An Algorithm Can Never Be An Artist: Resisting AI

It didn’t start at this conversation, nor would it end here, but sitting in my advisor’s office on a Friday afternoon with my A&E editor — who was picking up a check and joined me in scolding that advisor’s wish to create “Video Game Obama” — I was reminded of every reason I despised generative AI and every reason that the world was obsessed.

Our conversation bore no true political consequence nor did it follow any structured debate strategy, but despite being firm in my anti-AI stance, he wasn’t the cause of these 26 months of resentment, nor were the millions of other users sending in their photos to be “redrawn” into different “art styles.” In a space where everything can be possible with just a few words typed into a text box, generative AI is the very genie that we’ve tricked into granting us unlimited wishes.

I would be remiss to deny the use of generative AI in computer science or engineering fields, but this is not a meditation on generative AI’s utility and rather its violence against artists — visual, literary, performance, musical and countless more. It cuts out the entire process, the foundational learning element, of making art in favor of the finished product which can be distributed, consumed and then discarded in a matter of seconds for the next thing.

Yet, generative AI is not the reason the world has been trained to think this way. The neoliberal prioritization of individual overconsumption combined with the fascist colonization and censorship of the art space has been at the root of the global disrespect towards art. We have forgotten how to appreciate art in all its stages and contexts, not just its final product. 

Additionally, with the rise of social media, art becomes content to instantly gratify a user’s wants in only a few seconds. Art no longer stands as a means to question and experiment with the world; it’s become a sanitized, mass-marketable product for sheer pleasure.

For months, I’ve watched as non-artists inserted themselves into art-driven spaces, justifying their reliance on generative AI as a resistance to the art sphere’s inaccessibility. 

Handing over your ability to think creatively to a machine is not the accessible solution people want to think. There is no such thing as an AI artist when you’ve surrendered your thinking to an algorithm operating within the bounds of a capitalistic society built on exploitation and genocide. There is no room to push beyond those boundaries, because it is trained to only think of what we have and not what is possible; we are actively disabling ourselves. It is an insult to humanity itself and the human need to push those boundaries.

I came across a Benedict Smith poem years ago called, “I Wish I Wrote The Way I Thought,” where he opens saying, “I wish I wrote the way I / thought; / Obsessively, / Incessantly, / With maddening hunger. / I’d write to the point of suffocation.” I want every person to embody this poem — to create art that is driven not by a need to be good by any metrics, but by a compulsive need to create. To write as though getting it out means life or death. To paint as though each brushstroke allowed you to take another breath. To make art, if for any reason, to show that you are alive, flesh and blood, and that you will not be contained.