After watching Everything Is a Remix, my opinion on AI and creativity stayed the same. I already believed that AI generated images and videos shouldn’t be considered art, but Ferguson’s explanations made that belief even more solid. He argues that human creativity comes from experience, memory, and intention. At one point he explains that artists create by “absorbing influences and reshaping them through personal meaning.” That idea completely separates real art from anything an algorithm can do. AI doesn’t absorb, it doesn’t feel, and it definitely doesn’t shape anything through personal meaning. It just predicts patterns based on data. So no matter how impressive the output of a prompt looks, AI “art” will always fall short of what actual art is supposed to be.
The main reason AI can’t be art is that there is no human experience behind it. Being someone who creates art themselves, in my opinion it also takes away from the specialness of having a talent of being able to express a certain feeling or memory. AI making it that easy for anyone to just type in a prompt and receive the art. It makes all of the trials, time and effort of creating a piece of art seem like a waste. When a painter creates a piece, they’re expressing something internal, an emotion, a memory, or a reaction to the world. Art is a translation of the human experience into a form that others can interpret. But AI has no experience. It doesn’t know joy, grief, nostalgia, anger, or wonder. It can only imitate the appearance of emotion because humans have fed it thousands of examples. That makes AI an imitator of humans, not an artist.
In Everything Is a Remix, Ferguson mentions that copying and remixing are parts of the creative process, but he adds that human creativity involves “choice, judgment, and taste”, Those three qualities are exactly what make AI different from people. AI doesn’t choose, it calculates, it doesn’t judge, it predicts, and it doesn’t have taste, it statistically guesses what might look good based on what it has seen before. Since art requires vision and intention, AI cannot fulfill the basic requirements of what makes art meaningful in the first place.
Some people would say that AI is a tool, nothing more, and that we have always used tools when it comes to creating art such as cameras, paint brushes, and pencils. But those tools have not created things on their own. A camera does not decide what to photograph, and a paint brush does not decide what to paint. It is the artist who decides that. Whereas with AI, the machine produces the images, chooses the shapes, decides the light, and combines images from scratch. Typing a prompt into artificial intelligence is less similar to creating a work of art than it is to ordering something from a machine. Real art had a creator behind it, someone with intention, emotion, and perspective. AI has none of those things. So even if AI outputs something visually impressive, it will never be art. Only humans can make art, because only humans can take experience and turn it into expression.
I did not use generative AI to write this essay.
I like how you highlight that art gets a lot of meaning from the artists personal life. This I didn’t really talk about but agree with and this is important. Ai does not have the personal life experience to put into art.