A Rumination on AI at the End of the World

I decided to become familiar with the beast, and was surprised that there were any positives whatsoever.

I asked an AI engine to make a rendering of a dumpster fire in the style of Van Gogh. What you’re looking at exists, but also doesn’t really exist. I don’t think there were dumpsters like this in Van Gogh’s era in France.

AI has shitty marketing and that’s a good thing. For some reason, instead of hanging their head in shame for a few years, all the people who were convinced that crypto and NFTs (remember those?) were the future are still holding a bullhorn promoting generative AI engines. This is good, I think, because the slower the more skeptical of us are on the uptake, the better. But unlike crude paintshop renderings of apes with sunglasses, AI is actually here to stay, and continuously improves. While we may feel smug noticing extra limbs and an explosion of fingers on otherwise solid imitations of real artists’ work, the reality is this technology will one day be indistinguishable from real life, so we’d better become familiar with it sooner than later.

My initial fascination with this gifted month of Midjourney (a generative AI software that works within discord, which is prohibitive tech to people of a certain age and too reminiscent of slack for others) was really just to see how it worked. It works really simply:

You type: /imagine

You type your prompt (in my case, “black woman working on her laptop in the style of Edward Hopper”).

The engine takes usually less than a minute to spit out 4 options for you to then drill down further into.

You have options to zoom out, to remix an image in the pile, or, if you hate it, you write a more specific prompt. Ultimately it got to this:

It’s a pretty good image. If you squint you’ll notice there’s two hands typing on the keyboard and one on her face, but for two minutes of work, the computer is pretty good. Or at least pretty accurate to my request.

/imagine a Black woman working on her laptop in the style of cut out paper art. Notice the disembodied hand on the coffee cup.

The reason I asked it to make an image of a Black woman working on her laptop is because that’s pretty much the most accurate representation of myself and representation matters. I love going to museums, but my greatest complaint, especially in “classic” art museums, is that I don’t see myself in any of the alabaster royalty or whitewashed Christianity men felt was worth painting for hundreds of years. The best I can expect is the head of Cleopatra or a sarcophagus. I can handle not being centered (hello???), but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t piss me off after 45 minutes. Is nothing else remarkable but a pasty woman anemically lying around?? What those museums also remind me of, is the fact that there probably was art of Black women that just wasn’t preserved because we don’t preserve things we don’t value. Big ouch. Let me out of the museum before I kick something over.

/imagine a Black woman on a laptop in an 80s illustration style… This one was so good I wanted to frame it. But again, it’s not real?

Because it’s such a remarkable technology, I ended up spending the entire month’s worth of hours in a single night. I wanted to see every kind of art style of a Black woman on a laptop or iphone. I became obsessed. As horrible as I think it all is, there is something miraculous about picturing something in your head and having something create it immediately for relatively cheap. But even calling it “creation” feels wrong. Some of the images it easy-bake-ovened were so pretty I thought about framing them.

/imagine a Black woman looking at her iphone in the style of a Peanuts character.

The real danger, though, came when it got good at making what I wanted it to. I’m actually ashamed to admit, that because so many of these images were so good, and also nonexistent in real art found across social media and in museums (remind me to write about the over-representation of white people in art EVEN STILL), that I found myself wanting to take credit for this. Like because my prompt was so amazing and because “I made it” it was like, I should be praised for taking the 45 seconds to watch a computer make it for me. That’s dangerous.

/imagine a Black woman looking at her iphone in a galactic illustration style. It got the fingers pretty good this time. Spooky.

It’s dangerous for a few reasons: one, real art is important and should survive. We’ve all seen the memes by now about how AI should be replacing the hard work in life like getting plastic out of the ocean and detecting cancer or curing it already. And sure, that work is being done. But this past week Tyler Perry put his plans for a huge film compound on hold because he thinks AI can basically save him money on makeup artists and locations in the next few years.

Those of you who have followed this substack for a while have got to be tired of me lamenting the state of the entertainment industry, but how much more abysmal can it get? Well, with AI, a lot. They’re already using AI scans of real actors in the background of movies and shows and paying them once but using their likeness in perpetuity, and probably will continue to even after some of these people die! Now I have to make works of art in under a minute to compete with a computer??

Another reason it’s dangerous? AI is bad for the environment, just like all the blockchain stuff, it just takes a lot of computing power to steal at this high of a level.

And lest we forget, in the real world racism exists. So even though at the moment the tech will flag you if you try to make anything too racist or offensive (though somehow the AI renders of Taylor Swift existed, so it’s clearly not impossible), it will only get worse in the future. And considering our government is older than dirt, laws that reflect the damage this technology can do are decades away from going on the books. Will we be protected before we have an AI president?

This one didn’t even remove the signature at the bottom of this art. It’s such a rip off, and so obviously so.

I’ve started noticing a lot of people sharing AI without even knowing it. Beautiful images keep coming across people’s Instagram stories, and they’re not sharing with the caption (but even if they are, “artists” are burying the fact that it’s AI all the way at the bottom of their captions—if they admit it at all). I’m gonna share a few AI posts I saw in stories recently (posted by people I know don’t support AI taking artists jobs) unbeknownst to them. And no, I’m not tagging the pages that posted, because again, they did not create these images, they simply put an idea into an engine. We have to immediately and incessantly call that out. These are not images that these people took the time to make, they were prompts to a computer that is really fast at stealing and rendering. That’s all. You know how some people will say “I’m an ideas guy?” Well until right now that meant diddly squat because everyone has good ideas, most people just never act on them. Now we are in an era where “ideas guys” are the artists, even though it just took a couple key strokes.

This is AI. The person who rendered it is a real artist, but they didn’t make this.

Sure, this looks cool, but it’s because someone who excelled at this style of art was ripped off. Also there’s no sound, it’s a screengrab.

This is beautiful and entirely fake…

This person is SELLING a book of AI images that we KNOW is based on other artists’ work. For money! This is not ethical.

One more stray thought: the hardest part about posting on the internet is having high quality images and video to support your vision. ChatGPT’s soulless writing is pretty easy to point out, but with images, it’s so important to either make them yourself or credit. I’ve been beating the plagiarism drum for years online. But if I could use generative ai to make this substack look better it would make this a more quality space. I wrestle personally with that. Like, is it ethical to use ai if you acknowledge it is, or is it always unethical? I don’t know. I’m sure as more and more people benefit from this overt theft of artists’ work, just like everything else, we’ll accept it and use it to our benefit. That makes me very sad and very pessimistic about the future.

She’s cute, but she’s not even a real person. What if she’s trapped in some reality like a Black Mirror episode??

How does culture ever move forward if our tech can only look backwards? Are we at the end of art? Is the benefit of seeing myself reflected (and I ran out of space to even talk about how AI prioritizes thin, white beauty standards across any race it creates—and why it always puts Black people in yellow clothing???) worth it? Are we all just going to be working in a lithium mine once AI comes for all the other jobs?????

I don’t know, guys. I have a really bad feeling about all this.

TL;DR: AI is the end of us.

A

P.S.: Here’s me at an actual human museum of real art, The Broad:

When you’re mean to me, this is who you’re being mean to. Under the Table by Robert Therrien.