A robot tries painting. | Yuliia Volkovska/Getty Images
As AI continues to encroach on every aspect of our lives, there is a persistent fear or hope, depending on your angle: AI will someday take over art. The internet is full of quizzes showing that most lay people cannot tell the difference between AI-generated art (digital pictures of paintings, prose) and the real thing. Multiple studies have shown that when people are shown AI-generated art and human-made art, but are not told which is which, they tend to prefer the AI-generated art, whether it be images, poetry, or prose.
Yet what’s striking is that despite this disparity, people still consistently say that human-made art is what they want.
In one study published in 2023, participants were shown a series of images, each randomly labeled “AI-made” or “human-made.” Participants rated the images they thought were machine made as worse than the images they thought had been created by a human artist — even when those were actually human-made.
A literary scandal
A natural experiment in how difficult it can be for people to tell the difference between AI-generated art and human-made art occurred last month, when the prestigious Commonwealth Foundation awarded its short story prize to “The Serpent in the Grove,” which a bears some of the hallmarks of AI-generated prose. In a statement to New York magazine, the Commonwealth Foundation said that the prize committee does not use AI checkers, but that “all shortlisted writers have personally stated that no AI was used.”
The big “tell” for “Serpent in the Grove” was that it is riddled with metaphors that are rhythmic and evocative at first glance but fall apart when you try to figure out what they mean: “The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink”; “She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.” If art is about connecting with another human mind, we might say that “Serpent” fails if, when you read it, you find it almost impossible to tell what the mind behind that story is trying to say.
One conclusion you might draw here is that the widespread disdain for AI-generated art is empty snobbery. If human-made art were so much better, the argument goes, then people would be able to see a real difference.
This line of thinking relies on the belief that “good” art is something that many people find appealing, at least in a vacuum. At this point, AI has automated that generation fairly successfully. At some point, it may get even better at it.
But I don’t think those study participants were lying when they said they wanted human-made art, even if they couldn’t tell the difference. Even if we get to a future in which AI’s persistent glitches are ironed out, so that there are no more missing fingers and garbled sentences, and AI-generated images and music and poetry and prose and film are completely indistinguishable from the best a human can produce, even to highly trained experts — even then, I think people would still keep saying they would rather experience art made by humans. And even in such a world, I don’t think they would be lying.
The pleasure of art is specifically related to the human mind on the other side of the product. When we’re told that the mind on the other side is a machine, many of us don’t want to engage anymore.
That loss of interest matters. It is consistent. It has happened before in the history of art.
Two hundred years ago, another new technology emerged that was capable of automating the technical skills many people at the time would have considered one of art’s fundamental functions: the camera. It could capture a likeness perfectly and very quickly, in a moment when almost all of visual arts were organized around capturing a likeness.
The camera changed the way paintings were produced and ultimately valued, but it did not replace the medium entirely — and the reasons why can help explain why AI-generated art won’t replace human-made art, either.
“Art’s most mortal enemy”
In 19th-century Europe, one of the major ways people decided whether a painting was good was by asking the question, “How closely does this match what I can see with my eyes?” It was important for painters to be able to create something that we would now describe as photorealistic.
What people wanted from art at the time, says Richard Meyer, a professor of art history and director of American studies at Stanford University, was what people expect from a good Hollywood movie now: “You suspend your disbelief that you’re looking at a flat surface with pigment built up on it, and you fall into the fiction of, here are these beautiful bodies before you, or here is this landscape, or here’s this bowl of fruit.”
An artist’s skill was in large part defined by how faithfully they were able to recreate reality. Many artists were able to make a living painting relatively affordable portraits, which allowed people who weren’t aristocrats or nobility to commission a permanent record of their appearance, says Anju Lukose-Scott, a curator and master’s student at the University of Chicago.
As inventors began to develop early versions of photography in the middle of the 19th century, it started to seem like artists might become redundant. A camera can create an exact record of the way the world looks far faster and more easily than any painter can, no matter how skilled they are with their brush. The new technology, French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote darkly in 1859, was “art’s most mortal enemy.” By the 20th century, as it became possible to reproduce an old masterpiece on a postcard, philosopher Walter Benjamin feared that original works of art had lost their unique aura.
The immediate implications for a large class of skilled craftspeople were catastrophic. “Portraiture was a huge commercial business,” Lukose-Scott says. The camera made such work nearly obsolete. Some artists went out of business; others pivoted to making daguerreotypes for their clients instead of paintings.
But the effect on painting as a fine art form was different, Meyer says. Painters began to focus on what they could accomplish with their brushes that a camera could not. Instead of trying to capture reality, they began to use colors and textures to convey emotions.
