Fake Friends

AI, Art, and the End of the World

THE END OF THE WORLD.

What’s the point of making Art when it feels like the world is ending? It is almost the 3rd week in January as I write this. Large swathes of Los Angeles are burning to the ground in the dead of winter, a winter that hasn’t seen a flake of snow up here in Vancouver BC. On the opposite side of the spectrum, southern states froze over so badly that hundreds of thousands of people were without power for a dangerous amount of time. To make matters weirder, the convicted felon and rapist the good voters of the usa have elected has already announced his desire to take over Canada, Greenland, and the Panama canal. Of course, that’s coming from a country that already had TEN mass shootings as of January 14th. To add insult to injury, we lost David Lynch. We’re barely two weeks into 2025 and we’ve already suffered through enough “unprecedented” bizarre national events to fill an entire year pre-covid. By the time this video comes out in mid March, I imagine there will have been so many more ridiculous so-called strange international ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ news items that the fires in LA will feel like a year ago.

For anyone who’s been paying attention, it’s hard to shake the feeling that things are escalating on a massive scale. It’s difficult not to feel like humanity sits at the beginning of the end.

Where does that leave artists? Where does that leave art? I would love to simply grapple with this existential topic, to untangle these knots in a way that gives us all some sense of purpose, of hope. Unfortunately, instead of using their massive wealth to help solve the climate crisis or address real world tragedies, the richest of humans have funnelled an insane amount of money into something absolutely no decent person was asking for: AI Generated Imagery. We should be talking about how it feels to be the band playing on the deck of the sinking titanic, but the upper class have stripped even that luxury from us by making the band, in function, obsolete.

If you’ve been living under a mountain somewhere, in which case I envy you, here’s the general state of things. Tech bros and billionaires are dead set on phasing out the prospect of anyone, anywhere, making a living as an artist…as if that wasn’t already a hard enough row to hoe.

According to the National Literacy Institute “on average, 79% of U.S. adults nationwide are literate in 2024” and “54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level” (1). So we’re already starting off in a bad place for basic comprehension and life-skills, however, AI generated garbage makes this issue so much worse. ChatGPT rehashes of entire books clog amazon.com’s self-publishing service (2) (3) (4). Self-published budding novelists frequently find knock-offs of their hard work uploaded mere days after they’ve published said work. On top of that, ChatGPT is notoriously squishy when it comes to facts. Heck, just the other day I saw a post online from some kid who was mad that he bought the wrong video game console. It wouldn’t play the game he literally bought it for, when asked why he did that he said he asked ChatGPT which consoles would play said game…y’know, instead of just using a search engine.

Rounding back to that music analogy, you can generate entire songs, albums, discographies, with the click of a button. No more pesky composing or performing. Just type a sentence into a service, let it churn and congrats you’re a musician now (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10)!

From impoverished children making unreal sculptures to religious figures blessing modern presidents, AI generated imagery is so advanced at this stage that it appears to have fooled thousands on social media. (11) (12) (13). In a world where the majority of people increasingly can’t tell truth from fiction, anyone being able to generate convincing images and video on a whim is, honestly, pretty concerning for the odds of our species' continued survival. (14) (15) (16) (17) (18).

What’s the next obvious step for AI to slop out? Movies, of course. It’ll start small, an ad here, a short film there, but mark my words: these imagination-free executives don’t pump money into something they don’t expect a return on (19). What’s the benefit of a coca cola christmas ad generated entirely by AI? It looks terrible, the trucks slide instead of driving, the name of the product is spelled wrong, everything just looks a little off, and the humans looks almost as lifeless as the zombie kids from the polar express. None of that matters to coca cola though, no, they were able to generate an entire advertisement without paying a single actor, very few artists. To them, the payoff is creating something that’s close enough to what they used to while reducing the needed staff to a fraction of the artists they used to employ. Granted, in the process they lost any sense of imagination, warmth, and vitality in their video…but that’s not what this is about. Look at any major movie studio’s output over the last ten years. The more a film relies on spectacle, the higher the budget. Generating movies gives them the opportunity to slash costs (at the expense of livelihoods, but executives don’t really seem to care much about the little people they step on along the way).

