Renaissance Art and the AI Apocalypse

In Renaissance Europe, people painted a lot of biblical scenes. Too many, some might even say. You could probably walk through a decent sized Renaissance art museum and come away with the impression that they lived in a time where artistic subjects other than Jesus had yet to be invented.

Most of this had to do not with art, but with the power hierarchies of Europe at the time, and that much of the art we see today was commissioned by the church to be put up in chapels and palaces to demonstrate the wealth, glory, and cultural supremacy of christendom.

Now, we all rather like that things have diversified a little since then, and these days we can look at cool pictures of just about whatever we want, and much are better off for it. The difference is more than the subject, however. Christian art was made for a fundamentally different purpose than most of the art today is, especially the sort of digital art we often see online. Both types value aesthetics greatly, and people have doubtless labored for countless hours over aesthetics since art began. However, there is a strong sense in much of Renaissance art that aesthetics are not the primary goal, aesthetics are a means by which to convey a religious message.

What does this have to do with AI?

Well, DALLE-2 and other AI art generation is getting people a little worried about the state of art, and also about human expression and it’s meaningfulness in general. We are on the cusp of a world where aesthetically beautiful art is no longer scarce, and the ability to create it no longer necessarily the product of a lifetime of study and labor. This is a problem for art, especially on the internet, where good aesthetics are seen as inherently valuable. Someone makes something that looks good, and they should be rewarded (with likes, upvotes, donations, patreon supporters, jobs, or anything else.) Infinite abundance of art doesn’t mesh well with this, however, and this presents a bit of an issue. One option is to try to draw lines in the sand, to say we should only appreciate the creations of humans, to define some sort of soul that AI art is lacking, but there isn’t really a clear reason for this, nor is there a clear boundary between something a person created with technological assistance and something split out by DALLE-2 at the click of a button. 

More simply, we live in a culture that values aesthetics as an inherent good, and you can’t have an infinite amount of something that’s inherently good. 

This is prompting people to ask a lot of questions. Questions like, “is AI art meaningless?”, and “if AI art looks the same as regular art, is it all meaningless?” Worse, these are turning out to be very hard to solve, both because questions about art and meaning are always hard to solve, but also because there's a deeper issue: aesthetics are a bad metric for inherent worth. As long as we value things based on how they look, we'll never be able to come up with a satisfying explanation for why human expression is valuable.

Art doesn't have to be about looking pretty. Aesthetics doesn't have to be its own end. Art can be a mechanism for a larger purpose, a way of communicating something that does have meaning in a way that beauty does not. In Renaissance Europe, that thing was god.

Except now we have no god.