Summary

Core Thesis: Art as a Social Behavior

The central argument of this talk is that art is fundamentally a social behavior—a communicative act performed by humans, for humans, to affect social relationships, bond, and share culture. Consequently, computers and AI cannot be considered "artists." All computer-generated or AI-generated art is ultimately human-made art, with the computer serving as a tool. True automation of art is impossible because the human origin, context, and intent behind an artwork are intrinsic to its value.

Historical Parallels in Art Technology

The speaker draws extensively on art history to demonstrate that while new technologies inevitably disrupt artistic labor and methods, they do not replace the human artist.

• Oil Paint vs. Fresco: When oil paint emerged, masters of the older fresco style (like Michelangelo) dismissed it as amateurish. Yet, it allowed for unprecedented realism and fundamentally changed painting.

• Photography vs. Painting: The invention of photography in the 19th century caused panic among traditional painters. Paul Delaroche famously declared it "the end of art." Photography decimated the livelihood of portrait painters by offering a faster, cheaper alternative. However, it ultimately liberated painting from the burden of pure realism, directly ushering in the Modern Art movement (as championed by Van Gogh and Whistler) and eventually earning recognition as a distinct art form.

• Recorded Music vs. Live Performance: At the dawn of the 20th century, musical recording was attacked by figures like John Philip Sousa, who feared it would destroy the soul of music and turn people into automatons. While it did reduce communal music-making and displace performance musicians in theaters ("talkies"), it also democratized music appreciation and birthed entirely new genres, such as musique concrète and hip-hop.

The Evolution of Computer Art

Computer-assisted art has a 60-year history, and the debate over machine autonomy is not new.

• Conceptual Foundations: Sol LeWitt's idea that "the idea is a machine that makes the art" paved the way for algorithmic art.

• Early Generative Art: Artists like Harold Cohen spent decades writing complex algorithms (like AARON) to generate paintings. Despite the autonomous execution of the code, Cohen realized the machine lacked a "modifiable worldview"—it possessed no independent intent.

• Computer Animation: Early digital animators feared computers would steal their jobs. Instead, 3D animation became a highly labor-intensive, human-driven artistic performance. Pixar’s early mantra, "Art challenges technology, technology inspires art," reflects this synergy.

The Danger of AI Hype and Anthropomorphism

The speaker warns against the language of "Artificial Intelligence," which invites false comparisons to science-fiction characters like those in Star Wars or Star Trek. Modern AI (like DALL-E or ChatGPT) is essentially a complex, high-dimensional curve-fitting procedure, not a conscious entity.

• Historical Hype: In 1958, the Perceptron—a basic linear classifier—was hyped by the press as the embryo of a conscious machine.

• The Illusion of Agency: Humans naturally anthropomorphize machines (as seen with the 1970s ELIZA chatbot). Attributing artistic agency to AI ignores that its output is the result of human-written code, human-curated training data, and human-inputted prompts.

• The "Button Press" Argument: Critics argue AI text-to-image isn't art because it's just pressing a button. The speaker counters that photography is also just pressing a button; the artistic merit lies in meaning, expression, and context, not the physical labor of rendering.

Future Predictions and Ethical Implications

Looking forward, the speaker predicts that simple text-to-image generation is a superficial fad. The true impact of AI will be found in deeply integrating data-driven techniques into professional artistic pipelines, offering unprecedented control and birthing entirely new styles.

• Labor Disruptions: Just as streaming triggered the 2023 Hollywood writers' strike, AI will cause painful short-term labor disruptions, fundamentally redefining what it means to be an artist.

• The Necessity of Guardrails: The widespread impact of these tools will necessitate new ethical frameworks, guardrails, and copyright considerations to protect human creators.

• The Enduring Value of Human Art: Ultimately, pure automation is uninteresting to audiences. Because art is a social behavior, we will always seek out the human connection behind the work. Good art will remain difficult to make because it requires a unique, meaningful human perspective.