So, what’s the end goal of AI generation? In the past, Art sprung from lived human experience. The reality an artist experienced from day to day would tether their Art, seeping into every musical phrase, screenplay page, and paint stroke. Ai generated imagery and audio servers that connection to reality, to truth. In my lifetime I’ve watched popular conspiracy theories go from kitsch (did you know bigfoot is real and has a family, Stanley Kubrick directed the moon landing) to downright disturbing (democrats keep children as sex slaves beneath a pizza shop to harvest a chemical called adrenochrome from them, illegal immigrants in rural ohio are eating the cats and dogs there). I shouldn’t have to say this, but I do, none of those things are true. Humanity’s appetite for accepting increasingly dangerous lies will only be accelerated when said lies can be accompanied by convincing sound bites and video. Don’t believe me? It’s already happening. (20)

Well, we can’t put the electronic genie back in the bottle and people aren’t magically going to grow less stupid if current trajectories are going to be believed. The more our technology evolves, the more our brains seem to devolve. What happens when humans, as a species, can no longer agree on baseline reality? What happens to civilization when we can no longer trust our own eyes and ears? What’s the point of Art, of human expression, when humanity itself is no longer valued?

WHAT IS ART?

What is Art anyway?

Is a child’s scribble Art? What about an ice cream scoop? An impressively designed house? Is a urinal Art? Is Duchamp's Fountain Art? Some people say that anything can be Art and everything IS Art. Those people are wrong.

Art is “Human expression made manifest for the primary purpose of being Art.”

Put simply, it’s Art if it was made to be Art. To return to our examples: that child’s scribble, regardless of how important it is to their parents, is probably not Art. This ice cream scoop, not Art. Architecture? Depends on the architect, their motivations and the financial situation surrounding it. A urinal. Just because something has a designer, doesn’t mean it was designed with the intention of it being Art as the primary motivator. So no, a urinal is not Art…unless it’s Duchamp's Fountain. Why is this particular urinal Art? Because it was reclaimed from its previous life, given a title, given a context, and given meaning by an Artist all with the intention of the resulting found-sculpture being Art.

It is now the ideal time to remind the viewer that just because something is Art does not make it any good. Additionally, entertainment is not always Art and Art is not always entertaining. Art can be challenging, confrontational, taboo, intimidating, sweet, soulful, introspective, morose, and it can, on occasion, be entertaining. Entertainment, however, contains some of these things in moderation occasionally…after all, at the end of the day it must be entertaining. Art has no such restriction and is often baffling or rage-inducing to the general public as a result. Art is often not created for the general public, but each work has a very specific and unique target audience. Entertainment is targeted directly at the general public. The more a movie, an album, a book, targets every possible demographic of person…the less likely that given work was created with the primary intention of being Art. Transformers: Dark of the Moon and C’mon C’mon are certainly both movies, but their goals couldn’t be more different. One exists to sell tickets and merch, the other exists to tell a deeply personal story. The primary motivation is key.

Sometimes though, it’s hard to tell the difference between a product and Art. It can be like meeting a new person for the first time, trying to determine if they’re being genuine with you or not, how guarded you’ll have to be around them. You don’t always know if someone is fake for sure, at least not right away. But you get a feeling, an eventual sense that something’s off, something’s performative. They’re too quick to agree yet they listen without understanding. They feel compelled to document every meeting with selfies, fake smiles wide. Their friendship is more Product than Art. Their friendship, is hollow. Separating Art from product can be difficult because the disease that is capitalism has so long been using Art lingo and creative trappings to sell soulless products that we’ve been trained to ignore our instincts. That gnawing warning in the pit of your stomach that something is shallow, a fake friend. The determination is more Art than a science. But then, isn’t that the point? Art is active and interactive, it encourages investigation and study. Entertainment is passive. Entertainment is familiar. Entertainment is product. Art is human.

WHY DO HUMANS MAKE ART?

Why do some people feel compelled to make Art and why does that act often completely define them?

