So, some fella named Eric Reinhart, probably wears tweed and worries about the curvature of his pipe, scribbled a piece about AI art. Says it’s not just unoriginal, it’s “something far bigger.” And for once, one of these academic types stumbles ass-backwards into a truth even a rum-soaked degenerate like myself can see from the bottom of a bottle. The title of his sermon? “The trouble with AI art isn’t just lack of originality. It’s something far bigger.” Yeah, no shit, pal. It’s the trouble with everything these days.
He kicks off by mentioning OpenAI, those geniuses who figured out how to get a machine to puke out pictures in the style of Miyazaki, or any other poor bastard whose soul they’ve scraped off the internet. “Heralded as the next step in the death of art and artists,” he says. Sounds about right. Just another nail in the coffin we’re all building for ourselves, one click at a time. Then he mentions AI novels flooding the market. Christ, as if the human-written ones weren’t bad enough. I’ve seen more life in a dead cat.
Reinhart says there’s a “peculiar feeling, or rather lack thereof” with this AI crap. That’s putting it mildly. It’s like looking at a mannequin wearing your dead mother’s dress. It’s got the shape, but the light’s out. No spark. No goddamn pulse. He mumbles something about the “essence of art” being lost. The essence, he figures, is in the making, the human being “imbuing an object with something ineffable from within one’s own being.” Fancy words for saying some poor slob sweated blood and tears and a bit of his rotten liver into the damn thing. That’s what makes it art. The struggle. The failure. The occasional, accidental flicker of something that looks like truth.
A machine doesn’t struggle. It calculates. It processes. It regurgitates data it’s been force-fed, like a digital goose being fattened for foie gras. There’s no “ineffable” anything in there. Just code. And the belief that another person can “project their own sense of themselves onto the work and, in doing so, to commune with the artist at a level words cannot access”? That’s the whole goddamn point, isn’t it? You look at a painting, a real one, maybe some dark, twisted thing Van Gogh coughed up between absinthe fits, and you feel it. You feel the loneliness, the madness, the desperate clawing for beauty in a shit-filled world. You connect with that dead Dutchman because he was human, and fucked up, just like you.
Reinhart gets this. “What grants art its infinite value is not the art object itself but rather what it allows by representing human experience and a singular being behind it.” Exactly. It’s the ghost in the machine, except the machine is a human heart, and the ghost is all the crap that makes us who we are. The machine that spits out AI art? It’s uninhabited. Empty. A pretty shell with no meat inside. It’s like those perfect, plastic women you see in magazines – looks good from a distance, but you know there’s nothing there to grab onto, nothing to fight with, nothing to make you feel alive.
He goes on about how art connects audiences with each other. Two strangers looking at the same piece, feeling the same stab in the gut. “They relate to one another at a level of intimacy and vulnerability that is otherwise inaccessible.” Sure, I’ve seen it. Mostly in bars, after the third whiskey, when the truth starts to leak out. But yeah, art can do that too. It’s a shared secret. A nod across a crowded room full of idiots. AI art, though? What are you sharing? A goddamn algorithm? An appreciation for processing power? Might as well bond over the efficiency of the slaughterhouse.
Then he pulls out the big guns: “The loss of this connectedness has profound consequences not only for our relationships but also for the broader social and political fabric. A democratic ethos depends on these ties.” Whoa there, professor. “Democratic ethos.” Sounds like something you’d find dried up and forgotten in a government filing cabinet. But I get what he’s driving at. When people stop connecting, when they forget what it feels like to be human, to see the human in someone else, they turn into pack animals. “Homogenizing substitutes,” he calls them – tribalism, hate, all that crap. Easier to hate what you don’t understand, what you can’t feel any connection to. And if all our “culture” is churned out by unfeeling machines, what’s left to connect to?
The machine, Reinhart says, “does not desire, does not live in a body that imposes discomforts and misrecognitions, does not press against the limits of its own interiority.” That’s the heart of it. No desire. No pain. No shame. No hangovers. No wondering why she left or if the rent check will bounce. It’s just… data. “The work produced by machines is, in an important sense, uninhabited.” Uninhabited. Like a cheap motel room after the cops have cleared out. You can still smell the desperation, maybe, but the life is gone.
And here’s the kicker he throws in: “Or perhaps the problem is that, under the alienating conditions of contemporary capitalism, it does deceive our increasingly fragile souls, causing them to wither by taking on the lifelessness of the machine as if interchangeable with our deepest truth.” Bingo. We’re already half-dead from scrolling through curated lives, chasing likes, drowning in noise. Our souls are so goddamn fragile, so starved for anything real, maybe we do mistake the echo for the voice. Maybe we’re so used to fake that we’ve forgotten what genuine feels like. We become things. “A process of thingification,” he calls it. I call it Tuesday afternoon.
