Is AI Assisted Creation Real Art? Unlock the Mystery

Many of you know that I love to read. I love to research. Actually, if I break it down, I just really love to learn. Coupled with ADD and dyslexia that sometimes (read most often) leads to a million ideas presented through various methods of research, news channels and the libraries from institutes higher learning. 

Very few of these ideas actually make it to the page, screen or canvas. They hang out somewhere in my noggin as a synapse, a link that pulses on occasion just awaiting the chance to come to fruition after being sparked by another random thought or rabbit trail offshoot. This article is one of those. As I was researching last month for the inaugural issue of the Digital Art Goes Rogue magazine, I came across an article that peaked my interest. 

After several links, offshoot articles, a random encyclopedia article or two, I wound up thinking about the similarities in human reaction to art and artists anytime there is a paradigm shift in technology in the world. It goes back to the chicken or the egg question like always. Does art inform (that is, change) society or is art merely a reflection of what society is feeling? Rather than dig into that question I just want to leave it with you to ponder, to rest subconsciously in the back of your mind as you move through out this week. Instead, I want to go back to the beginning of the rabbit hole and look at what seems to be a very clear answer to the current question, is AI assist real art?

Artist Pindar Van Arman creates art with a computer...and a robot. His artist statement made me re-evaluate and ponder for a moment. Here is his artist statement from the Morf Gallery website, "Seeing how simple my children’s art was, I wondered if I could teach their creative process to a painting robot. My attempts, failures and successes led to a 15-year journey of artistic discovery that revealed profound insights into how my own mind worked. While I use artificial intelligence to control robots that paint with a brush on canvas, my art is not the actual paintings.

The paintings are merely a record of the progress that I am making toward my ultimate goal, which is the complete deconstruction of my creative process. Oddly, I feel no closer to an understanding than I did when I began fifteen years ago. Despite this, I look forward to continuing this journey and following it wherever it leads."

WOW! I know that many artists have the goal of creating something beautiful and there is honor in that. For me I want to create something emotional, something that communicates a message and reminder of all things good and hopefully that ends up as something beautiful. As Pindar says, the final pieces are merely records of the journey. The blessing is in sharing the journey, the communication. Like Pindar I am constantly deconstructing the creative process, not because I am bored but because I want to learn, to stretch, to grow. 

Creativity is the ultimate communication with the Holy Spirit in my opinion. The resulting piece of art from that creative process reveals traces of God. Art has the power to heal, to influence, even to spark love through the influence and power of the Holy Spirit embedded in the art piece. Just because one uses machine learning or a robot in their creative process doesn't mean the art is void of human creativity. Sometimes one just has to look deeper into the process to see where the creativity and the love lies.

"My machines have grown beyond being simple assistants and are now effectively augmenting my own creativity, as well as having creativity of their own. They have become a generative AI art system so sophisticated, that it has forced me to consider the possibility that all art is generative."
Pindar Van Arman

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