn’t meant to be easy’. There was at least a hint of ‘protestant’/Catholic work ethic to this and a desire not to extend the welfare state any further. He had little to say about the Arts, unlike his predecessor who saw value in contemporary art and expended funds accordingly but no doubt the idea that anything worth doing comes with effort and setbacks would have impressed him. While washing machines, electric and gas cookers and vacuum cleaners are all worthy additions to life at least in allowing time for socialisation, the fact that we may well be on the cusp of self-driving cars probably has more to do with the appalling toad toll and taking the risk out of being on the road than anything else. The very idea of a risk free life goes against every tenet of the creative process where failure is an inherent aspect of its very nature.  And yet the societal norm now is not only to remove risk and failure but that public perception is currently geared towards creativity that requires no work, no time and no conscious control at all. How on earth did we get to this state?

The Surrealists introduced the idea of subconscious control – that even in the most random of processes such as throwing objects into the air and letting them fall where they may, or during stream-of-consciousness writing, the brain would exert some form of control. Many artists have believed that there is state between consciousness and the subconscious where Art happens in un-looked for associations. The moment of realisation that has led to the world’s greatest discoveries would seem to be just that – a moment of inspiration as elements align in unexpected ways. However, it isn’t the accident that is important, but the interpretation aligned with human experience. Without the filtering process that assigns meaning, the accident remains just an accident, however pretty and appealing.

With the advent and continuing development of AI generators the question might be asked ‘where is the Art worth preserving and indeed, where is the Art?’ To call the products of AI generators art at all may suggest that another word entirely needs to be conjured up to describe both the process and the products. There is no doubt that the current crop of AI generators from producers such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Artbreeder, and DALL-E improve on what previous generations were capable of and their use in animation is ever further from the hand drawn cartoons of Disney and Mickey Mouse. The claim now from enthusiasts, of which there are millions, is that machines have crossed a threshold and are now capable of being truly creative. I doubt that. Lensa AI in particular takes 10 – 20 uploaded selfies with a range of backgrounds, facial contortions, and angles and indications of gender and creates a composite in 20 minutes. The algorithms have learned their ability to mimic art from scanning billions of pictures made by humans and what it is expected pictures should look like and to restructure the new pictures in a way ‘no human is likely to think of’ [to quote a recent article in Wired..

‘No human is likely to think of’…. I thought that the point of Art was of human beings expressing themselves based upon their personal histories and the way they view the world. Or am I wrong? When all that the AI ‘artist’ has done is push a button and allow the choices programmed into the machine to take control, no matter how many clever and appealing variations there are, at what point does it become art? Merely making an image is not enough.

Perhaps I am being too pedantic or protective of the creative process and the work I see being required to achieve anything and that I am completely at odds with the current reality but just as I saw with early creative computer programs, fooling teachers and those less than familiar with the generation of computer imagery, became all too common. As did ‘borrowing’ images from Pinterest and Google and claiming them as original work. While the tools of Adobe products lend themselves to ease of production, they are not in themselves, Art, but the societal malaise such products has engendered goes against even the wider stated aims of education in its efforts to foster creativity and problem-solving.

Much of the thinking surrounding this timesaving, risk-free approach, is to leave room for ‘life’. ‘Life’ would seem to be defined as the endless pursuit of pleasure and happiness – more holidays, more beer and more TV streaming – no doubt a product in itself of allowing the capitalist market via advertising to dictate both necessity and actuality.

I have no doubt that the computer industry sees its contribution to society as beneficial and there is also no doubt that we now cannot function as a society without access to the internet and information storage but the accent on ease and indolence as a definition of life may well see the prophecies of sci-fi dystopia and entropy as self-fulfilling and creativity could well be the first casualty. As someone wrote on Twitter Spaces recently, the wish to be in college now rather than a decade ago is prevalent because all papers can be written by AI in 60 seconds rather than staying the course and actually learning something. Plagiarism is already a problem at university level and while accessed scholarly articles can usually be identified, AI technology can apparently create works that cannot be traced back to a source.

Glenn Gould, the great classical pianist said that ‘the purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.  Time, and lots of it, is the telling factor. I have no doubt that many such definitions could be quoted about great artists. In another qualification the art critic Christopher Allen recently wrote that ‘for the last century, it has become harder [to find a personal direction] with the crumbling of tradition, the failure of art teaching and the disorientation of art institutions…..and a loss of belief in shared stories’. For him the training, the development of technique and time lead to art and great art. It isn’t the product of accident or indolence or short cuts.

Such is life……at least according to Google. Living though, is a whole other matter.