Within every artist, whether they realize it or not, there is a desperation to share. Art can be an incredibly vulnerable form of communication, often the result of the artist cutting pieces from their soul and arranging them for all to witness. When you find a work of Art that really connects with you, it becomes a private conversation between you and the artist where no words are spoken but rather experiences, memories, and emotions are shared. It can be incredibly validating. The pair, artist and audience, have, in that moment, gone through something together. Art often tells you almost as much about yourself as it does the person who made it.

Some Art makes people incredibly angry, take the painting Blue Monochrome by Yves Klein. This painting in particular makes some people very angry, “it’s just one color, I could have painted that!” You’re right, you could have. But you didn’t. Yet you’re still angry, why? Go with it, go on that journey. Really turn over those rocks and look at all the bugs underneath. While you’re going on this inner emotional journey, the person next to you is reading up on the painting on their phone.

Turns out “Klein worked closely with a chemist to create a binding medium that could absorb blue color pigment without changing it. The result was a bright ultramarine named International Klein Blue, a color its inventor described as a “pure essence of freedom”. The artist was inspired by Eastern religions that often associated the color blue with infinity… …Klein saw monochromes as an ‘open window to freedom’...”(21) The person with a little insight into the artist probably isn’t angry about the painting, they’re on a different journey with the work, staring deeply into the color as if it were a window they could fall into…letting it absorb even their thoughts. Your journey with that painting isn’t the same journey as someone else’s, but you both went places didn’t you? That’s why humans make Art.

Long before tech bros and billionaires decided to try and replace the human imagination with soulless code, Art was under absolute attack…though not perhaps from where you might expect. It’s me. I’m the problem. Perhaps you are too, but nah, probably not. It’s probably just me. I’ve carefully curated my instagram feed to be full of creative work. You name it, paintings, songs, clever vfx videos. It’s a thing of beauty full of Art any museum would be proud to display. That said, if the patrons of said instagram museum behaved in the way I do when I’m on instagram, it would be a sad place indeed. I scroll past more Art in a bathroom trip than a medieval farmer would have seen in his entire life. If a piece strikes a chord, I’ll give it a heart or even share it to my stories (how benevolent of me). This process takes approximately 10 seconds at the most, then it’s on to the next post. I treat Art online in the way it’s presented, consumable, disposable, and endless. My phone’s screen is only so big, so I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about a piece. My interaction with the art is less “how does this make me feel” and more “is this pretty or cool upon first glance” and then moving right along.

I treat Art online as though it were not Art, I treat Art as though it were only entertainment. When there’s so much of it at my fingertips, it loses all value. Instead of exploring why a piece of someone else’s soul hits me in a certain way, I can scroll and scroll past, I do.

Art online has no value.

I’ve personally witnessed people scrolling tiktok while “watching” a film. In this scenario, none of the short videos on tiktok have value and the movie had no value. We get out of Art as much as we bring to it. If we’re bringing a fractional sliver of our attention, we’ll get only a fractional sliver out of the exchange. But we’ve decided, as a people, that we’re ok with Art having no value, no benefit to us. We’ve decided that we’re ok with getting almost nothing out of someone’s life’s work. Books are just something we listen to while getting chores out of the way. Music is the background noise we’ve chosen to underscore a video game. When was the last time I sat down and listened to an album, not doing anything but listening? Saying it out loud is almost bizarre, but we’ve lost all respect for imagination. No distractions, just reading. Lights off, no phone, no talking, just paying attention to a film. Slapping on some shoes and trucking out to a local gallery, giving each painting, photograph, or sculpture the time and space to speak to you.

We didn’t need AI to kill Art.

We’ve already killed it ourselves.

At its core, Art is a communicative relationship between Artist and Audience…but that relationship has fallen apart. Artists never stopped creating, expressing. They can’t stop, many are compelled. Idea sharing, storytelling, and flights of inspiration are the driving force behind kickstarting many of humanity's greatest advancements. Yet, at some point, the audience changed from participants to consumers.

AI GENERATIONS ARE NOT ART AND THEY NEVER WILL BE.

