What is the value of art in the age of AI?

A discussion about the film Zima Blue with Animation Obsessive.

I invited John Adkins, a writer for Animation Obsessive, to watch an episode of Love Death and Robots with me called “Zima Blue.” The 10-minute short film concerns one robot, Zima, who started as a pool cleaning machine only to gradually become more sophisticated until he becomes a man. If you want to watch it with us, it’s the last episode of season one on Netflix.

The episode concerns humanity and artistry, and the value both gain or lose in the world of robots. As Zima becomes more advanced, he becomes an artist who is able to create masterpieces of cosmic scale, far more advanced than any human could create. And maybe that feels familiar because amidst the dawn of AI, many are already imagining a future in which the human artist becomes obsolete. 

If a machine can produce a masterpiece, what use is there for a human who takes way more time to complete it? “If I were to write a 2,000-page book with ChatGPT, does it ultimately have the same meaning, for example, as something that was significantly smaller, like 200 words, a really great poem that I put a lot of personal care and attention into?” John asks.

That’s an interesting question. It wonders whether you would find art more or less valuable if it were made by a machine vs. a person. If I wrote a book and gave it to you and you found it to be really good, would you change your opinion of it if you found out it wasn’t actually written by me, but by a machine? 

The same conundrum plays out among human artists. If I showed you a painting with only a few lines dashed across it, something anyone could make, you might think it juvenile. But if I told you it was a Picasso, would you change your opinion about it? 

“There are drawings by Picasso that are just a couple lines,” John says, “and because he was Picasso, he can just draw maybe even one unbroken line and it speaks to something much bigger, even if it only took him five minutes to draw. It doesn't necessarily look grand and impressive… but it can have amazing importance and significance to people.”

This idea implies that it’s not necessarily the art we find interesting, but the artist. There is something about the person and what they are trying to say that lends it more value. Why else would we prescribe so much prestige to an artist like Banksy and give no credence at all to an artist just like him? 

“There are a lot of graffiti artists who maybe are very talented, and may even be more technically skilled artists than Banksy himself,” John says. “If you see one piece of someone's graffiti, it might make a small impression on you. But at the end of the day, it was just one piece of graffiti and we're so so inundated with information it could easily be washed away.”

Ok but what if Banksy trained an AI to paint just like him? What if he trained it on all of the artwork he’s done before and asked it to generate the next 10 pieces that would come after? Is he still the artist of those 10 new pieces? Or is the machine? Does it matter to the viewer of that art, who might not be able to tell the difference? 

John thinks the human still has the edge. “AI could go and read a hundred issues of Animation Obsessive, for example, and it could spit something out that kind of sounds like the voice that I use for Animation Obsessive, or it can read your books and spit something out that sounds like those books. But your books and my newsletter are so much more than just a series of superficial word choices.”

That’s because we have something the machine doesn’t: Our personalities, our life experience. I might be able to train an AI on all of my writing and it might be able to generate something that sounds like me, but it doesn’t have access to me, and the millions of other pieces of information my brain has been fed during the last 38 years of my life, and the millions of thoughts I think on a daily basis. I am so much more than the sum of everything I’ve said. I’m also everything I’ve experienced and everything I’ve thought.

“When we go to write, we're not simply copying the work that we've already written, we can always change from what we have done before and bend in a new direction. You can be inspired to write something because you're walking down the street and you see a pile of rocks in a certain shape and it's like, ‘you know what, I just had a really good idea.’”

I’m not frequently inspired by a pile of rocks, but I certainly choose what to write based on reading hundreds of books and articles, researching the things I want to study, and coming up with my own ideas about them. And I change my mind a lot based on further research. Something I wrote 10 years ago might be disproven based on the further research I’ve done since then. My body of work will take a lifetime to achieve!

“The artist who is hired to paint a portrait and he takes 20 years to get it done—it's because, in the meantime, he painted thousands of portraits so he could do this one. That one portrait that he's taken 20 years to finish, that he hadn't worked on at all, he just jots it down in five minutes, and it's perfect. And that’s because he has developed something that was not possible to develop any other way except through a long period of development and decision-making by one person.”

A machine might be able to create a piece of art that is equal in skill and quality to something a person could create, but would we care that art without some attachment to the artist? Without some attachment to their story, their history? The way they think about the world? 

“What every artist brings to their work is their history because we are our histories in so many respects. We are the sum total of our experiences and feelings and thoughts over time. Things that we did a little bit of once and then it's like, ‘well, I'm done doing that now,’ but it's still back there. And maybe later, on some unconscious level, it seeps into the work just a little bit.”

That’s why we follow certain artists over time. I am a big Taylor Swift fan, but it is not because her newest album, Midnights, is the best thing I’ve ever heard. It’s because I’ve been following her for decades. As she moved through new phases of her life I was moving through new phases of mine. I was into country when she came out with a country album, pop when she came out with pop album, and folk when she came out with a folk album. We are on that journey together. 

Her Eras tour is a celebration of all of those eras—both the eras of her music and the eras we lived during them. 

“If you start to see someone's work in an ongoing way, it becomes more real to you as a viewer and you become invested in this ongoing event. And I think that that feeling of being invested in an ongoing event is very, very powerful right now.”

Interestingly, in the film Zima Blue, the artist does develop a following. Even a fandom. He has an almost Banksy-like allure because he’s never given any interviews or spoken to any press. It’s a certain level of spectacle that makes him truly famous and most assume he is a human person until the very end. 

“Would people in Zima’s era believe his art was of less value because he was a machine in the end? It's quite possible. Although, at the same time, in the film, he's such an advanced machine that his way of thinking is indistinguishable from a human and he may in fact be conscious in the film.”

In his final art installation, Zima unmakes himself, breaking the parts of his machinery that took a hundred years to develop. By the end, all that’s left is the simple pool-cleaning machine he once began as. One without sentience, whose only value is cleaning pools. Somehow, in making himself a man, and unmaking himself as a man, he has become every bit the artist. 

Have you watched Zima Blue? Let’s talk about it in the comments 👇🏻

Thanks for reading,

Elle Griffin