This AI discourse is fast approaching its critical mass at this point so I obviously gotta add my 2 trillion cents.

Before I do, I should establish my credibility. My first direct exposure to AI was in late 2017 when I was still in Illuminati School (also known as Fartmouth College). I took a course called Cognitive Computing with Watson with a cool professor who’s also a famous researcher at IBM (hence how he got all of us the hookup to a suite of AI tools that were extremely exclusive and prohibitively expensive at the time).

During that course I did the very serious work of training a machine learning model to differentiate between a mop and a Hungarian sheepdog , and training another model to differentiate between a Chihuahua and a blueberry muffin. In other words I was taught well enough to understand the general history and principles of AI, and how to use off-the-shelf AI tooling to demonstrate amusing canine-related Internet memes.

Around that same time, I went to an exhibition at ICA/Boston which is where I first encountered the genius work of Trevor Paglen (my personal favorite is his eigenface of Fanon), and when I first became consciously aware of the possibility of using AI to generate art.

I should underline that I came nowhere near making any contribution to the kind of AI research that’s resulted in the current boom in tools like ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Bard. Nor did I actually try my hand at making any AI-assisted art, despite how cool I thought the concept was. All I’m saying is that I’ve been contemplating this stuff for a while and I’m not completely talking out my ass.

A lot has already been said about what the implications of AI will be on art and artists. It’s been painted by many as a doomsday scenario in which algorithmic theft is the norm, and all the skills and talents that human artists have spent their lives accruing are utterly wasted. I’m here to provide a more optimistic take. I have three benefits I’d like to highlight.

Art has been trending more conceptual than technical for well over a century now. The idea behind a piece of art has long been more crucial than the physical artifact itself. Luckily, AI is only likely to encroach on the technical side of art-making for at least the next decade or two. That leads me to the first two benefits of AI on the art world: 1) serious artists have ample time to consider what the future of this technology means for the trajectory of their respective practices, and 2) in the meantime, they can safely* consider incorporating AI tools into their current workflow in order to tighten certain feedback loops and iterate more rapidly (which, I think, leads to better art).

*By ‘safely’ I mean ‘without being rendered totally useless’ not ‘without being stolen from’ cuz as we all know stealing has been an inevitable strategy in art since forever.

The last benefit, though, captures the whole essence of my attitude towards AI in art. If you accept the superiority of concept over technique like I do (broadly construed I mean, the technique could be the concept), then you should consider this current rush of AI platforms to mean the potential for a whole new renaissance! Not only a renaissance for established artists with good ideas, but for non-artists who were previously barred from realizing their good ideas due to differences in ability or lack of time and/or means. Put simply, AI in art means that great taste will prevail and our lives will be enriched by all kinds of freaky new shit!

Of course it’s not all roses. There’s the real possibility of AI empowering PSEUDO-COOL losers who previously couldn’t create anything worth a damn, thereby fueling their smug attitudes by convincing them they were geniuses all along. I don’t know how to hedge against that, but it’s a risk I’m personally willing to accept (TRUE-COOL will always triumph).

The parts of your brain that govern your particular tastes are referred to as your salience network . I recommend that you guard it and cultivate it, because it’s how you’re going to survive AI.