Regardless as to what the AI generator is generating, they all operate in a similar way. They train on a dataset of existing material in order to know what to expect. So if a person types “draw me a duck”, the AI generator has seen enough pictures of ducks to know what one should sorta kinda look like. Will it invent a brand new duck out of thin air? No, the output will be a mashup, a reimagining of portions of multiple sources. Think of it as a really advanced collage. The person typing the prompt “draw me a duck” into the computer is not the artist. They are, at best, the client. So right away, there’s no such thing as an AI artist. At best they’re a client and at worst they’re the world’s silliest programmers using the English language to try to convince a computer to make a nice looking collage of other people’s work. Cute hobby, very dorky, not an artist. What about the output? Since the AI generator is not capable of having artistic ambitions, it is not possible for it to have “make Art” as a primary motivation for its resulting imagery. Remember Art is “Human expression made manifest for the primary purpose of being Art.”

The generator is code and not, in fact, Human.

The generator cannot express.

The generator’s primary purpose is not to create Art. The only part of the definition it fulfills, is the ability to manifest a concept.

Not an Artist. Not Art. Case closed.

The Artist sets out to make Art, they probably have an idea as to how they’ll go about this but their aim, execution, and inspiration may change at moments notice along the way. These changes may be the result of world events, in-the-moment impulses, or even mood. So much about creation is active and alive, resulting in something that may be equally difficult to quantify.

On the opposite side, there is no skill required to generate with an AI.

None.

Some Techbro enthusiasts may, at this point, begin crying something along the lines of “but my prompt had to be very carefully phrased in order to get the picture I got wahhh”. Yeah, so much skill wow. An actual Artist, you know the people these folks are ripping off, had to put years of both technical and esoteric study/practise into their craft BEFORE they even solidified exactly what kind of Art they wanted to make, how they wanted that to look or sound, and what message they want to send. There’s an incredible amount of groundwork that goes into forming the foundation where something that appears deceptively simple can grow.

Van Gogh is famous for his bold brush strokes and fanciful imagery, but that’s built on a foundation of countless realistic sketches, drawings, and paintings. He didn’t just wake up one day and boom “Starry Night”. It grew out of his experiences, there was a process for him to reach that point. Picasso didn’t just start chopping up reality into cubism out of nowhere, he laid a foundation of skill and knowledge first.

The machine nor the prompter have any such skill or inspiration, they simply take what came before and remix it. That’s not innovation, innovation is inspired and informed. When I was in university, some students would grouse about having to take the basic foundational art course like life drawing and sculpture 101 etc. They were like, “I already have a style, I want to draw manga” but like, without understanding anatomy, light, how to leverage different mediums, composition, color theory…not to mention technique and skill honed over long hours and time…your manga is gonna look pretty bad. You can only push the limits of stylization when you have a firm grip on WHY it’s stylized. Without fully understanding how to capture reality, what the rules are, one cannot successfully break those rules in an interesting or new way. As the character Ian Malcolm from the film Jurassic Park famously said: “I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here: it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you want to sell it!” (22).

CONTENT IS THE ENEMY OF ART

AI generated books.

AI generated music.

AI generated images.

AI generated movies.

It all makes sense when you think about it from the perspective of someone without a soul, sorry, I meant, a CEO. “...the art of cinema is being systematically devalued, sidelined, demeaned, and reduced to its lowest common denominator, ‘content.’ As recently as fifteen years ago, the term ‘content’ was heard only when people were discussing the cinema on a serious level, and it was contrasted with and measured against ‘form.’ Then, gradually, it was used more and more by the people who took over media companies, most of whom knew nothing about the history of the art form, or even cared enough to think that they should. ‘Content’ became a business term for all moving images: a David Lean movie, a cat video, a Super Bowl commercial, a superhero sequel, a series episode. It was linked, of course, not to the theatrical experience but to home viewing, on the streaming platforms that have come to overtake the moviegoing experience, just as Amazon overtook physical stores.” (23) To a CEO, content is nothing more than “a product to be sold”. If it started life as Art, you can bet that they’ll sand down all the sharp edges in order to make it as palatable to as many people as possible in order to make as much money as possible.

Capitalism is the enemy of Art.

Art is the reflection of the human spirit.

Capitalism is the enemy of humanity.

