No, AI Cat Videos Are Not Art: Virulence and Affirming Our Own Humanity

Article by Alexander Alava (https://substack.com/@alexanderalava)

Image by Giuseppi Molteni, La derelitta, (La morte del bimbo), 1845. Found here

Nowadays, most things I write begin in the Notepad app on my laptop. 

It’s really as simple as it gets; you get a text box, the ability to bold and italicize, a generous seven size options ranging from Title to Body, and one single font: Consolas. There are no margins, no page sizes, nothing. It’s the closest thing to a typewriter, as far as I’m concerned, and a typewriter is the closest thing to pen and paper…more or less. 

I once read a quote from a writer whose name I’ve since forgotten, who argued that you couldn’t call it writing if you weren’t doing it on paper; the act of physically scrawling words onto a page gave physical connection to what was being written, they cried, and the bastardization of this art which had been introduced by the typewriter was a mere simulacrum of true authorship. 

The invention of the typewriter and the numerous elaborations upon it which have followed have certainly not brought writing to its knees, nor severed us for good from our creative connection to the innate. While the physical act of writing can invoke pious and even romantic emotion (the aura of mythos around the first draft of Harry Potter being written on paper napkins is, to me, a modern reflection of this), typing things out isn’t so bad after all. Frankly, I prefer it immensely for my own purposes. I never feel as if I can keep up with my thoughts when writing in pen and paper, which infuriates me, and the occasional sloppiness of my own handwriting drives me crazy. On my laptop I can type quickly, format precisely, and never worry about quite literally dotting my i’s and crossing my t’s.

But I do emphasize with our unknown writer’s strong opinions because they pose an interesting point: at what point in the progression of our tools does our art cease to be our own, and thus cease being worth considering as art entirely?

This brings me to the subject of AI ‘art.’

Call me a bandwagoner, a luddite, a reactionary, whatever, but I truly can not emphasize enough how virulently disgusted I am by AI art and the notion that it can somehow replace the human artist. I feel it in my bones. It is contemptible. 

Thinking it might lend credibility to their depravity, photography is often referenced by proponents of AI art. Today, we accept photography as an art form of its own right and worthy of appreciation, critique, and attention. At its introduction, this was not the case.

First, existing artists worried that the new technology would displace them and render their work meaningless, as voiced by artist Henrietta Clopath (1) in 1901:

The fear has sometimes been expressed that photography would in time entirely supersede the art of painting. Some people seem to think that when the process of taking photographs in colors has been perfected and made common enough, the painter will have nothing more to do. (2)

Secondly, the way it seemed to reduce art to mere mechanism, simply an act of copying, was emphasized by critics of the budding technology:

[However] ingenious the processes or surprising the results of photography, it must be remembered that this art only aspires to copy. It cannot invent. The camera, it is true, is a most accurate copyist, but it is no substitute for original thought or invention. Nor can it supply that refined feeling and sentiment which animate the productions of a man of genius, and so long as invention and feeling constitute essential qualities in a work of Art, Photography can never assume a higher rank than engraving. (3)

Do these issues sound familiar? AI ‘artists’ reading the parallels are surely squirming with glee.

The idea that the most critical aspect to art is its ability to invent transcends all boundaries of fine art discourse.

In Notes on the Novel, Ortega y Gasset makes his opinion on the matter clear:

Art has no right to exist if, content to reproduce reality, it uselessly duplicates it. Its mission is to conjure up imaginary worlds. (4)

Today, I believe it is generally safe to say that photography has earned its place and is no longer viewed with the hostility it met a century and a half prior. It has not left the painter with nothing to do, has not obliterated our ability to appreciate art, and has transcended its nature as a mere reflection of the world around us.

One of photography’s first defenders, 19th century landscape photographer John Moran, articulates it well:

There are hundreds who make, chemically, faultless photographs; but few make pictures. (5)

Bang. Photography truly is simply the literal reflection of light captured through mechanical means, and yet we have managed to find a way to step beyond it. Everyone can agree that some pictures look better than others (anyone who has ever tried to take pictures for a friend should be well acquainted with this), and evidently through historical example certain special photographs have clearly been able to evoke emotion, feeling, and intimacy. Photography today finds itself commonplace in artistic circles and gallery spaces. As a tool, we have successfully incorporated it into our creative language.

With AI, however, I fear that the paralleled critique is not as easily matched with mirrored resolution.

While they may sound similar, two key distinctions set them apart. The first is intention of result: the photograph, as a medium, exists on its own. It is not trying to be a painting, nor a novel, nor a song. There is of course nuance to this, as all forms of art overlap and mix with each other in various ways, but I believe I’m safe in making such a statement. The second is source of result: a photograph is taken directly from the physical world around us; it is the emulation of individual human perspective.

With AI art, at least in its traditional form, the matter is painfully different. It is trying to be a painting, or a novel, or a song, to circumvent the artist in pursuit of instantly gratifying ‘creation,’ and it is taken directly from the artist in a gruesome fashion. This is an interesting matter because, of course, all art exists on the shoulders of that which has come before it, so it’s hard to draw a line. But as I mentioned, intentionality seems to be the great divider. If I am inspired by someone’s art and create my own thing, that’s great. If I see someone’s art and shamelessly replicate it to pass it off as my own, it’s pitiful. Anyone who’s read through the comments section of the many TikTok Basquiat clones can attest to the vigorous discussion this distinction generates. With AI art, any room for nuance in this regard is obliterated. It takes the existing work of artists and, in the words of Ortega y Gasset, “uselessly duplicates it.”