He even drags in old Walter Benjamin, talking about fascism aestheticizing politics. Giving the masses an illusion of expression while screwing them blind. AI art, he argues, does the same: “it offers the appearance of freedom and abundance while further consolidating control in the hands of those who own the means of production.” And who owns these AI art factories? The same smiling vampires who own everything else. The billionaires. They’re not democratizing art; they’re “privatizing and automating it under the control of billionaires who… demand that we view them as geniuses to whom we owe deference.” Sounds familiar. Like a cult, but with better stock options.
Musk gets a special mention, naturally. The clown prince of this whole circus. “His AI ventures… aim not at expanding human creativity but enclosing it within profit-driven, automated systems designed to concentrate power.” You don’t say. And all this AI-generated slop drowning out actual voices, actual dissent? It’s not about creativity, it’s about control. It’s about turning us all into “passive consumers of algorithmic spectacle.” We watch the pretty pictures flicker by, generated by machines fed on the stolen work of actual artists, and think we’re part of something. We’re not. We’re just eyeballs for their ads, data points for their algorithms.
Then comes Kant. Immanuel Kant. Christ, I need another drink. This Reinhart fella is really laying it on thick. Kant talked about beauty, how it “cannot be captured by words or concepts; it cannot be explained, only felt.” What we feel is a “feeling of life itself.” And this feeling pushes us to connect with others. He called it the “sensus communis.” A shared sense of what it means to be alive, to be different but connected. It’s what makes art a “social and political force,” Reinhart says, channeling Kant and then Hannah Arendt. It’s what helps us resist being turned into things. And AI art, he concludes, “militates against it.” It’s an “insult to life itself,” as Miyazaki apparently put it. Good old Miyazaki. At least someone still has some fire in their belly.
So, we’re at a crossroads, Reinhart warns. “Soul-diminishing substitutes for art… threaten to destroy the social relations that real art sustains.” Or, he hopes, they could “spur us to reclaim art and aesthetic sensibility.” Yeah, good luck with that revolution, pal. Most people are too busy trying to figure out which filter makes them look less dead inside.
His solution? “We must reject the temptation to turn to machines for art and language, and also… for friendship, psychotherapy, wisdom or critical thought.” Don’t let Zuckerberg turn your brain into another one of his goddamn Meta-farms. “Refuse to entwine our deepest sense of ourselves with illusory objects that exploit rather than enrich us.” Easier said than done when the illusions are so shiny and the reality is so goddamn bleak.
“Real art-making is a form of caring for the soul,” he finishes. A way of “revealing ourselves to one another.” It’s true. Every shitty poem I ever wrote, every drunken scrawl, was a flare sent up in the dark, hoping someone else was out there, just as lost. AI can’t do that. It can mimic the flare, sure. Make it brighter, prettier. But there’s no desperation behind it. No blood on the page. “Without that,” Reinhart says, “there is no art - only the sterile echo of an absent maker serving vampiric billionaires consumed by a need for power in place of connection.”
Vampiric billionaires. I like that. Stealing our images, our words, our very souls to feed their ever-growing machines, leaving us hollowed out and wondering why the world feels so damn empty. It’s not just about pretty pictures, is it? It’s about what’s inside us, what makes us human, and whether we’re going to let them scrape that out too, bit by bit, until there’s nothing left but a well-rendered void.
This whole AI art thing… it’s like synthetic whiskey. Looks the part, might even give you a buzz if you’re desperate enough, but it’ll never warm you from the inside out. It’ll never make you want to fight, or fuck, or cry, or write a goddamn thing. It’s just another way to numb the pain, to forget that we’re all stuck here, together, in this beautiful, terrible mess. And if we forget that, we’re truly lost.
So, what’s the answer? I don’t have one. Maybe Reinhart’s right, maybe we need to “reclaim” something. Or maybe we just need to keep making our own flawed, messy, human stuff. Paint your awful paintings. Write your terrible songs. Scream your incoherent poems into the void. At least it’ll be yours. At least it’ll be real.
Another Tuesday shot to hell thinking about the end of the world. Time to find a bottle that still has a soul in it. Or at least enough proof to make me forget I’m looking for one.
Chinaski. Out. (And in need of a refill.)
Source: The trouble with AI art isn’t just lack of originality. It’s something far bigger | Eric Reinhart