Mahler and Meta: Is AI art? How Technology Shatters the Limits of Expression

A technical and historical overview of how technology has shaped art over millennia to help us answer whether AI art is art

Art is not a product, but a problem. If art is emotion on a medium, it has always been shaped by the tools available to humans. These tools and techniques could impose technical constraints on artistic expression - we have pointed arches and buttresses to thank for freeing us from dark and heavy Romanesque churches and bringing us airy Gothic naves - slowing down creativity.

Occasionally though, new tech engenders entirely new ways for humans to embody their ingenuity. Photography is a clear enabler for the imagination. But did you know that early photographers sometimes intentionally blurred their photos in an attempt to imitate oil paintings, in the face of relentless criticism of their medium and before we accepted the potential of photography as a new vehicle for art? The tension between incumbent artists and newcomers goes back much further than the explosion of AI.

Roughly half a century separates the death of Julia Margaret Cameron and her Pre-Raphaelite photos and the birth of Robert Mapplethorpe.

Julia Margaret Cameron’s 1867 portrait of her niece, Julia Jackson – mother of Virginia Woolf. Julia used soft focus, long exposure times, and staged compositions to create pictorial effects that resembled Pre-Raphaelite paintings. She also added scratches, stains, and texts to her prints to enhance their artistic quality. Photograph: National Media Museum, Bradford-Science and Society Picture Library. As for Mapplethorpe, imma let you Google that one.

I was inspired to write this article after playing around with Meta's MusicGen tool to create new bits of music out of text prompts. Did you know that Mahler composed a pretty jazzy piano concerto? I mean, he didn't, but I'm going to see some jazz at Vortex on Friday and I love Mahler, so I wanted to give Mahler the chance to enjoy that breathless coked-up gremlin-performer quality I've experienced every time I've been to Vortex.

Click to listen to the author's version of a Mahler concerto, if Mahler enjoyed the occasional warehouse rave at Hackney Wick.

Ancient Art and Technology

The biggest truths are so obvious that we don't stop to think about them ("This is Water" by David Foster Wallace). So it's powerful to stop and consider how the dawn of art coincided with the dawn of technology. One of the earliest examples of how technology influenced art is the invention of writing. Writing enabled not just the transmission of stories and ideas beyond the limits of oral tradition, but it also enriched other forms of art such as painting and sculpture, by providing symbols and inscriptions which added meaning and context to visual representations.

Egyptian hieroglyphs, for example, are pictorial representations of words, sounds, or concepts. But they were used to decorate monuments, relief sculptures, paintings, metalwork, and jewellery. They not only added meaning and context to visual representations, but they also had an aesthetic function, as they were often arranged in harmonious and symmetrical compositions.

Another early example of language helping to evolve other art forms, the François Vase (c. 570 BC). The vase illustrates episodes from the Trojan War, the Calydonian Boar Hunt, the Return of Theseus, etc. But it also contains inscriptions that name most of the characters and some of the events depicted on the vase, expanding the limits of oral tradition like a Hellenic hieroglyph.

Another example of how technology influenced art in ancient times is the development of metallurgy. Metallurgy fostered metalwork and jewellery as forms of art, using metals to craft shapes, patterns, and designs that reflected the culture and aesthetics of each civilization.

Modern Art and Technology

Few examples illustrate the many ways that technology influenced art in the modern era as the invention of photography. Photography revealed reality in unprecedented detail and speed, spawning a new art form where subjects could be more raw, narratives gleaned from ordinary moments of day to day life. Needless to say, photography also challenged other forms of art, such as painting and sculpture, by questioning their role as the primary channels of representation.

Famously, photography was not immediately embraced as an art form by the traditional art world. Many critics and painters dismissed photography as a mere mechanical reproduction that lacked creativity and originality. The French painter Paul Delaroche famously declared that “from today painting is dead” after seeing a daguerreotype in 1839. Similarly, the British critic John Ruskin argued that photography was “not an art but a science” in 1853.

Photographers also faced challenges in developing their own style and identity as artists. Initially, many photographers tried to imitate the conventions and techniques of painting by using soft focus, long exposure times, staged compositions, and color filters to create pictorial effects. It took decades for the world to truly see the potential of this new medium.

The Two Ways of Life, a moralistic photo montage by Oscar Gustave Rejlander, 1857. Rejlander used combination printing, angles, light sources and even editing to create large-scale and elaborate compositions that resembled historical paintings.

Another example of how technology influenced art in the modern era is the development of steel structures. Steel structures and lifts enabled the first ever skyscraper in Chicago (the Home Insurance Building) and thus a new language for architecture. Steel structures also challenged other forms of art by providing new materials, spaces, and contexts for artistic expression (did anyone go to see the BBC Proms at Printworks?? or have you been to Bold Tendencies? Hearing Messiaen in such an unpretentious setting rearranged my brain chemistry).

The London Symphony Orchestra at London's best club venue. Smelling salts wouldn't have revived a Victorian don seeing this.

It was a Frenchman, the writer Émile Zola, who described the Eiffel Tower as “a hideous and colossal skeleton”, noting its industrial look. It was another Frenchman, Le Corbusier, who took 'industrial' as a compliment and proposed to raze Paris to built his machines for living (apartment blocks) 50 years later. Paris is truly at its best without Parisians. But I digress.