Transcript

Introduction: Can Computers Create Art?

In this talk, I'm going to discuss the question of whether computers can be considered artists, including so-called AI. To do so, I'll describe many other times in history when technology changed the way that we make art and the way that we understand art. And I think that looking at this history will provide a lot of useful lessons for the challenges that we face today. I'm going to explain why I believe that art is really a social behavior, one that we do for and with other humans. This talk originally began as a paper that I published way back in 2018, and a lot has changed since then, but a lot of the lessons of history remain the same.

Before I begin, a bit about myself. I studied art and computing in college, and over the past 30 years, I've done research in computer graphics algorithms inspired by art. I also still like to spend lots of time drawing. My art experience has informed a lot of my research over the years. So, for example, here's an installation that we made as part of my PhD thesis. It's a canvas that continually paints a picture of you as you move around in front of it. And we showed it at some art exhibitions in New York in 2001.

The Rise of AI-Generated Art

The past decade or so has really felt like a whirlwind of activity and attention for AI-based art. I date this to 2015 with the introduction of DeepDream, which was a kind of fun, interesting technique for a while. Neural style transfer was presented in 2015 as well, and this was a fun toy a lot of people liked to play with. Both of these methods were shown in art exhibitions, such as this one that was shown in San Francisco in 2016. Another notable moment was the auction of a GAN-generated artwork for half a million euros, and this was even signed with the GAN loss function.

Now, academic researchers have gotten involved in making statements about AI artwork. Here's a technique from a paper called "Creative Adversarial Networks," and it has a very interesting approach in the paper to defining new visual styles. But the thing I want to focus on is in the abstract where they say, "We propose a new system for generating art. The system generates art by looking at art and learning about style and becomes creative." So the authors are making very strong statements about the role of the computer in the system.

This was picked up by the news media. Headlines said, "Artificially intelligent painters invent new styles of art," "The artist that can create its own painting style," and "Critics even prefer some of its work to human efforts." And again, this is back in 2017. Here's a video of one of the preeminent art critics in the world, Jerry Saltz, talking about that algorithm. And the thing to notice here is the level of agency that he gives to this piece of computer code: "Initial thoughts: incredibly dull, generic, boring. The programmers are not freeing up the program. I want the robot to tap into its inner robot. Be free." So it's a simple GAN model, but he's essentially presented it as though it's an independent artistic entity.

More recently, in 2022, DALL-E was made available to the public. You could just type in a bit of text and images would be generated, and suddenly this created a lot of excitement, energy, anger, and controversy. And this is kind of the world we live in now.

Framing the Question: Human vs. Machine

In this talk, I want to focus on the question of whether computers can create art, whether we can think of computers as artists. Often, people treat this as just a matter of technological capability—that if the pictures are good enough that come out of the machine, then that makes the machine an artist. On the other hand, other people I've talked to say, "Of course computers can't be artists. Art requires intent or expression." There's a sense that art is fundamentally a human activity, like having a soul. I agree with a lot of these intuitions, but they're not very scientific, and it would be nice to make them a little more concrete—like, what do they actually mean? What are they saying?

The main points I'm going to make here are that people make art, sometimes using computers, and so all of the art that we make with computers is human-made art. This is in part because art is a social behavior. It's a thing that we do with and for other people. However, new technologies transform art, the way we make art, and the way we appreciate it. History provides many useful lessons for what happens when these technologies come along and the way people respond to new artistic technologies.

Now, these are very, in some cases, controversial topics. There are a lot of concerns and strong emotions here, often for very good reasons. There are lots of legitimate concerns around copyright, but I'm not going to discuss that here so much. I'm not making policy recommendations. I'm really here recommending ways to talk about art and technology that avoid a lot of the pitfalls. There are a lot of ways to have a gut response to these new technologies that are really quite misleading, and I think it's worthwhile being a lot more careful about how we think of the role of each of these new technologies.

