Now more than ever, artificial intelligence has brought to the foreground profound changes in global perception and appreciation of art and artists. The advances in these autonomous tools shed new light onto the fundamentals of our creativity and our appreciation for being human. Novel advents from AI collaborations mark the newest era of stylish, personified expression, and the innovative dynamics to come will only further the artistic possibilities today.
Yet such advances also feed into the darkness projected by popular media, quick glances, and a lack of quality investigation. In these shadows, AI often embodies the fearful future of human obsolescence. The uncertainty surrounding these smart algorithms makes the AI conversation one of sensitivity, and like most difficult matters, it lingers out of sight and mind.
I am interested in what today’s discomfort with AI means, and from it to better understand the future of human-AI culture. Starting this series of AI in the arts is mixed-media artist Z Macabre, whose background in mature content offers a key insight into dismantling, or at least investigating, our anxiety with artificial intelligence.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Smile Politely: What are the mediums and styles that make up the most of your portfolio?
Z Macabre: I consider myself a mixed media artist. I engage in video editing, a lot of writing, photography, some digital art—a bit of everything. I really enjoy digital mediums and how they can open up possibilities for sharing art with people in different places. Plus, I’m a nerd, so the internet has always been a fun place for meeting people and discovering things. Being able to share art digitally is also exciting. I like to deal with content like sex, gore, gender, and other things of that genre—mature content, essentially. But all in all, I work mostly with digital mediums.
SP: Where and how, then, does AI become relevant to your practices?
Macabre: I’m not opposed to AI as a device, nor do I have issues with utilizing it in certain ways. I think it’s great in some ways: other artists have used it to create, draw, paint, or just give visuals for themselves. From there, they can better articulate what they want to make, and I think AI is really interesting and cool in that regard. But since my art touches on adult and graphic images, consent is a big part of what I do. AI has not reached a point where consent can really be given in the manner it needs to. And ethically speaking, I think AI can infringe on art in a lot of ways—especially when dealing with graphic or mature themes. So consent of content is very important, but I think that is something AI definitely is not up to date on.
SP: For an artist, would AI be considered a tool, a shortcut, a collaborator, or something else?
Macabre: Currently, AI is more of an environmental hindrance. No matter what kind of art you’re making, it’s not going to be as harmful as AI is to the environment, and that is just what we know of it so far. Only now have we started to anticipate the kind of energy AI is going to consume. Just in terms of materials, AI is far less ethical to use than painting on a canvas or digital photography. But I also think AI would be a really fantastic outlet for lots of artistic opportunities. Unfortunately, people use AI to make money as opposed to creating spaces where money is not necessarily needed. This alternative could provide opportunities for artists: because if we don’t need money, we can make art as much as we want at any time we want. It would be lots of fun, but that’s not how AI is utilized.
SP: Say AI makes its way deeper into the arts—what are the biggest trade-offs you predict artists will make?
Macabre: At the end of the day, people will say that AI art doesn’t have a “soul.” What they mean is that the art is generic. There’s a lot of art out there that doesn’t have a soul. You’re not going to go out and buy a painting that says “peace”, “love”, or whatever—you want an artistic soul. And yes, a human probably will have helped design that, but it doesn’t mean that it has a soul. It’s a silly thing to say, but AI will nevertheless encourage a lot of generic-ness in art. I usually can tell when something came from AI because it has that generic feel and lack of texture and depth. You can still put things into AI and make something in the style of some other artist, but you’re still ripping off that artist. It’s going to come out and look like a copy of someone else’s work. So you’re trading in something that’s unique for something you already know how it will turn out. That’s really what it is: trading in the uniqueness of what a singular artist can do.
SP: What might you personally gain or lose if you started to use AI regularly in your own practices?
Macabre: I really don’t know what I would gain from AI. Regarding AI’s ability to save time, I can’t conceptualize how it would make things easier; I would still need to take the time to enter in a prompt. Plus, I’m so picky about stuff that I would do it again and again until it came out right, or I would give up and just do it myself. I also don’t really enjoy the style of AI as it is right now, but that might change in the future. I like having the peace of mind knowing that my ideas stay in my own head and close to myself. Anything that you punch into AI is essentially taken. I don’t want my ideas to be taken by a machine.
SP: Is it worth appreciating and considering AI’s own imperfection and maybe taking advantage of that to create a new human AI hybrid form of art?
Macabre: Yes, and I actually love how AI is not reliable in this way. It makes weird fingers and other imperfections, and I like picking apart an AI photo and seeing all the ways it falls short or doesn’t really align with reality. That’s a lot of fun and very interesting—really cyberpunk, in my opinion. I think that we can use AI’s imperfections to establish its own genre because glitch art is already a thing. AI fits more into that category than anything else.