Credit: Dangerous Minds / Elias Marrow
You might think you can always tell when you’re looking at AI-generated art, and that might even be true. However, that level of certainty might not exist forever.
While it’s true at the time of writing, there is something about the finished product of generative AI that lands whatever slop it’s given you square into the uncanny valley. To be clear, that’s not what makes it bad. The problem isn’t that AI-generated art looks like ass, because sooner or later, it won’t. The toothpaste is out of the tube, and the people behind them are pumping enough money into this particular con that eventually, they will be powerful enough to create work that doesn’t reek of AI slop.
Many people will tell you that this makes it art. If you can’t tell the difference between something created by hand and something created by typing a prompt into a computer programme, then they’re the same thing. These people are fundamentally wrong, especially the truly braindead people who will tell you that, since these works of “AI art” don’t involve human error, they’re actually better than what humans can create. Or, perhaps more troublingly, anything they can create.
Even Elias Marrow, who actually does have respectable ideas when it comes to art. It’s always grand to hear when people stick it to established art galleries by hanging their own work in there and scarpering. Especially, when it’s a work like Empty Plate, a work that Marrow snuck into the National Museum Cardiff about the plight of Wales in the modern day.
However, the fact that Empty Plate is also quite obviously slop generated by artificial intelligence is a major problem here.
When you look into Marrow’s work, it’s clear that the man knows how to talk the talk. His website is stuffed full with high-minded ideas about what constitutes art and what his place within it is. Although Marrow swearing blind that Empty Plate is a work that was based on his original sketches does slightly have “based on melodies originally whistled by Garth Marenghi” vibes.
On the one hand, that’s just an ingrained English cultural bias against people who believe in themselves, something I’m trying to work through myself. On the other hand, for all of Marrow’s manifesto-like beliefs, he didn’t believe in himself enough to actually put his own work up on the wall. A century ago, Marcel Duchamp was sneaking hatstands into galleries in the name of art. If Empty Plate really is based on some sketches that Marrow made, those sketches would have so much more power than a profoundly ugly JPEG image farted out by a computer programme.
That’s not just me either. The BBC reported that while Empty Plate hung in Cardiff, a patron of the gallery enquired “why such a poor quality AI piece was hanging there without being labelled as AI”. While there are fascinating ideas being put forth by Marrow, the use of artificial intelligence just cheapens it the way that it cheapens everything. It makes a conversation that should be about how ignored and neglected the Welsh feel by a government that should be their own, and makes it about artificial intelligence.
Thus, Marrow goes from a principled, counter-cultural artist to nothing more than someone jumping on a bandwagon. Something that will still be true when Empty Plate looks like a real life painting.