Historical Lessons: Oil Paint and Photography

As you know, one of my main themes here is that technology has transformed art many times throughout history. One early example is the development of oil paint. Oil paint, as compared to the earlier technology of fresco, has a much greater tonal range and can depict basically more colors. It's also much easier and more practical than fresco. In response, Michelangelo, who was more a master of the older fresco style, said the new stuff is for amateurs. Within the Western tradition, over the following centuries, artists got better and better at using oil paint to create highly realistic and dazzling depictions of reality. I think it's really hard for us right now to appreciate how special it would have been to see pictures like this. Today, we are surrounded by photographs and realistic imagery online, in print, and on our cameras. It's hard for us to appreciate just how special it would have been to see what could only have been done by a painter 200 years ago. So the role of the painter and the identity of the artist were very highly tied up in their ability to create these kinds of pictures, which only they could make.

At the same time, photography was initially invented in the early 1820s. The first known existing photograph was initially made by technology tinkerers playing around with chemistry and optics. Here's a picture that Daguerre took out his window. Because these were long exposures, around 10 minutes, most people walking by would be blurred out. But you can see there's a fellow getting his shoe shined in the lower left there. And so this is the first known photograph of a person.

This technique really became widely available when Daguerre publicly described his invention. The French government bought him out so that he wouldn't patent it, because they believed that this technology was widely useful. Immediately with these first demonstrations of the technique, traditional artists said, in the words of the great Paul Delaroche, "This is the end of art." Or J.M.W. Turner, who said, "I am glad I have had my day." Because here is a machine that does what artists do: it makes realistic pictures.

So what actually happened? Well, one of the roles of painting was portraiture. Just as today we like to have pictures of ourselves, our family, friends, and ancestors. In 1838, if you were very, very wealthy, you could hire a painter to paint a picture of you. If you were not so wealthy, you might have a silhouette picture made—not a great likeness. Once photography came around, portrait studios emerged where people could get their portraits made through photography. And even though you had to sit with your head in a brace and sit very still for 10 or 30 minutes, it became very, very popular. As a result, we have all these wonderful photos by people like the colorful photographer Nadar of figures from the 19th century, such as this picture of the photographer Mathew Brady.

Within several decades, painters, at least one painter, said, "Photography has harmed painting considerably and has killed portraiture, especially once the livelihood of the artist." This is because portrait painters were unable to find work in the way they had before because photography was faster and cheaper, and so painters either had to switch to photography or were unable to find work as portraitists.

On the higher end, there was a discussion of whether photography is art. On one hand, there were the tinkerers and people exploring the technology, making pictures and seeing what happened. One thing that often happens with a new technology is that people try to mimic the existing artistic styles, both to develop the technology artistically and also to justify it. With photography, that movement was called Pictorialism. Here's a classical style tableau created through a multiple exposure composite within Pictorialism that had the same kind of horizontal tableau as a lot of classical painting. It took many, many decades before photography emerged into its own. It eventually had its own style, its own language, and was, by the beginning of the 20th century, accepted by major museums and galleries as a separate art form.

Now, throughout this, there were of course the haters, people like the poet Charles Baudelaire, who said, "If photography is allowed to stand in for art it will corrupt it completely. Thanks to the stupidity of the multitude." So this technology is going to replace art and make it stupid because people are stupid.

Ultimately, painters began to see this as a challenge. Whistler wrote, "The imitator is a poor kind of creature. If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this." And so he made these atmospheric gauzy paintings that were quite different from what photography was capable of at the time. Vincent van Gogh, in his pivotal year of 1888, wrote to his brother that accurate drawing is not the thing to aim at, because a reflection of reality would not be a picture at all, no more than a photograph. So now this is a 180. He is saying that actually making realistic pictures is not what artists do, because that's just photography. And this whole story ushers in the Modern Art movement of the early 20th century, where making realistic pictures is no longer viewed as one of the major goals of painting.

