In an AI-Generated World, How Do We Determine the Value of Art?

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In discussing and assessing a work of art, historically it seems that the context in which it was created matters. But in an age of AI-generated images, videos, and writing we may need to consider whether that’s the case any more.

“How can context exist if the art is being created by artificial intelligences with no awareness of society, norms, politics, trends, movements,” poses Nir Zicherman, Global Head of Audiobooks at Spotify and Co-Founder of podcast platform Anchor.

In his blog titled ‘Art is Dead. Long Live Art. And DALLE-2’ Zicherman weighs into the debate about the value of AI-generated art. Some argue that because machines clearly lack the actual lived experience of a human being (and all art is a reflection and response to being alive)  then a work of art produced by AI is clearly not equivalent.

What happens when that context is removed? Or, more exactly, what happens if the context of production is no longer of significance?

Zicherman presents the example of a child’s drawing of a blue rectangle which is likely at some point to be recycled, no matter how sentimental its parents, in contrast to this 1962 painting by Yves Klein, IKB 191, which is considered a masterpiece of post-war French art.

“One might say that much of the beauty or ugliness we see in any form of art comes from our knowledge of where it came from. Let’s be real though. If DALL-E had painted IKB 191, would anyone even know?”

It’s not just critics or the ‘art world’ that extracts value from the context in which art exists.

Context can be related to all our subjective experiences of consuming the art, argues Zicherman. For instance, reading a coming-of-age novel while coming of age yourself might change your perspective on life, while seeing the TV show everyone loves a year or two too late might drain it of any significance for you.

“On the other hand, context can also arise out of how a work of art was created, as well as the time and place in which it came to be. Would Citizen Kane, created today, matter as a film? Would the Beatles, as an up-and-coming retro rock band in 2022 be considered by anyone ‘the greatest band of all time’?”

These questions matter, argues Zicherman, because we now live in a world where it is possible for machines to generate virtually the same output a human might create.

“What’s even more incredible is that it is now possible to create output humans would never have created. We can generate an infinite number of Picasso-esque paintings, half a century after the artist’s death.”

And this trend will only continue, as more and more of the ‘art’ being created each and every day can now exist devoid of any ‘context’ in the traditional sense of the word.

So that forces us, says Zicherman to ask ourselves a different set of questions: Given that new reality, which art will we value and why? What will differentiate the great works from the bad ones? Will we finally reach a point where art can exist on its own, for art’s sake?

This phenomenon is hardly just relevant to images of course. OpenAI (the research lab behind DALL-E) has started working on Jukebox, which promises to do for music what they have done for images. 

We only a few years away from videos being generated in the same descriptive way. Surely feature films and entire television shows will follow suit.

So, given how quickly this space is moving, it begs the question what if children growing up now and falling in love with music, books, and movies during their formative years ascribe entirely different meaning to their art? Would it matter to them if the art that speaks to them was generated by a machine (fed perhaps on the greatest artworks created by humankind)?

Perhaps it matters to us, the older generation more so, because it’s scary and unfathomable that art – again which is how society learns about itself and grows culturally richer - could be somehow be outside of our control and generated by banks of servers.

Zicherman asks: “How much will future older generations and younger ones disagree about not only which art is great (as all generations do), but about what greatness in art even means?”