I keep hearing that art is dying because of algorithms, and I want to be upfront, I don't fully know what an algorithm is. I know it's the thing that shows my wife a couch on her phone one time and now it shows her forty couches a day for the rest of her life. That I understand. Whether that same system is also quietly murdering human creativity, I can't say, but I agreed to write this newspaper article about it, so let's just go through it together.
Apparently there used to be a time when a painter could just paint. He'd finish a piece, put it somewhere, and then just wait. Sometimes for years. Sometimes forever. That sounds like a nightmare to me personally. I could not have handled being an artist in seventeen century Holland waiting a decade to find out if the barn painting was good.
Now, from what I understand, there's a system that watches how long you look at something before you get bored and scroll to the next thing. And whatever people look at the longest, it just makes more of that. Which sounds fine until you realize this is also how my family decided we're having the same seven dinners on a loop for the rest of our lives. Somebody liked the chicken one time in 2019 and now that's just what we eat, forever, no new chicken has been allowed to audition since.
They got a fancy term for this too, they call it homogenization, which is a big word for "everybody's doing the same thing now because that's what did numbers last time." I don't need a study for that one. I have watched every single thirty second video on the internet slowly turn into a guy talking real fast in his car. Nobody sat down and planned that. It just happened, the way all seven dinners just happened, nobody voted, it just got decided by forces greater than us.
And apparently artists now sit around checking how they're doing on this thing constantly, like checking a thermometer, except the thermometer is also their whole personality. I do not have the constitution for that. I get nervous enough waiting to see if a text message gets a reply with just the thumbs up versus an actual sentence. I could not have a number, updating live, telling me how likable I am as a human being. I'd throw my phone in a lake. Multiple lakes. I'd need several lakes.
They also mentioned something called "conformist transmission," which is science for "everybody copies whoever's winning," which, again, is just how I pick restaurants. I don't know what's good, I look at what's busy, and I go stand in that line too. Turns out artists are doing the exact same thing I do at a strip mall on a Friday night. We're all just watching to see where the crowd already went and then walking real confidently in that direction like it was our idea.
Now here's the part that actually got me a little, apparently it used to take artists a long time to get good, like actual years of nobody watching, just quietly stinking at it in private, which by the way is also how I learned to grill, several summers of nobody watching me ruin chicken in the backyard, and I feel like that's disappearing now, for artists I mean, not backyard chicken, that's still just as bad as it's always been. Everybody wants results today, this afternoon, before dinner, and if you don't got it, the machine just moves on to somebody who does.
And then, on top of everything else, now there's computers that can just make new art on their own, having looked at all the old art, so they can make you a brand new painting that looks like it took somebody ten years, except it took the computer about four seconds and it has personally never once been rained on, or heartbroken, or forced to eat the same chicken seven times. I don't know if that counts as real art. I know if I found out my kid's macaroni picture on the fridge was actually done by a robot, I'd be upset, and also slightly relieved, because that macaroni picture was rough, but mainly upset.
So is art dying? I don't think so, not really. I think what's dying is just being allowed to be bad at something in private for a while before anybody's allowed to have an opinion about it. Which is, honestly, kind of how I feel about my whole personality, I'd have liked a little more time to workshop that too before everybody started forming opinions on it.
Anyway that's my article. I did not use one em dash the entire time, which I'm told is a big deal now, apparently everybody's mad at those too. I don't know what they did to anybody. Seems like a lot of hate for a little line.