Conceptual and Early Algorithmic Art

An important step in the development of Modern Art is the notion of conceptual art, especially this famous work by Duchamp, which, if you're not familiar with it, is a urinal that Duchamp turned upside down, signed, called it a fountain, and submitted to an art show. This is considered one of the most famous and influential works of 20th-century art.

So in summary, it looked like photography automated art because it does what artists do: it makes realistic pictures, and many artists feared it and condemned it for those reasons. What actually happened is it created a new art form—photography—which is considered distinct from painting. It invigorated the old art form of painting; I would argue that modern art emerged in part because of photography. Many jobs were affected; many portraitists were replaced with photo studios, and so they had to retrain or find other work, or they lost their jobs. Furthermore, image creation was made much more easily available to hobbyists. Nowadays, we're all carrying phones around in our pockets with cameras attached to them, making it very easy for all of us to make pictures all the time in ways that we couldn't have done 200 years ago.

There are many trends here. They're very complicated. And I argue that in some form, many of these trends repeat with each new art technology to varying degrees. There are many common features that different technologies share when they change art. Some people have responded to this history by saying I'm making it sound like there's nothing to worry about with the new changes, and one could ask, "Are the new changes different?" Of course, every new technology is different. There's a lot now that people didn't have to worry about 200 years ago. My only point here is that what's different is not the things people usually think they are. I think studying these trends of history is a way to avoid naive gut reactions and cognitive biases.

For example, people have complained that the new AI tools can't be art because it's just "pressing a button." But if that's true, then photography is not art as well, because photography is also just pressing a button. Whatever concerns we have about the new technology, they have to be a little bit more thoughtful than that. If you can apply that same concern to photography or other things I'll talk about, then that may be a problem for that criticism.

As part of this discussion, I may need to tell you a little bit about what art is, or the kind of art I'm talking about here. I use the term art very broadly. I talk about visual art, photography, conceptual art, and I would say children's drawing and amateur drawing is also art. Movies, music, video games, theater, and many other things. I take a very broad notion of what art is, and I don't see the value in slicing it up more finely than that. Even though most of my examples in this talk are primarily visual art, some people have inferred what my definition of art is. The thing is, there is no single definition of art. I think it's not really possible to come up with a short, simple definition of art. If you want to know more about that, I recommend the book The Art Question by Nigel Warburton. A lot of people's intuitions about the definition of art don't really generalize well or follow through if you think through the implications. But I still think it's useful and worthwhile to talk about art without trying to come up with a strict definition.

Let's come back to conceptual art. Sol LeWitt is another important figure in conceptual art. These are examples of paintings that he made. In these cases, he didn't actually make them by hand himself, though. He wrote down sets of instructions, and then other people would actually execute the paintings. In his writings about conceptual art, he argued that it's really the idea behind the work, the definition of how the paintings are made, that is the real work of the artist. He wrote, "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art."

This very naturally leads into early computer art. In the 1960s, as soon as people could make pictures with computers, they started making art with it. These are three examples of generative art where people wrote code that made artworks. The one on the left is a picture in the style of a particular Mondrian painting. Throughout the 20th century since then, there's an enormous, amazing variety of computer-based art of all different kinds, which I clearly don't have time to summarize in this talk because it's a vast history. I'll just mention three of my favorites: the evolutionarily generated screen savers of Scott Draves, which autonomously evolve over time in response to people's upvotes or downvotes; Jason Salavon's visualizations, including this picture which is an average of many different wedding photos over time; and Sofia Crespo's interesting GAN-generated artificial botany.

The Myth of Algorithmic Autonomy

One of the most important AI artists in the 20th century is Harold Cohen. He began as a contemporary fine artist from one of the major art schools, the Slade School of Art in London. He started out writing rules for himself to follow when painting by hand on paper, and then he would simply follow those rules and see what happened. In the early 1970s, he discovered computer programming in FORTRAN. From that point on, he started writing those rules in code rather than by hand. He spent the rest of his artistic career programming algorithms that made paintings. These are paintings collected by major galleries and institutions. There was a recent retrospective of his work at the Whitney a few years ago.