Generative AI and art

Let's get to the meaty part. Can artefacts produced via AI be considered art?

In form, they sure reflect human-produced artwork. That's because AI models are drawing from humankind's body of work. There are valid questions about originality, copyright, and self-sabotaging. How will art evolve if we flood the internet today with many-fingered regurgitations of existing work? How will case law keep up with copyright? How about monolithic Napoleonic legal systems?

My biggest qualm with questions of copyright is that artists have always benefitted, including commercially, from the work of previous artists. There have been cartoonish depictions of other cultures' art borne out of racist, atavistic orientalism (often in the defence of empire). There has been relatively respectful discovery and reinterpretation (see Picasso and African art). There has been outright provocation (I refuse to post a picture of the Koons vs Rogers controversy because Koon's work belongs on top of a 90s Serbian TV set, doily permitting), and there has been the most comical analog precursor to the current copyright controversy, when Anish Kapoor tried to copyright the 'blackest black'.

Gathering Clouds I-IV, a piece by Anish Kapoor using Vantablack, 2014, fibreglass and paint, via the artist’s website.

Let's assume the medium (large generative AI models and their training data) is an enabler. Is human emotion and intention required to produce art? The French artist Jean-Michel Jarre stated that “AI is not an artist” back in 2019. And yet, in order to produce the header for this article (the Opera Garnier made out of glass with some Blade Runner elements to it, if you're wondering. I never claimed to be deeply original 😘) I had to try many combinations of instructions to convey to the AI model the sort of pathos I had in mind.

Medium versus intent versus emotion versus audience utility

What if an AI prompts another AI? Is the product art? The language model writing the prompt is drawing from a breadth of recorded human experiences and emotions I'll never get to partake in. The neural network (GANs, VAEs, transformer models) using this prompt to generate an image is also looking at all the recorded human artwork. There is, or has been, human emotion, There is, or has been intent.

This is the high level of how a stable diffusion model works. Text prompts get converted into tokens (units of information that the model understands); this gets 'understood' by an encoder, which then parses the latent space of all information to come up with a set of instructions for the image decoder.

What if an AI prompts and AI, which prompts an AI, which prompts an AI… One can assume that if we add enough steps, human emotion, intent, and even form will be progressively less recognisable. I don't worry about form; we don't admonish Jackson Pollock or Marcel Duchamp for taking tremendous leaps in form (at least not anymore); we praise them. I do wonder about emotion and intent.

Let's imagine a hypothetical. JAXA (Japan's NASA) plans to launch a spacecraft which will fly by an asteroid called 3200 Phaethon. Imagine JAXA is invaded by the spirit of hygge and decides it must use this chance to drop a cute, cozy mid-century Scandinavian-inspired fully assembled and provisioned house onto the surface of the, as of right now completely un-hygge asteroid. I picked this particular mission and asteroid because its orbit takes it so close to the Sun which, even if we ignore the lack of a breathable atmosphere, it would make human habitation of this house impossible. Is this house, made with intent but without a human audience to use it, a house? Will it be a house if robots use it for shelter?

The use that humans make of this celestial house is representational, since it has no use but to advance a concept. The use that robots might make of this house assuming they can withstand the heat would be, at least until they develop sentience, utilitarian. Whether the house was made by humans or machines, the specific shape it takes, doesn't seem to matter in order for it to crystallise an idea or a utility. Its use by different audiences does. Perhaps the answer to whether AI art is art doesn't lie with form or intent, perhaps the answer lies at the interaction with its audience. This isn't groundbreaking, just ask your parents whether graffiti art is art. But it does help with the question of whether art made by machines is art, if it's enjoyed by a human afterwards.

To be clear, I 100% think that artists and writers should be compensated fairly for their work. But we can't forever avoid machines perceiving the world around them, and with it existing artworks, given that we're deploying more and more sensors and automations to the world. I can't see a large difference between advanced sensors and AI models other than the fact that the latter are proactively fed training data by humans, as opposed to being left to their own devices to process their environment.

Current case law also doesn't really lend itself to recognising copyright infringement if the new artwork does not appropriate all or most of someone else’s earlier copyright work, but instead uses inconsequential elements of it together with other images created by the new author. By the very way that encoder-decoder architectures work (eg, stable diffusion models), there is abstraction and original creation.

When training a model, we 'diffuse' an image by adding random noise to it in steps, and teaching a predictor how much noise was added at each step. Reverse diffusion consists of starting from complete noise and then taking away noise step by step based on the amount of noise our predictor tells us there should be at each step. The randomness innate to this process means it's extremely unlikely that generic prompt instructions for a 'painting of the Thames in London at dusk' will return a painting by Canaletto exactly.

Conclusion

Technology is not only a tool, but also a catalyst for art. Technology not only enables, but also provokes artistic expression. Technology and art have been interlinked since the dawn of time, and will continue to be so in the future. How we assign worthiness, intent, emotion, form, and effect will affect not just the economics of creation, but it may even shape our very enjoyment of art. I only know 2 things for sure after writing this piece: that we need artists as much as ever and therefore they deserve fair compensation for their work; and that generative AI is here to expand the limits of what's possible to create.

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