Holiday Snapshots from the Latent Space
Creativity is a process and Generative AI can be a part of it
The discussion about whether Generative AI produces art, is creative, and will replace human artists, is raging and I’m trying to add a nuanced opinion here. I’ve been thinking about this topic for a long while now – it connects neatly to my own past practice as an artist, to my dissertation in Computer Science, to the video games I’ve designed, as well as to my work at Write with LAIKA. As much as I would like to state that my opinion is humble, in this case it is not. Quite the opposite.
Humans are not Malfunctioning Machines
Generative AI is creative because it learns from images just like humans do, right? No. The first argument I would like to make is that humans are not malfunctioning machines. We are not rational beings inconvenienced by emotions. We are emotional beings who are now and then able to act rationally. We are intuitive beings that now and then can reflect on their behaviour. And that’s fine. I even think the more we embrace the above facts, the easier we have it in life.
The best book to read on this topic is Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made, where she attests that “emotion is constructed in the moment, by core systems that interact across the whole brain, aided by a lifetime of learning”. Emotions are very much at the core of our experiences as human being.
We are not machines, and the machines we are modelling inspired by biology are not as similar to us as some think-piece writers claim. That has no bearing on the answer to the question of whether AI is able to be creative or not. Crows, whales, and octopi are creative, so why not attest it to machines independent of how much similarity they have to our brains?
Generative AI usually does not Create on its Own
But Generative AI is still creative, right? In a way. The whole question of whether machine learning models can achieve creative acts is often reduced to the activity of the model itself. As if any of the systems we have creates in isolation, on its own. In Midjourney, the user first prompts, then guides the generation, then – quite often – retouches the result, and then finally curates in the sense that they decide to publish the image somewhere else or not. And most of this happens on Discord, in a social space where everyone is observing each other and getting inspired by each other. This whole process is how Generative AI works. The actual act of inferring from the model is but one tiny step for the human user. In Write with LAIKA, writers train little language models and then interact with them over a long time, bouncing between inferences, overwriting the results, integrating them into their existing work until the boundary between what is human created and what is machine made blurs. Not only does that mean that it matters little whether the AI itself is creative, it also means that separating between what the machine created and what was human-made becomes impossible.
When we are creative we always engage in a tight loop with the world around us, using interactive cognition to explore the space between constraints of the physical world and of our cognitive abilities. Henrik Gedenryd wrote a fantastic thesis about how designers think. His main argument is that we think in interaction with the world and that cognition – feel free to replace it with creativity, which is but one attribute of cognition – happens not in our brain alone, as an isolated activity, but is a function of us interacting with our environment. Gedenryd’s theories require a lot of rewiring of your brain. I highly recommend doing just that.
The Product is Journey
But the results are art, right? Who cares. If we work in this interactive fashion with Generative AI systems, what does that mean for the products of such a process? Well, first of all it means that the product is relatively unimportant compared to the activity. I’ve been using Generative AI systems, and other procedural systems before that, for many years now and have been observing others using them. The journey that you’re on while interacting with AI is much more fascinating than the result. Now of course there are people who just want to churn out some assets for their game or have other utilitarian goals in mind. They will be served the oatmeal that procedural systems produce. But I think the majority of interaction with Generative AI is not about the result and even posting any results on social media has nothing to do with the actual images, texts, and snippets produced. It’s an isolated activity purely existing for social reasons. What is interesting is dwelling in a huge semantic space assembled from human cultural artefacts. When we interact with Stable Diffusion, we are walking through arbitrary recombinations of human expression. We are drifting through latent space when picking a direction in Midjourney. We are bouncing ideas back and forth with great minds when running inferences in LAIKA. And much like travelling through a foreign country, we now and then glimpse something we want to hold onto and take a snapshot of that moment. While to a lot of people these products are the main result of Generative AI, I think the main result is that we have a new way of interacting with our culture. We suddenly are not bound to search databases of images in order to understand our past but can actively recreate it in ways that make it more tangible than the highly biased curation of historians will ever be able to. That being said, I have high regard for historians and archaeologists – but historically they have focussed on very specific viewpoints from which to look at history. Exploring the image spaces of Generative AI is a bottom-up, constructive approach to history. There is a lot wrong with that but it does not mean it’s not a fascinating endeavour. What is wrong with that? Well, here’s a list of things that are actually problematic and you won’t find the death of art on it:
Data sets are still constructed with a Western bias, just like history was written with the very same bias. We need more diverse voices.
Data sets are also constructed largely with Anglo-Saxon ethics. I wonder how much Renaissance art, ancient art, non-Western art and critical art from the sixties and seventies can make it through a porn filter. We need to move beyond one-size-fits-all content filtering that reduces the potential of expression in highly culturally specific ways.
Data sets are made by engineers. Now I might come off as a snob but there is definitely a “crisis of taste” in AI art and beyond it. We need ways to creatively explore more challenging aesthetics than anime and concept art.
What is the product of working with Generative AI? It’s akin to a holiday snapshot, or maybe a mix tape you make for someone. Both are only valuable with context but worthless on their own. Now of course one would say that art is like that, too. Worthless without context. And one would not be wrong.
Holiday Snapshots from the Latent Space
Creating with Generative AI is like going on a vacation to the realm of cultural heritage. We take snapshots of interesting scenes that only happen to us and they are about as reliable as other accounts from the past. Creativity happens in interaction with the world around us, like all of cognition. Generative AI can be a great new addition to this world we’re interacting with while being creative. It’s like suddenly having a significant junk of human history to rub against. That does not mean that the results are always art or that they never are. That depends on the context they are presented in, turning the artwork itself into a process (and the process of making art into the artwork).
“Cold things warm up, the hot cools off, wet becomes dry, dry becomes wet” as Heraclitus says. Everything flows. Maybe in the future we will not be concerned with the products of Generative AI at all. We will constantly create and recreate instead of ever freezing a result in place. All art would then be in a permanent state of flux, forever changing, now and then holding still for a short moment, getting permanently constructed and reconstructed as we move through the past and the present of humanity.