Artists in the new impressionist movement would deliberately show their brushstrokes in their paintings, making the texture of the paint and canvas part of the artistic effect they were developing. Since photography was still a black-and-white medium, the impressionists made vivid colors more and more central to their work. They moved away from trying to duplicate the shapes and lines that cameras could record so well, and instead began to explore the way unnatural shapes and lines could provoke a visceral response from a viewer.
To the modern eye, it’s these discrepancies between paintings and reality that make these impressionist paintings so exciting and pleasurable to look at. They show us a way of perceiving the world that photography cannot.
As painting evolved, photography took over where trade portraiture left off: It was considered a craft, not an art. When people began to take photography seriously as its own medium in the 20th century, it wasn’t because of photography’s exceptional ability to capture a likeness, Meyer says. The ability to do that could now be taken for granted. Instead, the art of photography was about the choices made by the human using the camera: what to shoot, how to frame the subject, how to light it, how to edit it.
Today, almost all of us carry cameras around in our pockets. But most of us would not describe the quick, functional photographs we take with our smartphones as art, no matter how accurately they capture the world around us. People can and do make art with their phones, but doing so requires a human mind working with intention and craft behind the machine of the camera.
We no longer consider the ability to create a perfect replica of reality to be the main prerequisite to making a piece of visual art. Technology has made it easy enough to do that the skill has lost value. People still care about visual art, but we use different criteria to evaluate it than we did in 1800.
AI’s arrival may very well devalue the ability to create smoothly readable text and pleasant visual compositions, and that could mean bad things for a lot of industries, including journalism. But that doesn’t mean we’ll stop caring about whether or not a human being made a piece of art.
“Art offers us a way of looking”
I keep thinking about something Meyer told me about what happened to the 19th-century portrait painters who lost their jobs to daguerreotypists. Meyer argues that there was something about the nature of middle-class portraiture that made people willing to cede it to cameras, in a way that they didn’t feel happy to do with the types of paintings that live on in museums.
In portraiture, Meyer says, “you’re going not so much for the individual expressive perspective of the artist but for a likeness. It’s really about oneself, the person portrayed, rather than the person portraying.” In contrast, Meyer says, fine art is about the artist, and the way that the artist sees the world.
It’s worth spending a bit of time on the distinction Meyer is drawing. One thing that people who love playing with AI sometimes say is that the pleasure of prompting comes from watching a stray thought become concrete in the blink of an eye: It is a piece of your mind made external, so that you can look at it. An AI prompt is about the person prompting, in much the same way that the average hired portrait was about the person being painted.
If I consider an image or a piece of text to be a reflection of myself, I might not mind using soulless technology to create it — it’s already interesting to me, because it’s about me and for me. But when an image or a piece of text is about something else, I feel differently. I want to connect with another person, not something mechanical.
That seems to be the thing that most humans crave from art: an encounter with another human mind. Someone expresses how it feels to be alive in a human body, with a human soul, and another one sees it, reads it, hears it, and grasps at it. That is the experience that moves us.
“It’s about wanting to understand how an individual sees the world differently from how we can see it on our own,” Meyer says. “Art offers us a way of looking.”
So when we think about whether AI-generated content has the potential to be art, to replace art, the question that matters is not whether it can create entertaining or realistic images and text out of nothing. The question is whether the machine allows us to experience the way a different person lives in the world.
For Lukose-Scott, the possibility is unlikely, because today’s LLMs are trained on a corpus of existing art. ”What’s retained in the invention of photography is a kind of artistic identity. People are using the technology through their own artistic voice, which from my perspective is lacking in AI,” Lukose-Scott says. “My perception of AI art is that it’s just a self-gratifying loop, because it’s taking from what we already know, and it’s putting it back in the world.”
When a person uses ChatGPT to spit out a Studio Gibliflied replication of their family snapshots, they are not showing us a new form of subjectivity. They are mimicking the subjectivity of Hayao Miyazaki, without bringing Miyazaki’s intention or skill to bear on the finished product — and they’re able to do so because OpenAI trained its model on Miyazaki’s work without his permission. Unlike the camera, AI is built on a foundation of what is arguably intellectual theft.
This is not to say that it would be impossible for an artist to use AI as a tool to produce new artistic ideas, just as it is not impossible for an artist to use an iPhone camera as a tool to make art. But it would look different from slapping a prompt into Midjourney, for the same reason that most people’s iPhone selfies are not very artistically interesting: Because they are about and for you, not about sharing your embodied experience with the world.
The context matters enormously. The context is what tells me that when I reach out to art with my human mind — my human soul — another mind is on the other side, reaching back.
