Kafka (?)

To be honest, I’ve been having a hard time building up the motivation to spend the normal amount of time on my work that I’m used to. All this AI art like Dali-e and Midjourney has really sucked the life out of me as a traditional artist. I’m sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place as I’m contemplating my place in this industry even though I’m just starting to get legit opportunities.
When I say I’m debating my future in this industry, I just mean my goals and whatnot. Art is my passion and I’ll always be an artist, I wear that with pride. But I can’t help but think about what even is an artist today? Every day I wake up and see Artificial intelligence creating beautiful aesthetics and whose to say the programmers using such devices are any less of an “artist” than I. The same people arguing that Ai created aesthetics aren’t “art” would have said the same thing about photography 100+ years ago.
A.I. Art is art. Not only that but it can create art at a far more efficient pace than me, or any other human for that matter. Whether or not it’s “real” art is a matter of ideology, but regardless it is art. Let’s assume that A.I. art is “real” in the sense that it is accepted in and as a part of the culture, I can only see one possible future. We’ll be flooded with such an abundance of art to the point that art as we know it will become meaningless. As an artist I keep asking myself how am I supposed to produce meaning in a world where meaning is becoming increasingly arbitrary? Again I think back to the invention of the camera, where beforehand expressionism was considered avant-garde. For a brief period of time the public was screaming “art is dead” until creatives like Duchamp and Jackson Pollock came around and altered art as we know it. Pollock gave away realism to photography by stripping painting down to the basics; the colors, lines, shades and space. Does that mean today’s artists are supposed to strip art down to what makes it human?
First, this makes me think of a return to physical painting where you can visibly see the brushstrokes and whatnot that go into a work of art. But in reality, in 5 years I could probably just buy or build a robot that would replicate that too. I believe one humanistic aspect of art that will never change is the meaning behind it, in other words Adorno’s” truth content”. It’s the subconscious dialogue behind a piece of art that makes it such. A.I. can produce meaning but it can never really understand it, as shown in the Chinese Room Experiment.
Traditionally, the human side of art lies within a piece of work, rather than it’s surface. The surface is filled with aesthetics that lure you towards the real beauty of a work of art. But now that we have A.I. to lure the audience in so to speak, all an artist has to do is focus on the real beauty behind it.
It’s almost as if A.I. has pulled the curtain over this illusion of aesthetics, and now we can finally see art for what it really is; it’s truth. No longer do we have to hide behind this idealized beauty that only ever really served an artificial purpose in the first place. We need art for human’s sake, no more art for art’s sake.