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I watched “dreams” (1990) Directed by Akira whatever some fancy artsy film director from Japan that is allowed to be loved by the art communities. Anyway, one of the vignettes was a very interesting sequence of events that just looked stunning. “The dream of the peach blossom”. It brought me to tears in a confusing way that I don’t know why, to be perfectly honest I don’t feel so proud admitting it. It was weird I had a human reaction to this piece of art movie, alone in the dark watching this on a laptop. I don’t really know what the vignette meant on a deeper meaning, as to say I don’t understand the narrative metaphor but as I was watching It made me feel different. It made me feel emotional.

After I finished the movie like many others in the digital, I searched the internet to read reviews, thoughts, and opinions of my fellow INTERnauts and the first thing I found was an AI generated country song called “peach blossom Dreams”. As far as AI music goes its not the best. It does not elicit the same emotion as a meticulously crafted movie with Mise-en-shawn, but hey its catchy and if I heard it on the radio I would think it as any other pop country song.

Now is this AI art completely different from human made art? My answer is not the one currently in vogue(in fact it might be I haven’t been keeping up with the publication as of recent) I think AI art has the same extrinsic value as human made art. If you read a joke generated by the latest large language model, there’s a good chance you’re gonna get a chuckle. Heck, probably even more chuckles than you’d get from a joke I try to make. In this case the AI “art” or creativity is superior to my “art” or creativity. Why should my craft be better? Because I am human? So we should be nicer to the human because he has feelings that we don’t want to hurt?

Don’t get me wrong, this is not an anti-art post. I am just trying to make a point that the computer can do things better than humans sometimes. We don’t say that arithmetic that is computed on a calculator is worse than if it was calculated on an abacus. If the end product is the same why should I care as a pedestrian consumer if the calculator had a soul.

Art could be considered from an artist’s perspective as something we do to try and reach out and share our experience with others. At the same time from the enjoyer’s perspective art is something we experience to feel connected to a wider community. Sure, it might come from a data center that increases your electricity bill, but the feelings you get from laughing at a generated joke is the same joy you get from a joke some dude in his late twenties thought up while in his underwear at 1 in the morning. Its okay that AI is better than you at doing things. Theres already a lot of people that are way better than you at everything that you think you’re good at. That doesn’t mean that you should stop trying to express your deep troubling thoughts and feelings. It means that the value to your art comes from within.