This industry, by invading the domain of art, has become art’s most dangerous enemy,” Baudelaire once wrote of photography.
And Virginia Woolf wrote of film: ‘Cinema has struck its victim with great greed, and is now living largely off the body of its unfortunate victim.
Generative imagery and big language models – popularly known as “artificial intelligence” – burst onto the scene just two years ago. It is rare, though increasingly common, to see such intense opposition to the emergence of a new technology.
More than a few, including some notable authorities, are predicting the death of human creativity and sometimes even humanity, or, in extreme cases, of mankind. Are they right or not? I do not know. As a media artist, filmmaker and writer who has been working with images and texts all my life, I am fascinated by the possibilities and perspectives of new technology. I felt that if I could not make a film, I could create a world out of text and visuals.
Somewhere in the territories delimited or rather opened up by literature, visual art, film and digital art, all of them attracting but not identical to each other, a new possibility of expression is emerging, which some people consider art, others still a gloss.
It is undoubtedly true that photography and film appeared in their first breaths as fairground spectacles and technological sensations, but it is also true that the artistic possibilities and forms of these genres were also awakened there. In addition, both inventions forced the museums that saw them as competition to seek new paths.
Either way. They are from the same source, creatures that expand one’s existence. Just as light and the object set in the light shake and make the light-sensitive analogue or digital surface react, so the text, the idea, stimulates and forces the neural networks of generative models to react.
We are probably witnessing another epochal turning point in art and technology. We will see many, many results of little or no artistic value, but also results that will deepen and enrich our worlds. I leave it to the viewer to judge how much is in the shop of terrifying ideas.