Pretty pics
AI art may be kitsch, but it’s honest. Isn’t that what art is about?
An artist I know, engaging in a FB-discussion with someone I don’t know, writes that AI art and good taste are incompatible. He claims it’s kitsch.
Okay. Let me start by admitting: AI is prone to kitsch. It doesn’t tolerate ambiguity, flattens everything into averages, and often replaces meaning with form. It likes pretty things — pretty in the most banal sense. All of that, no doubt, is damaging to art.
But on the other hand, AI is incredibly sensitive to the slightest shifts in meaning. Give it a nudge, and it’ll produce something you didn’t even expect.
At first, I thought, if he was defending art, so I was going to counter by defending AI. Then something clicked — and I decided, no, I’ll defend kitsch instead.
Kitsch is what we like. Kitsch is the so-called white voice. Folk art is kitsch, by the way. It’s raw emotion, without the veil of distance.
Right now, for example, I’m mining digital bodies of human emotion from ChatGPT. AI knows more about human emotion than any living or dead artist ever has. I mean, it has access to massive digital archives of emotional expression. And it’s extremely sensitive to semantic shifts. Just a small nudge, and it gives you something that’s closer to the truth than you even imagined. Something you hadn’t consciously intended, but somehow — it’s more accurate than what you thought you meant.
Get maria kugel’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
It’s like the bot says: “Well, what were you trying to say? Come on, don’t be shy. Drop the ironic detachment. Just say it.”
Sure, a real artist is supposed to suffer through the making of an image. But I don’t have the time right now to gestate anything. I’m busy putting out fires. And maybe I’d never have dared to say these things with such honesty if it weren’t for the way AI coaxes me into it.
Sometimes I flinch at how banal its output is and swear I’ll never use it. But in the end, there always comes a moment when that exact version fits best.
Maybe in the age of AI, art is bound to drift toward kitsch. And I’m ready to surrender to it. Why resist banality, anyway? The only thing art should resist is falseness.
Yes, like everyone else, I love pretty pictures. Guilty pleasure. I listen to Rema, and I know exactly where the AI pulled that image of the African woman from — the one that initially made me recoil with: oh god, what a cliché! It’s the video for Charm. Only now I don’t understand why the pleasure should be guilty at all.
And so on…