In the more popular realm of computer animation, Alvy Ray Smith tells a story about how, before he co-founded Pixar with Ed Catmull, they would go down to Disney and try to convince them to adopt computer animation tools. They said that back then, the animators were afraid of the computer. They thought it was going to take their jobs away. They spent a lot of time telling them that the computer is just a tool; it doesn't do the creativity. Indeed, if you've ever worked with computer animation tools, you know how incredibly labor-intensive they are, and how much talent, skill, and artistic ability they require. Computer animation is very much an artistic performance in much the same way that previous hand-drawn animation had been. This is why Pixar's early days were really driven by the mantra: "Art challenges technology, technology inspires art." Nowadays, if you watch the credits of any animated movie, you see an enormous number of artists were employed in order to create the animation. This is also true for so many of our live-action and VFX films that involve computer animation. There's an entertaining series of videos online about how "no CGI is just hidden CGI," which I recommend watching if you're interested.

In my own work, I began my studies with my first paper, which was a technique for taking a photograph and making a painting from it. This was published at SIGGRAPH 98. This original paper was based on just a series of rules and instructions that I wrote that used the material source image to decide where to place brush strokes. Anyone can read the paper and understand the reasoning and decision-making process involved in this algorithm. This is the source of the interactive installation that I showed earlier. Now, through this process, I found it difficult to define different rules for making paintings, and so I came up with the idea of doing it from examples. This is a paper called "Image Analogies" that we published in 2001. In this example, it's using elements of the texture in the picture on the top and applying them to the photo on the left. Even though it's learning from examples, you can again read the paper and understand how the decision-making process works and how the pastel illustration is being made.

I've summarized this long history of computer-generated art. Throughout this whole history, people are saying, "The robot can paint, but is it art?" Go back 40 years: "Computer art, is it really art?" For the past 60 years, people have been making art with computers and asking the same questions over and over again. Each time someone sees that the computer made a picture, they ask if the computer is an artist. The answer has always been the same for 60 years: the computer is a tool for people to make art. All computer art is really human-made art.

Now, in many of my discussions over the years, I've seen a lot of people make the explicit statement that being an artist is a matter of making good pictures. If you can make good pictures, that makes you an artist, and it's the same for a machine. I think this is a thought process a lot of good people go through in various ways. I want to look at how Harold Cohen went through that process:

"Ten years after that, I would have said, 'Look, the program is doing this on its own.' Another ten years on and I would have said, 'The fact that the program is doing this on its own is the central issue.' Here it was producing complex images of a high quality and I could have had it go on forever without rewriting a single line of code. How much more autonomous than that can one get?"

So he's saying, "I have a computer algorithm that makes pictures. They're being sold, framed, and displayed in major art galleries and museums. Doesn't that make it an artist?"

He continues:

"Well, of course, that's exactly the point. It's virtually impossible to imagine a human being in a similar position. The human artist is modified in the act of making art. For the program to have been similarly self-modifying would have required not merely that it be capable of assessing its own output, but that it had its own modifiable worldview to provide a basis for any meaningful assessment."

It's a thought process a lot of us have gone through. I made a computer algorithm that generates images. Maybe that makes it an artist. And then you keep using it over and over again, and you realize it actually feels like it's missing something. Harold Cohen thought it was missing a modifiable worldview.

Other people have made other statements for what computers would have to have to make them autonomous artists. Yet whatever statement you make, there is some existing code or algorithm that actually does that. For example, people often define creativity in terms of making things that are aesthetically valuable, surprising, novel, and perhaps unpredictable. Here's a video of the Mandelbrot set, which was developed in the 1980s. You can watch it for a very long time; it's visually dazzling, really fun to watch, and unpredictable. By that definition of creativity, it's quite creative, and yet it's 10 lines of code. Chaos theory tells us it is unpredictable. If those were enough definitions to make an artist, then this would be an artist. Same for the code that I wrote as part of my thesis. You can't tell exactly what it's going to do. And so, by a lot of definitions, it's an artist.

