Why is art appreciation important, and why shall we support art-making?
If the pandemic was mostly about the metaverse, NFTs and cryptocurrency (aside from the annoying virus), post-pandemic must be about AI.
While AI used to be an idea that was very difficult to grasp as a non-tech guy, the few things that I could have imagined all came from movies and animes — like the “2001: A Space Odyssey”, an iconic movie about the evolution of human beings; or the Cyber System from the anime “Future GPX Cyber Formula”.
My thinking about AI
I have always dreamt of being able to speak to my car and have it recommend when to activate my extra booster power for acceleration. However, my perspective changed earlier this year with the rise in popularity of chatGPT and Stable Diffusion. Despite being a frequent user of chatGPT (as evident from my other article) and relying on Stable Diffusion for my work, particularly in creating thumbnails and generative art, I’m starting to feel that the outputs generated by these tools are similar to how we used Microsoft Word and Excel twenty years ago. They are efficient, clean, and neat, but ultimately, the appreciation of art and language relies on the user’s personal taste.
Take an example of asking chatGPT to proofread a sentence with something like,
I prefer having hamburger over spaghetti, mainly because I’m not a big fan of the red sauce.
chatGPT would return the following in five different versions,
“I prefer hamburgers over spaghetti, mainly because I’m not a big fan of the red sauce.”
“When it comes to food, I favor hamburgers over spaghetti, primarily because I’m not particularly fond of red sauce.”
“My preference lies with hamburgers rather than spaghetti, primarily due to my lack of enthusiasm for red sauce.”
“Given the choice, I lean towards hamburgers instead of spaghetti, mainly because I’m not keen on red sauce.”
“Personally, I have a preference for hamburgers over spaghetti, mainly because the red sauce doesn’t appeal to me.”
To be frank, I would still prefer the first version, except that chatGPT helped me add an “s” after hamburger — and I see this is proofreading, but not plagiarising or ghost writing.
Why human-created art, but not only Stable Diffusion?
Similarly, when we look at art, even though Stable Diffusion could create some very stunning images, like unrealistically pretty girls, surreal scenarios, art that would resemble some renowned artists etc., they still cannot show what I really like about human created art — which is the imperfectness.
I remember as a kid I used to learn music, and while I was practicing very hard for a violin piece by Sarasate, I came across some crazy recordings by Perlman. When I was so frustrated with all the double stops and harmonics, I thought, “why would I need to practice that hard? We can always let Perlman do it.”
So I went to my teacher with my concern, and what she told me was life-changing. She said, “regardless of how good Perlman is, it is his art, but not yours. In order to create your own art, you will need to experience yourself.”
I think this can perhaps be applied to what we are experiencing nowadays — while a lot of game companies and anime companies are cutting headcount in the art team, it is always important to remember that the styles, the imperfectness, and the work of art can, at least at the moment, not be replaced by machines, regardless of how “perfect” they seem to be. Human input in art is still very important.
Doodle for Google student contest
This brings me back to a recent news article that I read online — Google has recently announced the 2023 Doodle for Google National Winner, and her name is Rebecca Wu, a grade 6/7 students who painted her sisters above some flowers.
When I read the news, I thought, could these be replicated by Stable Diffusion? Probably. Could the paintings be done better? Probably. Could Google cancel the competition and rely entirely on AI? Probably.
So why do we still need appreciate the works of these contestants?
My childhood violin teacher could likely give me an answer — because these are their understandings of art, and through art, they were able to show what means the most to them. For Rebecca, it’s the memories with her sisters; for Benjamin, it’s his appreciation for the bees; for Allison, it’s the trip to Joshua tree with the family.
We need art, and we need to be able to appreciate art, so that we can appreciate what people want to convey through art.
Next time, let’s talk about music.
