B is for Beryl
Week B | Monday | Deliciously Welshy
Just thinking about how much of this work will likely be replaced by AI. And how much water and energy will be used in the process.
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© 2025 Dr Rachel Morris
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I don't think they will be replaced - just inadequately and soullessly emulated.
I don't think AI will ever have the capacity for emotionally relating to bathos, or pathos, or hubris, or grief, or guilt, or sorrow, or humour and then summonsing that emotion to create something that expresses the sense of its feelings. That is uniquely a capacity of the living and it is invested in the artist not the artefact.
In time we will learn to distinguish between AI outputs and human art by detecting those slight omissions of soul or the embellishments that are substituted, that give AI "art" its distinguishing flatness and dullness and I think/hope that sooner or later we, as a living species, will tire of the cornucopia of mechanistic simulacra of our spirits and simply cease attending to them.
None of us worships or marvels at steel, or wheels, or pendula any more - we did once - think of the success of the great exhibitions of the 19th century and the abject failure of the 2022 Brexit exhibition.
We expect technology to evolve and produce extraordinary things, and we may even mutter "cool" a few times when something is particularly striking, but we soon move on and we often hark back to what went before to find an anchor for our being - I believe that that will happen with AI "art", too.
There are artists who incorporate elements of the AI mechanistic into their work and it emerges as art and other non-artists who hand off the task of visualisation and production to AI and their output emerges as soulless copy of one or another form.
I remember the emergence of synthesized music in the 1970's and the way the form diverged into two distinct strands of noise - one being music, like, for example, Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells and the other being the soulless public space background noise of synthesized muzak, or the repetitive stuttering of percussion and synthesizers that served, and still does, as the virtually unheard background to the communal ingestion of alchohol and narcotics.
I think we will eventually always be able to recognise the signature of the human soul inscribed at the foot of the canvas.