The evolution of creativity
How does AI fit into the world of art?
Art is an ever-evolving means of expression. The first known artworks are millenia-old cave paintings made using clay and natural pigment, but they serve as an illustration that the earliest man and woman had a story they wanted to tell. The ancient Greek and Roman empires perfected marble sculptures and were able to capture suspended motion in stone. The Renaissance artists invented stretch canvas oil paints and the use of perspective on a two dimensional surface. Andy Warhold came up with silk screen printing and made a can of soup one of the most recognisable images in the world. So where does the evolution of creativity go next?
One of JAN the Journal Volume 15’s exciting collaborators, visual artist Gabriel Cabrera, discusses the role of AI in the art world.
Does creativity need to be efficient?
On the one hand, the use of AI in the art world has proven to be a double-edged sword, or rather a double-edged brush. For some its disruption of the more traditional approach to art is a threat to authenticity and artistic integrity as opposed to an exciting new development. While it might be the flash topic of the moment, these disputes in the art world are hardly new. When Joseph Nicéphore Niépce captured one of history’s first photographs some classical painters decried photography as “the death of the painting”. Instead, Impressionism emerged as a direct response to the introduction of photography in art. And despite which side of the line you sit on, AI is undeniably reshaping the artistic landscape, and opening up space for meaningful dialogue.
Expanding creative possibilities
While some worry that authentic creations require more than just a click of a mouse, AI can bring a host of transformative advantages to the media and art worlds, essentially enhancing creativity. This speeds up the creative process, freeing artists to focus on refining ideas rather than getting stuck at the start.
Just as the calculator was an advancement in the field of mathematics, AI is an advancement that can be helpful for everything from mood boards and visual concepts in early phases of a project to art restoration (predicting missing elements in damaged works) and the digitisation of certain projects to make collections accessible to a whole new generation.
In fact, it’s most likely that AI will become a medium itself, just like oil paint, photography or video once were once new.
An artist’s perspective
In JAN the Journal Volume 15 visual artist Gabriel Cabrera invites the visionary director, musician, artist, and icon David Lynch to “have dinner for one last time, before continuing on his own transcendental journey”. In this collection of images, available exclusively in the Journal, the Mexican Canadian photographer combines many artistic mediums, including AI, to create a visual feast.
“AI is the perfect testing ground for ideas. It allows you to put together concepts quite quickly,” says Cabrera. “This helps a lot to figure out if your vision is going to work, or if you need to refine it. Many people question the role of AI in the creative process. How do you explain its role to them – and how can we see this evolving in the future?”
“[It’s] nothing more than a tool. I feel there’s a lot of hype out there, a lot of click-bait talking about how AI is the be-all and end-all, but that to me is nothing but baloney. AI cannot understand the difference between artwork that sparks emotion, and work that’s done for purely commercial purposes. AI requires our references and input to do its job, so really, the limit of what it can do is in our hands, and not the other way around.
“AI is also far from being perfect, there are still many ethical and ecological factors that need to be regulated and improved, but AI itself could be of great help to find a solution to these problems. In the future (hopefully very soon), I can see AI becoming part of our general creative toolkit – a tool that will allow us to explore, test, and bring to life our ideas to share with the world.”
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