You’re smart, you see where this is going. Everywhere you look, every digital service, app, or software is just ramming AI tools down our throats despite it not being something the public was demanding. Why is AI being pushed so hard? Artists are hard to work with because, unlike the suits they work for, they want to make Art. It’s a real skill coaxing a product out of a passionate artist but, what if these business gurus could just remove the artist from the equation altogether? Companies don’t want to work with artists because they don’t want to make Art. They’re not going to stop pushing AI until it is no longer economically viable to do so.

The goal is to replace the human soul with uninspired electronic garble remixes so advanced that they’re betting the public won’t be able to tell the difference.

Sadly, judging by our tiktok length attention spans, I think they’re probably right.

PAYING THE BILLS

So. With corporations and businesses embracing technology that will, in their mind, hopefully allow them to lay off more workers thus maximizing profits, how exactly is an artist supposed to pay the bills? The videogame industry is going through a time almost as difficult as the film and animation industries. Jobs are hard to find. It’s always been tough to make money as a musician or fine artist. AI generations are just another in a long line of devastating economic disruptions to artists being able to be artists full time. The fine art world was absolutely decimated by the advent of the photograph. The photograph was greatly challenged by the movie picture. Practical effects fell to the advances of computer graphics.

We exist in a time where you CAN do any sort of art you wish to, you just probably won’t be able to pay the bills doing it. Even if you try, phones and social media have fried everyone’s ability to even appreciate Art much less understand it. Go ahead, try to convince a 12 year old to drop the ipad and read a book in the woods with their feet dangling in a creek. Good luck.

Movies don’t have it much better. Streamers are typically more about quantity than quality, curation is a dying art form. Additionally, they know that movies have become background noise for the phone-addicted. As writer/director/actor Justine Bateman said: “I’ve heard from showrunners who are given notes from the streamers that ‘This isn’t second screen enough.’ Meaning, the viewer’s primary screen is their phone and the laptop and they don’t want anything on your show to distract them from their primary screen because if they get distracted, they might look up, be confused, and go turn it off. I heard somebody use this term before: they want a “visual muzak.” When showrunners are getting notes like that, are they able to do their best work? No. And when these companies control the entire pipeline from beginning to end, then you wind up doing what they ask.” (24)

So the next time someone complains that movies and shows just aren’t as good as they used to be, you can hit them with the old chicken and egg argument.

They’ll get better when you start actually watching them again.

So, if you can’t make a living from your Art and the general public can’t tell the difference between corporate product and generative AI slop anyways…well…at some point you’ve gotta ask:

WHY BOTHER MAKING ART?

If Art collectively is the truest manifestation of the human soul, then the devaluation thereof is an abject rejection of humanity. Artificially generated imagery will only show a person something they never could have imagined, if said person has allowed their imagination to atrophy. When we charge a machine with remixing the human soul, we, in that moment, abandon our species. Art is essential. If humanity writ-large has already deemed the commodification of expression not only acceptable but essential, then Artists cannot hinge their identity on being accepted, famous, or financially stable (something any student of history will point out as being not particularly new).

Things are pretty bad right now. I wish I could tell you that it’ll get better. It won’t.

It’s going to get worse, a lot worse.

Humanity is content to hollow itself out, chasing product after product with nothing genuine or emotionally challenging in sight. Despite this, in the face of human suffering, our hearts need genuine poetry. Books written by people different from us teach us empathy. Paintings can allow us to stretch our emotions in the same way we stretch our muscles. Music is a transportation device for the mind, and Film can challenge us to face our fears and grow through them in a safe environment.

The key? It’s got to be genuine. Just like our friends. Don’t settle. Make Art like your life depends on it.

To quote Nicholas Cage: “I am a big believer in not letting robots dream for us. Robots cannot reflect the human condition for us. That is a dead end if an actor lets one AI robot manipulate his or her performance even a little bit, an inch will eventually become a mile and all integrity, purity and truth of art will be replaced by financial interests only. We can’t let that happen. The job of all art in my view, film performance included, is to hold a mirror to the external and internal stories of the human condition through the very human thoughtful and emotional process of recreation. A robot can’t do that. If we let robots do that, it will lack all heart and eventually lose edge and turn to mush. There will be no human response to life as we know it. It will be life as robots tell us to know it. I say, protect yourselves from AI interfering with your authentic and honest expressions.”(25)

-Josh Evans

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