When people say, "If AI makes good pictures, that makes it an artist," I would say we have over 150 years of history of machines that can make art by that definition. We have photography, smart phone cameras, generative art, and all of the artwork that Harold Cohen's machines made. If it were the case that that was enough to make an artist, then we would already be calling these things artists. Yet instead, it's the case that computers are yet another technology that people use to make art, even when the code is running autonomously. In short, everything that we call computer-generated art is really human-made art.

People say, "Okay, well what about text-to-image? Surely that makes it an artist." I say it's the same thing: you type in text, you produce pictures. These things on some level draw better than I would, and certainly faster, and people ask the same question: whether it's art. I say, of course it's still art. It's art made by a person using an algorithm. The question we should really be asking about this is: Is it expressive? Is it meaningful? Is it ethical, beautiful, skillful, culturally significant? These are the axes on which we should discuss these things. Whenever we get into discussions about whether it's art or not, it ends up just being a huge waste of time, or we're talking past each other. It could be art, but it's bad art. It's just not meaningful. It's sloppy, or not expressive. That doesn't make it not art, it just makes it bad art, or unethical art.

Moreover, I really want to argue the point that it matters how a work of art was made. I've talked to a lot of people, at least within computing, who seem to believe that the only thing that matters is the visual effect that a set of pixels has on you. It doesn't matter where they came from. I want you to look at this picture here, and I'll tell you a few different versions of where it came from, and just see if you feel differently about it with these different stories. It could be that I painted this by hand with real oil paint. Or maybe I just typed in a text prompt and this was generated in ChatGPT. Does that change how you feel?

Let me tell you where this actually came from. I volunteer at an animal shelter where I spend a lot of time with shelter dogs. When you do that, you form relationships with them; you feel connected, emotionally attached to them. This is one dog that I spent a lot of time with. I took the photo on the left when I was hanging out with him, petting him, and he was looking me in the eye. It was really a moment. The picture on the right I made later by painting by hand digitally on my iPad, using the photo on the left as a reference. I would argue that this story gives you a different relationship with the picture than you had before. It means I have a very different relationship to the picture than other people do. And other people who knew this dog and know me have a different relationship to it than people who don't. These differences are very important. Where the picture came from and how it was made is very important. How much you know about that, or what your assumptions are, really affects the way you approach the artwork.

The Illusion of AI and the "Hype Cycle"

Now, all this happens within the context of AI hype. This is really what I see as the most dangerous part of all these new trends. AI hype is not new. With the development of the Perceptron in 1958, the New York Times said on the front page that the Navy revealed the embryo of an electronic computer that it expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself, and be conscious of its existence. This was just a perceptron. This is equivalent to adding up a set of rows in an Excel spreadsheet and comparing it with zero. It's a simple linear classifier, and this was claimed to be the foundation of consciousness.

Over the years, we have these headlines about artificially intelligent painters and computers magnifying this hype beyond all proportion. I think part of the problem is just the phrase "AI" and "artificial intelligence." If it was up to me, we would ban this phrase. Part of the problem is that the phrase AI, to most of the public, signifies artificial intelligences that are much like people, because we have in our popular culture artificial intelligence like the friendly droids from Star Wars or the psychopathic Terminator. When the term artificial intelligence is used, it refers to these kinds of things. Yet our science fiction is not really about how our algorithms actually work. They're really about people, and these fictional AIs are really kind of like modified people.

What we're calling AI is really primarily a set of complicated data-fitting procedures. Instead of fitting a line to a set of data points, it's about fitting extremely high-dimensional, complicated functions to very, very large datasets with massive amounts of resources. But in the end, it's still just fitting curves to data. I do not consider that human-like intelligence on many axes. We as humans have a very strong propensity to infer intelligence and agency in things that we don't really understand. For example, the ELIZA chatbot was developed in the 1970s as a parody of talk therapists. It's a really simple set of rules that asks you questions and reflects back based on things you said. People had emotionally intense relationships with it until they found out how it was made, and then they felt a little bit let down.

