Cybernetic Art
& Those Who Would Shun It
I became interested in art & computers at about the same time, in high school in the 70s, & it seemed entirely natural to want to combine them. Thus I have followed what I call Cybernetic Art (including Cybernetic Literature) as it developed from winsome but rudimentary attempts circa 1960, to its eventual flowering in the 21c., rather like a novel medium (or family of media)--not as (it now appears) a rival creator: with all the guns on its side.
I suppose it’s a bit selfish of me, having been removed by time & necessity from much prospect of having my own art studio anymore, not to want to give up the possibility of making (for example) AI-generated images not that far removed from those I used to paint. I only ever made a couple dollars at painting, & don’t feel my livelihood threatened* (even as I acknowledge that for others the story is far otherwise). I need to start viewing it as one more facet of our contemporary enshittification, which has turned technology into a machine for maximizing extraction, along with the other derails—of communication, medical & scientific progress, & possibly even our most intimate relationship with attention & time…
I used to be interested in runes & Nordic mythology, too, but gave up that in any social way when I found out the kind of person most likely encountered in such circles would unapologetically affirm the most ridiculous notions of race & heritage. So I can understand the people now who pull back from anyone who wants to use AI-art in a recreational way. It’s kind of like being a person who was using swastikas in the old symbolism** after National Socialism came along. That’s not how they’re going to be read. There’s no escape from historicity.
So history has caught up with my dabbling in AI-art, & my innocent exercise of making a cover for my self-published book becomes very ugly when seen by someone who’s about to lose all prospect of employment as a book-cover artist. Maybe there’s a better way to fix this in the industry than trying to enforce a taboo through social media; ultimately it’s not my place to say what will work or what won’t. Suppose photography had only ever been used to feed a vice (whether pornography or sadism); suppose then a malcontent wanted to make respectable art with it. I sympathize more with the side of social progress—most important, at a time when that progress is in the process of being reversed.
Likewise once I indulged myself in trying to write a program that would generate sentences in grammatical English. I could not have foreseen a day when I would be staring at a student paper trying to decide how much of it was written by them, & how much written by a robot.
Surely safeguards & guidelines for the use of AI, just as the rules we did make to regulate industry against poison & pollution, might have prevented our present debacle. But that wasn’t what happened: it arrived too fast. (And business was too greedy.)
Art might have been picked up as a plaything (& a bloodless investment) by the capitalist world, for all too brief a time, just as there was an earlier era when great artists were recruited to make a cathedral beautiful. The impulse & the drive to achievement will remain (or rather, recur). If all the things we look at, listen to, or surround ourselves with, become the mediocre output of a glorified autofill machine, & fine artists are relegated to hobbyist status like all the other crafts that never got celebrated by the bourgeoisie, we can still dream & in dreaming create things that never existed before. They might even become more precious, if robotic pastiche succeeds in its promise to give us nothing but more of the same (only worse).
*My job as a writing tutor at a community college—is another story. Soon they will be using robots to polish up the robot-written essays that students submit to their teachers who will use their own robots, in turn, to give them a purely factitious grade.
**i.e. success & good luck