Now, I admit I have come to appreciate some aspects of AI generation. On my phone right now I probably have saved about a dozen different AI generated videos of small animals, usually cats, getting into mischief with firearms. A hamster walks up to the ring camera and shoots a pistol. A cat enters the Walmart via shopping cart and fires off a shotgun. So on and so forth. I recognize that I may sound akin to a senior citizen on Facebook finding joy in a poorly generated image of Jesus made out of bread, or something like that, but I defend myself through the irony involved in its appreciation (7). In and of itself, the stuff I’m talking about here isn’t really art, at least not fine art, no more than the Doge or Taco Cat of yesteryear. But as far as shitposting goes, AI has found its niche fairly successfully. I suppose it makes sense that the cultural arena in which last week is old news would be able to cope with aggressive changes in technological development. In this context AI seems to truly exist as a tool of its own rather than an outright replacement for the living breathing comic, as ultimately one still has to prompt it to output the right video, and anything like an AI generated podcast is quickly buried under the postings of real-life people; human ingenuity remains critical for the product to succeed.

This reflects a perspective I have heard on AI art which I am yet to really judge: its incorporation as merely a tool which is woven into a greater piece by a person with a soul. I can think of a couple of examples where this could work off the top of my head: an exhibition contrasting AI generation with photography; an overlay of machine vision on selected video to juxtapose natural video footage with the gaze of artificial intelligence; a very simple machine given the ability to ‘speak’ and ‘make its own decisions;’ so on and so forth. By way of my mother being an artist, I visited dozens of galleries and exhibitions as a kid; and if I learned one thing, it’s that the only true defining feature of art is the human being behind it. I always like to recall a piece I saw once when I was younger, especially in conversations regarding the validity of modern art, which was exclusively composed of a pile of candy. It was quite literally a pile of candy, on the floor, which passersby were encouraged to reach down and take from. That’s it.

Now, how the hell could that be art? It’s literally just a pile of candy. Am I visiting an art gallery when I go browse the candy aisle in C-Town?

The difference is one of symbolic meaning, of intent.

The description for the installation reads as following:

Felix Gonzalez-Torres produced meaningful and restrained sculptural forms out of common materials. “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) consists of an ideal weight of 175 pounds of shiny, commercially distributed candy. The work’s physical form and scale change with each display, affected by its placement in the gallery as well as audience interactions. Regardless of its physical shape, the label lists its ideal weight, likely corresponding to the average body weight of an adult male, or perhaps the ideal weight of the subject referred to in the title, Ross Laycock, the artist’s partner who died of complications from AIDS in 1991, as did Gonzalez-Torres in 1996. As visitors take candy, the configuration changes, linking the participatory action with loss—even though the work holds the potential for endless replenishment. (8)

The pile represents a partner lost to AIDS. The pile represents the artist lost to AIDS. Loss, death, grief. Now charged with meaning, the act of taking candy is transformed; the nature of the pile itself is transformed. It spurs thought, emotion, understanding. It is art. Thus I find that the line between life and art is perhaps only a matter of intent.

There is potential for art in everything. After finding myself moved by a literal pile of candy I figure anything is possible.

But this critical distinction of intentionality is difficult to nail down, the line demarcating its boundaries blurry and unclear. So instead, I turn to a greater point about the purpose of art and the sacred duty it must fulfill.

Jonathan Bowden (7) states:

The point of great civilization, as expressed in great art, is to raise people out of that particular trough and get them, if only momentarily, looking upwards, looking upwards towards the sky, looking upwards towards higher forms, looking upwards towards the prospect of archetypal forms, looking upwards towards the religions of the past, present, and the future, looking upwards towards God, or the Gods, or the idea that they might be there, or the idea that it might be necessary that they’re there, even if you don’t think they are. That’s the point of great civilization. That’s the point of great work. That’s the point of great art. (10)

C. G. Jung echoes:

What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind. (12)

…

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. (13)

Ortega y Gasset finally declares:

[Art] aspired to nothing less than to save mankind. (11)

The importance of realizing this is tantamount.

When I speak of the virulence of AI art, I speak of those who believe they can cut the artist out of the equation, skip the human component entirely, and replace it with a machine which, while man-made, is not made in his image. Through technology we have come to wield Godlike power over the world around us, but no amount of technology will ever be able to truly replicate the sanctity of a human soul. Though they may not outright admit to it, I fear that efforts of this nature come from people who, dissatisfied with their ability to connect with their own humanity, turn to artificial means out of cowardice to replicate this connection to the greater human race. They seem to seek to fully domesticate art, to rationalize it, to tear down the heavens which float out of reach above them, under the impression that they can then get there by simply building upwards from the ground alone.

Augmentation of the human artist is a consequence of any technological progress. Replication and replacement is, to me, an attempt to strangle to death what keeps us human.

Regarding art, AI can never replace man. It is only capable of destroying him and deplorably taking his place.