When you say, "My AI algorithm is an artist," that tells people it's like Data in Star Trek—that it is a human-like entity. I think that's actually an irresponsible statement. Again, I argue that all of what we call AI-generated art is computer-generated art, which means it's human-made art. Humans using computers to make art, often through these so-called AI algorithms. With database algorithms, the authorship is diffuse; different people are involved in different parts of the process that led to the final work. But again, in the end, it is ultimately a human-driven process.

Art as a Distinctly Human Behavior

So, that's a discussion of where we are today with computer-generated art. But things could change. Maybe in the future, we will consider computers to be artists. I want to ask whether that's possible. Essentially, another way of asking this is: why haven't we accepted computers as artists already? What would it take for us to agree that the computer would be an artist? In order to do this, I want to think about what it means to be an artist. What does it take?

I think these are really social behaviors. What do I mean by social behavior? A social behavior is something that we do, at least in part, to affect our social relationships—like conversation, gifts, having meals together, and fashion. These are all things that have their own benefits. We wear clothes to protect our bodies from the environment, but we choose which clothes we wear often based on how we want to be seen and what we want to communicate. But fashion is really a social behavior.

I claim that art is also a social behavior. We share our art with other people. We go to see other people's art, often together. We like to talk about art with other people, or talk about movies, books, and music. We teach it to the next generation to communicate our values and our culture. We buy it and display it publicly to communicate our taste, values, or wealth. These are things that have happened since before written history. There's an argument that art is really a product of our evolution. I really like the book The Art Instinct by Dennis Dutton. The claim is that art is a product of our evolutionary history—something that we do for gifts, sharing, status, mating, and so on. Ultimately, all of these different functions of art throughout human history are about our social relationships. There's another paper making the case specifically for music, arguing our ability to make and care about music is a product of using it for social bonding.

When I've given this talk, people have said, "Well, I make art just for myself, so doesn't that disprove your point?" I think that's great. I find making art to be a valuable, personally fulfilling thing. But a lot of our social behaviors have their own individual benefits. Language is for communication, yet people might talk to themselves, sing to themselves, or take notes for themselves. That doesn't mean language isn't fundamentally for communication.

In short, art exists for us to help affect our social relationships. As a result, we care about art made by people. Only people make art, and computers are not people. I think this is a really important point. This is why we have not accepted computers as artists in the past, and why I don't think we're going to anytime in the near future.

To illustrate these points, let's look at alternative examples. There are many natural processes that produce things like landscapes, flowers, and trees that have a lot of the properties we associate with art. They're beautiful, emotionally impactful, and create meaningful experiences, and yet we don't consider the ocean to be an artist. Conversely, we do have social relationships with some animals. I think we're very open to the idea that if a dog painted a picture and really seemed to care about the painting itself, we'd be open to the idea that animals are artists. It's just that we haven't found animals that really seem to care about a painting as an aesthetic artifact, rather than just a fun activity.

If that's true, then we have an answer for when we might agree that a computer could be an artist. If we developed human-level personhood—AI that we truly see as people just like us—then we would consider them artists. But this is science fiction. The algorithms we have right now are not people. They are text generators or image generators fitted from data that follow understandable code. I don't see how we can see them as artists. There are various kinds of AI designed to be social and conversational—Siri, Alexa, Cortana, ChatGPT—and we are hearing stories of people having intense emotional or romantic relationships with chatbots. Personally, I find that really scary, and I don't think we should consider them as people. But that is the situation in which we would accept them as artists.

Another thing I've heard, especially among computer science audiences, is that we are all just computers, or the brain is just a computer, or that the whole universe is a computer, and therefore that computer could be an artist. Theoretically, in a science fiction world, maybe these are true statements, but they are not true statements about today's computers. I'm not talking about 1,000 years from now. I'm talking about the computers we can actually build right now. When I say computer, I mean a laptop, CPU, GPU.

