Can AI ever replicate human art? Maybe that’s the wrong question

Toward the end of a visit to Barcelona last week, I found myself with some free time before my flight home, and so I decided to visit Casa Batlló, the large house on Passeig de Gràcia that was remodelled in the early 1900s as the residence of the wealthy Batlló family, and which is considered one of the great masterpieces of the Catalan architect, Antoni Gaudí. The house, which is now a museum and a Unesco world heritage site, is among the most popular tourist destinations in a city with a famously vexed relationship with its tourists. (To anyone from Barcelona who happens to be reading this, by the way, I wish to plead my innocence: I was in the city for a book festival event, and was therefore only briefly and incidentally a tourist – so we’re still cool, right?)
As an experience, Casa Batlló is kind of a mixed bag. The house itself is extraordinary, an architectural Gesamtkunstwerk in which a great artist’s wild vision is given full freedom and reaches its gorgeous apotheosis. But it’s also crammed full of people posing for selfies on narrow stairways, and there’s a gift shop right in the middle of the thing – which struck me as a bit like putting a QR code across the penis of Michelangelo’s David, or a conductor stopping a performance of Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring to deliver a word from the orchestra’s sponsors.
But it was the end of the tour that really aroused in me a sense of weird bathos. After about an hour of walking through this strange and wonderful building, whose every recess and detail evoked an uncanny sense of being on the inside of a living, breathing, alien organism, we were shepherded down a long rear staircase (black office-carpeted steps; frosted glass banisters; palpably conceived by a lesser architectural mind than Gaudí) and into a dedicated audiovisual space called The Cube, every surface of which was covered in LED screens. Here we were treated to a three-minute immersive audiovisual experience entitled “Gaudí Dreams”. The piece, by the Turkish multimedia artist Refik Anadol, is the result of (apparently) a billion images of Gaudí’s work processed by multiple AI algorithms, and is intended to create an experience of being inside the great architect’s mind as he dreams. It’s technically very accomplished; for three minutes, you are hurled through a swirling series of tunnels and rapidly evolving geometric spaces. It’s quite intense, and undeniably trippy, though in a way that evoked more the feeling of being inside my Macbook’s screensaver than being inside one of the 20th century’s foremost creative minds.
I think if I’d seen Gaudí Dreams in a gallery or some other context, I might have found it interesting and impressive, but there in the basement of Casa Batlló, it felt like being shown a bunch of viral TikTok videos right after a Tarkovsky film. And it made me think about the current debate around whether AI is capable of producing art – a debate I’m inclined to avoid because it necessitates pretending that we know what the terms “artificial intelligence” and “art” mean, which we basically don’t.
The experience seemed to encapsulate a certain way of thinking about that debate. If I wanted to use it to argue that AI is artistically dead in the water, I would probably talk about how Casa Batlló itself was an infinitely more powerful representation of the dreaming mind of Gaudí than even the most visually arresting algorithmic extravaganza of light and sound could ever be. In fact, I was tempted to do exactly this: to argue that generative AI was really only useful as a tool for the automated production of kitsch, that it was less a futurist technology than one that processes and regurgitates the aesthetic past.
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But I’m not sure I entirely believe that. And – at the risk of wading into the debate I just said I’d rather avoid – I’m not sure I remotely believe, either, that AI can’t be used to make interesting art. In a way, I think the problem with something like Gaudí Dreams is that it’s too slick, too seamless, to be properly interesting. Earlier this year, the composer Jennifer Walshe, who has often employed AI in her work to powerful effect, published an essay called 13 Ways of Looking at AI, Art & Music. One of the 13 definitions she offers for AI-generated art in the essay is “gunk”: there is a smeariness, a glitchiness, to such images and sounds that is hard to quantify but aesthetically very distinct. “Extra fingers ooze out of hands, beer cans morph into faces. The same is true of many of the sounds produced by generative platforms – vocals are loaded with silvery whistles, orchestral violins turn to mush and are swallowed by blobs of white noise.” It’s this uncanniness, this quality of aesthetic wrongness, that’s interesting to artists like Walshe, and that can make generative AI a powerful tool in the right hands. A few weeks back, the sci-fi writer Ted Chiang published a New Yorker article arguing that AI is never going to be capable of making art. Art, he wrote, involves the making of countless choices, at large and small levels, and to assume that “inspiration” – the big choice at the conception of a work of art – can somehow be separated from the minuscule choices involved in its execution is to misunderstand the process of creativity. Software can’t make choices, and so is incapable of making art.
It’s a seductive argument, but one that overlooks the extent to which generative AI is, at least at present, a tool that facilitates the making of choices. The electronic composer Holly Herndon, whose music uses machine learning in powerfully strange and moving ways – her 2019 album Proto was made in “collaboration” with a neural network trained to respond to, and riff on, her own voice and compositions – suggested that Chiang’s essay missed the fact that AI does not exist autonomously. The Proto project, she pointed out, involved 18 months of prompt engineering, of building datasets and training models on them. And it is, unquestionably, a remarkable work of art.
The distinction that often gets elided in this debate is that between art (or “art”) made by AI, and art made using AI. And it’s hard to imagine an AI ever creating, autonomously, a work of art as sublime and strangely human as Gaudí’s Casa Batlló. But it’s certainly possible to imagine an artist using AI to make work of that scale and stature. AI is not going anywhere. But neither are artists. And despite that basically underwhelming AI “experience” at Casa Batlló, it’s easy to imagine Gaudí himself being at least curious about the possibilities offered by AI.