Art, through the lens of AI...

“He has made everything beautiful in its time”-

Ecclesiastes3:11.

 The origin of every existing artistic creations hides beneath the monolith of age old human desire to connect themselves with that grand design. Thus the quest begins and thus word “Art” comes to play. Now throughout this epic quest, “artists” invented many “tools” and “techniques” to colour up their thoughts. From the cave art of Lascaux to the renaissance art, they created numerous methods to make their “art” more realistic, more vibrant. They observed the world , the views, the scenarios, the events which to them was “real” and tried to replicate that “realism” through their works, through their own reflections. As the river flows, some of those seekers succeed to create their personal variation of the real world, they understood that words like truth and real can be deceiving and unique simultaneously. Thus all those variations of “traditional art” continue to contribute concentrically to this great quest. Till now. And all along the journey those tools and methods were never allowed to dominate, seekers mind and thoughts held the key, always.

AI : A seismic wave around the artistic world :

On the seventh day of the creation, he took a holiday, and we kept hearing the echoes of the thalassic deep, a lot was unknown , there was no one to help, thus we kept “imagining” and resolving. Thus incubated intelligence. Since the dawn of the divine holiday mankind kept on imagining, tried to know the unknown through their intelligence. Now in the past decade we have witnessed some terrific technological explosion around us. Artificial intelligence or AI is the brightest production of all the cumulative efforts we have taken this far. It can be treated as an all knowing entity of the matrix with a potential to break all the cages beholding darkest mysteries of the globe. Like any form of technology can be used like a two headed sword, it can be used as an extension of human efforts and can be used as a method or tool. Among those numerous characteristics that we have inherited from our ancestors, surrendering to the greater power is the one muscle reflex we are mostly fond of. Thus from our home lifestyle to our daily formal introduction, everything is getting dominated by AI exponentially and the good (?) news is we are happy about that, to surrender our liabilities and watching the greatest intellectualism eclipse of the history.

Through any rational lens, the inclement milieu that the situation holds can be observed easily. But the question is who will hold the lens today? If we try to sharpen our history lessons, it should be visible that whenever society got threatened of loosing its fundamentals it was the artist who always stood up. Therefore today also the artists need to come up , need to retain their uniqueness in a way so that hope remains, because art is the last thing we can afford to surrender into the mighty paws of technology. Thus the pack needs to be careful, and must keep AI restraint as some mere toolbox to bolster their aesthetic perfection and fizzy imaginations.

What AI tries to do in the art field is to create an unforeseen reality and mannerism , alluring the audience. But what we need to believe is that in the long run all of these computerised “realities” will follow some definitive pattern, because that is how artificial intelligence works, it stores up databases of all the existing art styles and art works of the globe brings up some permutations and combinations of those “data”, “data” that the artists from different timelines keep providing. Thus in the end the concept of original works will fade up. Thus to keep the aedificium of humanitarian artistic lauds intact, art should walk together with technology but keeping its fundamentals unharmed. So with the increasing popularity of the digital art, it is evident the a new genre has arrived and it is here to stay.  

 Some thoughts on the AI art & future of traditional art by Pritam Das