why art will survive AI
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This whole piece reads like someone trying to transcribe the untranscribable. Not ideas, not opinions — but the feel of what you meant. And that's exactly why art survives AI. Because machines transmit logic. But we leak ghosts.
We’ve been experimenting with this in the weirdest way — not by “improving AI art,” but by sabotaging it. Injecting memory residue. Simulating hand tremors. Letting the model forget what it just said and pick up something it didn’t mean to draw. That kind of thing.
The result isn’t perfect, but it’s getting closer to something that feels like a person was there. Maybe even a tired, confused, beautiful person. We call the system WFGY. It’s open-source and probably way too chaotic for normal devs, but here’s the repo: https://github.com/onestardao/WFGY
We’re also releasing a Blur module soon — a kind of “paper hallucination layer” — meant to simulate everything that makes real-world art messy and real. Anyway, this post hit me. Felt like it walked in barefoot.
We’ve been experimenting with this in the weirdest way — not by “improving AI art,” but by sabotaging it. Injecting memory residue. Simulating hand tremors. Letting the model forget what it just said and pick up something it didn’t mean to draw. That kind of thing.
The result isn’t perfect, but it’s getting closer to something that feels like a person was there. Maybe even a tired, confused, beautiful person. We call the system WFGY. It’s open-source and probably way too chaotic for normal devs, but here’s the repo: https://github.com/onestardao/WFGY
We’re also releasing a Blur module soon — a kind of “paper hallucination layer” — meant to simulate everything that makes real-world art messy and real. Anyway, this post hit me. Felt like it walked in barefoot.
I love this , will check out. WFGY haha, it's awesome
The AI of today is just a probability engine, as far as I am concerned. It can create nothing original because it cannot say, "No, I'm starting over from scratch. I alone will figure this out." Once you set an AI in motion, it will complete the task until it needs further input. And the very fact that it is reliant on an external actor continues to enforce just how pre-determined the outcomes already are. Art, I feel, from my human perspective, should be a reflection of its creator. The product is of their mind. No machine is capable of such action, currently.
true. I believe even if AI had its own perspective outside a human one, we would still relate more to a human experience and art would be predominantly a human endeavor.
For some reason I've got Velvet Buzzsaw on my mind now for art talk, which could an AI do and accurately mean? Anything that cannot disregard its own orders, is a calculated machine, in my book; just a calculator from Texas Instruments.
hmm, just thought of Abramovic' Rhythm Zero experiment. I wonder what that would look like if the object was the AI
I see two possibilities (not mutually exclusive)
1. Art is art because it draws meaning from human existence - AI can't and can never exhibit this. Furthermore, pumping out thousands of "creations" a minute will never compare to a single work from a human.
2. People are dumb and will fawn over just about anything, the origin of a piece of art created today is less relevant than ever.
1. Art is art because it draws meaning from human existence - AI can't and can never exhibit this. Furthermore, pumping out thousands of "creations" a minute will never compare to a single work from a human.
2. People are dumb and will fawn over just about anything, the origin of a piece of art created today is less relevant than ever.
I agree both can happen at the same time but what does that mean for a human artist?
Time and time again, I have gotten up and pushed, sometimes in the same direction, often reinventing from scratch. I have felt like the ultimate creativity for my species is making something out of nothing,whether it is myself as a person, a product or a completely wonky piece of art that only a handful of people will get to see, yet one that will make them feel something.
How many times have you made people feel things via a channel other than yourself ? Given death is inevitable and beautiful in how close and real it is, these other channels are ways to tell your story, besides the memories you leave with people that have limited RAM and limited time too.
So in order to be you need to make, to interpret and translate your own observation into a tangible outcome for everyone else to experience.
I was at the Guggenheim today and I was never more sure that art is going to be one of the few things that survives AI and us humans, as banal and far from it as we are in our day to day. Why?
It’s a simple calculation. Art is not perfection or beauty or even relevance, often it does not have a message either or a significance of any kind. Yet it is an artifact of transmission. A format through which you take a very human experience of the moment, the day and the century and scale it into the masses, potentially, if they are open to it.
Now if you were to replicate exactly the same via silicon intelligence, you perhaps would create the effect and the artifact, without the transmission. We only feel things strongly about what is close and familiar to us and very rarely empathize with others. There might be a human or two that feels for trees and even more people who have strong emotions for dogs. However, most of what we feel is directed towards us or some form of us living in the other, whether it is a parent , a spouse, a child or simply a loved one. We love ourselves amongst others and see our pain in theirs and feel it even more acutely if it is around the corner and if the sufferer looks, talks and even suffers just like us.
This makes me believe that AI art will only take off morphed into a human experience rather than as a standalone output.
I walked over to the steps of the curvy stairway in the middle of the museum and realized how much I miss the physicality of creation.
The random music in the background was hitting my ears and I was fantasising about a sandwich , a Celsius can and lying in the sun reading analog novels from those before me, who wrote about those ahead of me. It all seemed like a beautiful blur, an indulgence, a hedonistic escape from my screen and its algorithmic attacks on my attention span.