The man lauded as the “godfather of AI” is comparing the artistic capabilities of AI to a period of significant cultural and intellectual transformation in Europe around the 14th to 16th centuries. It was associated with great social change in most fields and disciplines, especially art.
He’s not entirely off course, but like AI art, 95% of Renaissance art was likely terrible. It’s only the “good” art that was preserved to hang in our museums and be taught in our art schools today. Those trumpeting AI’s proficiency as a creator — including Sam Altman — are not creatives, they lack a fundamental understanding of aesthetic.
There is, of course, both good and terrible art being made without AI. But it took us 200 years to get Edward Hopper, Amy Sherman, and Catherine Murphy, it’s going to take a while to get AI’s great artists.
There’s a slipperiness to art that’s made with AI. An uncanniness and uncomfortableness that, evolutionarily, tells us something important is happening and we need to be on alert. It’s inhuman, and even though we rationally know there’s an author, we can’t see the marks and imperfections of a human hand.
Dexterity and skill of a machine is not what makes a piece of art interesting, the critical thinking behind it is. A study by Michael Gerlich at SBS Swiss Business School has found that increased reliance on AI tools is linked to diminished critical thinking abilities. It points to cognitive offloading as a primary driver of the decline.
This doesn’t mean that even average AI-generated art is not powerful in the right (or wrong) hands. The “Trump Gaza” video that recently enjoyed its 15 seconds of fame via the president himself was originally created as political satire of Trump's megalomaniac idea, according to its original creators.
The video depicts a family emerging from the wreckage of war-torn Gaza into a beachside resort town lined with skyscrapers. Trump is seen sipping cocktails with a topless Benjamin Netanyahu on sun loungers, while Elon Musk tears flatbread into dips. The AI tells are everywhere throughout the 33-second montage: blurry edges and flat, lifeless scenes, and a definite slipperiness.
We’ve all been trained to consume art and media on screens, so kitsch crap with no real aesthetic value has the potential to go so much further in the hands of a wannabe dictator.
AI is making an average of averages, an echo of echoes. It leads to mush that exists in no context but its own. AI has never sat in a hospital waiting room at 2am. It's never found undeniable evidence of infidelity in its marriage. It's never locked eyes with its lover across a crowded airport arrivals hall after a long separation. It’s never grieved, or celebrated, or raged, or loved.
It can’t create images from lived stories when it hasn’t lived them. It can’t replicate the mark of a human hand when it has none. It can simulate them, but simulated hands don’t crack and scrape and scratch and click until the canvas or stone or metal tells the story. The artist has labored over each aesthetic choice, regardless of medium.
AI will never have a human touch, which will make a human touch more valuable than ever. But it’s not enough to be human in the age of AI, what matters is how scarce our unique form of humanness is. That’s what gets us to real value.
Hayao Miyazaki, the creator of Studio Ghibli, reacted when he was pitched an animation created by AI: “I am utterly disgusted…I strongly feel like it is an insult to life itself.” He added: “We humans are losing faith in ourselves.”
Even the AI-generated and manipulated images of Mario Klingerman, which at first glance, look like documentary photographs, have a slipperiness. They’re certainly visually arresting, but once you look away they’re gone from memory. The improbable objects in his images almost look like real world objects but they have blurry edges and a blurry story that causes our brains to fold them into a dusty, unused crease somewhere. They’re barely able to be remembered.
On the flip side, art historians are going to look back at this period in 50 or 100 years with all its not-quite-right scenes and limbs with too many appendages and see what art historians have always seen: that art is not the work of a single creator but that of a society, a community, a culture, and a context.
Maybe it is a renaissance after all.
Now I send it back into your own hands.
I hear you. I know this life is hard now.
I know your days are precious on this earth.
But what are you trying to be free of?
The living? The miraculous task of it?
Love is for the ones who love the work.