What Happens When David Salle Lets AI into the Studio? Essay by David Salle
By David Salle
Can everyone please just stop talking about AI now? There is altogether too much chatter around it. Will AI replace artists? Is that what you’re worried about? You can stop wringing your hands. Un-clutch those pearls. AI might make coders obsolete, but – trust me on this – it definitely does not mean the end of art.
AI may well prove the equal to any number of artists whom the muse has declined to visit – those who lack the divine spark of inspiration – but it will never replace the good ones. The apocalyptic scenarios are far-fetched. The reason has to do with the specificity that art requires. The machine is a prediction device; it makes bets on what is likely, or probable, given the average of everything it has seen before. Good art is precisely that which cannot rationally be predicted. It is both intuitive and counterintuitive. How do I know we will not wake up one morning to find ‘Job Filled’ signs posted all over town? Just look around you. If the machine could replace us, it would have done so already.
I would be more worried about AI replacing all the viewers – our audience, many of whom seem to have succumbed to the ‘Ten Artists Worth Knowing from Lower Slobovia’ or ‘Fourteen Artists Under Fourteen’ kind of thinking. I’m sure AI could do better than that. When the algorithms come for our brains, artists will be the last to succumb, not the first.
A little background: in 2022, I started working with a technologist, Grant Davis, to design a custom AI model that could produce a fluid, malleable and thoroughly deconstructed pictorial space. Somewhat perversely, I undercut the very thing the machine is designed to do: average out the data. I drastically restricted the machine’s data input, re-training the model only on what I wanted it to know: the basic principles of composition; the way the edge of a form is expressed by a brush stroke; how contrasts of light and shadow are used to create the illusion of volume, etc. In essence, I sent the machine to art school, one in which the examples were drawn from my own work. [...]
