So an AI was programmed to examine hundreds of paintings and then dream up one of its own. The end result is recognizable, and recognizably art. Is it *good* art? Meh. It’s not a clear and accurate representation of the subject; it does not uplift; it’s not really that interesting on its own. Still: it’s way better than most modern art, so it’s got that going for it.
And it just sold for almost half a million dollars.
One painting is hardly a threat to the art world. Except… maybe it is. Algorithms have been cobbling together books of terrible fiction (and terrible non-fiction) for some years now, with some newspaper articles on dry topics such as the stock market created automatically. So far, nobody is beating down the doors to get this computer generated stuff (the auction went for zillions probably because of the First! factor), but the sheer volume could easily overwhelm the marketplace of ideas. I, for example, proved to myself that I could write perhaps two novels per year (I have so far failed to provide any evidence that I could get so much as one novel published in a lifetime). A bot could crank out millions of them in the same timeframe and theoretically so swamp Amazon that even if one f my books was published, AND even if everyone who read it declared it to be the best book ever, it probably still wouldn’t sell because there are 50,000 AI generated books on the same topic with virtually the same title.
And that’s just assuming that AI generated books remain lower quality. But there’s nothing special about art: there is no need for sentience, or “soul,” or “love” or anything else to put words to a page… or paint to a canvas. A computer can make a million paintings or write a million books, and the marketplace will poke through the pile and find the few that are kinda good. The computer will recognize those successes, and learn from them. Before long, AI will create art that, if you didn’t know it was AI created, you’d think a talented human artist had created.
I suspect that eventually the “art scene” will be mooshed into a paste of commercially successful “pop art.” As the market for human artists falls away to nothing, with computers cranking out the images for book covers and magazine articles and movie posters and statuary and wall paintings, the humans who would have climbed the rungs of art success, learning and growing in the process, will follow other paths. Art will no longer be a way for even the barest of incomes for the vast majority of artists. And consequently, good artists won’t turn into great ones. The computers will continue to make art that is Good Enough. And there things might well plateau, unless the AI become *truly* creative. And if that happens, we’re all kinda boned.