Welcome To My NightmA.I.re

Why A.I. art is missing the point.

Last night I had a nightmare; a proper, wake up sweating and heavy breathing nightmare. I was in a massive, labyrinthine library looking for a book but I didn't know which book. I just knew I desperately needed a book to tell me something about who I am but I couldn’t find one because every book in the library had been written by an A.I. and when I asked the librarian for help she turned out to be a red-eyed robot! And that's when I woke up.

Robot librarian image created using Canva A.I. 😏

I know exactly why I had this nightmare. At various stages in the evening before bed I had been dipping in and out of the author Christopher Fowler's memoir 'Word Monkey', in which he writes about how he organises his personal library and what books mean to him. I also read this article: Fears of irreversible damage to literature as A.I. wins award for sci-fi novel.

Finally, just before bed, I downloaded Bandlab onto my tablet. Bandlab owns Cakewalk, which is my preferred desktop DAW or Digital Audio Workstation for making music. I wanted to see if my tablet could act as a drum-pad-cum-synth (it can). As I was familiarising myself with the functionality of the app I saw that it, like everything, now has A.I. built in as standard so I had a fiddle. Essentially, you select a genre and a tempo and it will make up three tracks that you can tweak. So I did. And it was the least satisfying music-making experience I have ever had. I just pressed a button and, hey presto, an incredibly run-of-the-mill, middle-of-the-road, ho-hum track appeared roughly within the genre I was after and, despite the no-doubt millions of dollars pumped into this technological miracle, I found it completely...underwhelming.

You see, creativity is not an outcome, it is a process. By undertaking that process you work out what you really want to say or do, be it in a song, a painting or a blog post, and hopefully have a lovely time doing it. I suppose I could go to Chat GPT now and ask it to write me a blog post about 'a man who wakes up from a nightmare about A.I. and then tries to write a song using A.I and finds it underwhelming' but what would I get out of that? Six or eight hundred words that did nothing to help me understand the experience I'd had, why I had it and what I thought about it. For that I need to go through this process, which I enjoy, to select the words that best articulate how I feel and what I think. In that way I sort out my own mind and hopefully communicate something uniquely human that connects you to your own thoughts about A.I. and creativity, which you may wish to share with me or keep to yourself.

It seems to me that using A.I. to create art is like using this drill to increase the step count on your Fitbit - you get the result, but none of the benefit. Art is a workout for your brain and soul, not just a way to get likes online (and I would never have come to that thought had I not bothered to write this blog).

Don't get me wrong, I don't think A.I. is evil. Like anything A.I. is only as good or bad as the uses to which it is put and I think it has lots of positive applications in finance, law, medicine and marketing. But, just like I wrote previously about digital vs. analogue technology, to use A.I. is a choice not a pre-requisite and if you want to create art that is original, meaningful and as much about understanding and expressing yourself as ticking it off your to-do list then you should consider carefully how and when you use it.

P.S. Did you notice that I created the main image using A.I? That’s because I didn’t care much about it, I just wanted something in there to fill space, which I think is quite telling.