The stuff of Salvador Dali’s wildest dreams is no match for Facebook these days: Amputee kittens using crutches, strawberries in the shape of lifelike frogs, bosomy conjoined twins, structurally impossible sand sculptures, snakes swallowing fully-grown lions, airplanes with human hands, and an underwater Jesus covered in shrimp.
These unsettling images appear in our social media feeds, sometimes as a jump scare, and sometimes as a Trojan horse. They might be accompanied by a manipulative caption — “99% of people will scroll past without clicking like” — or hashtag gobbledygook that often includes, for some reason, a combination of the words “Scarlett Johansson beautiful cabin crew.” The replies, a medley of gullible users and likely bots, are usually full of compliments for the insane image.
Why Do People Fall for These Images?
Khan Schoolcraft, 33, moderates a Facebook group called “AI Boomertrap,” which collects examples of the genre. Schoolcraft has seen it all. “Tiger Jesus saving his beautiful cabin crew from a plane that’s slowly sinking in the mud,” he says, by way of example. “You’ll see, like, a half-human, half-baby monkey hybrid getting eaten alive by fire ants, and people are commenting, ‘Oh so beautiful, I love it. Amen. God bless.’”
Even the more prosaic images have a certain aesthetic — like the trend of AI-generated human quadruplets or centenarians asking for birthday wishes with their supposedly handmade cakes, whose designs defy the contours of reality. People somehow don’t see, or look past, the obvious signs of software-generated fakery and surreality.
The Philosophy Behind AI Art
Jonathan Gilmore, a professor of philosophy at the City University of New York, says these pictures are “slop,” the tech world’s term for the image equivalent of spam. But they’re also a new category of surrealism. From a certain perspective — if your interpretation is broad enough — they may even be art. Not good art, by any definition, but they raise interesting philosophical questions about how we think about and classify images generated by AI.
The French writer André Breton wrote, in his 1924 “Manifesto of Surrealism,” that the genre elevates the “superior reality” of the subconscious mind — that dreams and reality can combine to create a reality that is somehow more real. But what happens when the entity creating a surreal image isn’t human? What if the creator itself is surreal?
“These are serious questions in philosophy of art right now,” says Gilmore. The questions “cut to the core of our concept of art, and what we mean by art, and what we think art should do for us.”
Is AI Art Truly Art?
Robert Hopkins, a professor of philosophy at New York University who studies aesthetics, offers some other questions to evaluate whether an AI-generated work is Art with a capital A. “Does it have real expressive power?” asks Hopkins, “Does it articulate feelings and moods and thoughts, and make them clear to you in a way that is distinctly artistic? … Is it interacting interestingly with preceding art?”
Humans do make AI art, in one sense: They must string together a description, or prompt, to tell the AI what image to make. In this sense, AI is a tool, like a sort of magic, automated paintbrush.
The Future of AI Art
Polina Kostanda, a 45-year-old Ukraine-based AI artist who posts her work as Polly in Wonderland, also makes surreal, uncanny and dreamy images: grandmothers with mermaid tails, frogs smoking cigarettes, pepperoni pizzas growing like wildflowers. These descriptions might fit with the weird crap reposted on “AI Boomertrap,” except Kostanda sells prints and NFTs of her work, and is represented by a photo agency in Milan. Her objective is for viewers of her work to confront the boundaries of reality and “inspire them to go beyond their usual perceptions,” she says via email.
Kostanda’s work — for which she uses AI image-generating software called Midjourney — is free of the flat affect that plagues much of the social media art you see on Facebook, because she knows how to create a skilled prompt that evokes real photographic quality. In addition to prescribing the subject matter, she will also specify a film and camera as part of the prompt. “For example, Kodak Portra 800,” Kostanda says. “And the camera this photo was ‘taken’ with, for example: Hasselblad 503CW.”
What pushes an AI-generated image into the realm of art, she says, is whether it conveys a message, and whether it “catches the soul.”
“There are a lot of ‘dead’ physical paintings and photographs, without an idea or message,” says Kostanda. “And there are ‘live’ AI images” — images imbued with rich depth and meaning — “that can confidently be called art.”
Conclusion
As an artistic tool, AI is still in its infancy. We’re still not sure how to appraise it, says Hopkins. Will it be judged along with the various forms of handmade art it emulates, or will it be in a category of its own?
One argument for the latter is that we judge works of art not only by how we experience them, but also by our understanding of how they were made. “We value works of art sometimes when they are the product of great struggle, or a virtuoso ability,” says Gilmore. The perception of AI art is that it’s “undermined by the fact that it was just too easy to produce.”
Meyl believes that art created by human-made algorithms should be judged no differently than art created by human hands. He sees AI as a tool, like a pottery wheel. “It operates within the parameters set by the human creator,” he says.
So AI slop is art, in Meyl’s eyes. It’s just really amateurish, really corny, really bad art — kind of like most amateur art that humans have created across media throughout history.
Set aside the AI generator’s tendency to add or subtract fingers, and its ability to deceive. The question, then, is: Why are so many AI creators — from scammers to professional artists — stuck on this flat, kitschy, sometimes hackneyed form of surrealism?
“With this absolutely massive, seemingly infinite capacity to create a visual image, the work ends up looking so conventional,” says Gilmore. Unsettling and uncanny, yes, but somehow “so boring, so familiar.”
For example: several recent posts from a Facebook page simply called “Fascination,” which appears to be run from Armenia. The posts depict the same subject — a little boy who has purportedly painted, with skills beyond his years, a beach landscape — with the same caption: “My new artwork, please appreciate it.” The children look real enough, but the details of the images are giveaways. One of the lighthouses protrudes off the canvas; the ground shown under the easel is also rendered in brushstroke.
The image isn’t real. The boy isn’t real. The fake boy’s painting isn’t real. The posts are the modern rendition of the famous Rene Magritte work “La Condition Humaine,” a painting of a painting that blends into its background so seamlessly that you can’t tell what part of the scene is real.
“You are so talented,” a commenter named Daphne (is she real?) replied to one of the posts. “That’s what I call a work of art.”
Sources: Washington Post, NPR, NY Times, Research Paper
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