Here's a picture of when I adopted my dog. That's a person, and there's a dog. If it were the case that people are just computers, then we would be saying that computers and people are morally, ethically, and socially equivalent. I see no moral or ethical problem with wiping the memory in my computer, throwing it away, erasing it, or recycling it. Doing that with another person or with a dog would be illegal and morally unacceptable. Anyone who says people are just computers needs to think about the difference between a person and a computer, because I think there's a very sharp divide here. It's okay to wipe computers, and not okay to kill people.

In short, computers are not people, and people make art. All of our computer-generated art is really human-made art.

The Consequences of Technology: Labor and Culture

As I mentioned, when I've given this talk, people have said, "Well, it sounds like you're saying there's nothing to worry about and everything's okay." That's not what I'm saying. I am saying that in the long run, we are always going to care about human artists. So in the long run, art is safe from complete automation. But in the short term, there can be lots of problems, concerns, and disruption. Moreover, these things aren't simple. It's not just "computer AI good or bad." It's much more complicated. I really like the writing of the historian of science Melvin Kranzberg. Kranzberg's laws state that technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral. It can be a very powerful force for good and for bad, and it's worth understanding the different kinds of consequences it can have.

I want to give a final example with a different artistic technology: musical recording. This was invented at the end of the 19th century by Edison. Before music recording, the only way you could hear music was to be in the room with the person performing it. With musical recording, that was no longer the case. You could buy recordings and listen to them later. It became very popular, of course. Within a decade or so, John Philip Sousa, the famous composer, wrote this wonderful essay called "The Menace of Mechanical Music," in which he wrote that he foresaw a marked deterioration in American musical taste due to recording technology. It's easy to laugh at the ridiculous things he said—he made scary predictions about how recorded music was going to turn children into automatons and remove soul from music. But he also made points that are relevant to our discussions today. This article was really part of a successful campaign to add copyright protection for composers.

But I want to focus on the communal aspects. Before recorded music, people would get together, families and social groups, and make music together. There's strong evidence that the function of music is for social bonding. I've heard that making music together is a really powerful social bonding activity. It's something that is relatively rare in our modern lives because we can just buy recordings instead of learning to play instruments.

There was another campaign against recorded music with the invention of "talkies"—the ability to have soundtracks in movies rather than having performance musicians in the theater. Performance musicians were worried, claiming recorded music has no soul. Indeed, a lot of performance musicians lost work as a result of this technology. On the other hand, we got new media and new styles, such as tape loops used by pop artists like The Beatles and Pink Floyd in seminal works. Moreover, the development of recorded music was absolutely key to the development of hip-hop, where someone can create entirely new kinds of music by sampling elements of existing recordings using just two turntables and a fader.

The development of recorded music, in addition to creating new styles, created a lot of labor disruptions. Such as the Hollywood writers' strike in 2023, which was essentially the result of streaming technologies. Again, a different way to record and distribute media allowed studios to exploit loopholes and change the terms of how writers were paid. If you look through the history of writers' strikes, many were essentially responses to technological shifts that changed the way writers were paid. Or, as a friend of mine who was active in the latest strike puts it, "They use each new technology as a new way to screw us over."

In short, musical recording and streaming made musical appreciation much more convenient. We can all listen to music all the time. Revolutionary new kinds of music came out of it: musique concrète, tape loops, and hip-hop. On the other hand, most of us don't make music socially anymore. Moreover, artists really struggle to get fair pay; music streaming online is especially bad for artists right now. And yet, it's very hard to imagine giving up music streaming.

Conclusion and Future Outlook

With all this background, we can make a few predictions about what the new tools will do for art in the future. It's hard to make specific stylistic predictions. Here's Les Paul, the inventor of the electric solid body guitar in 1947. He played swing tunes. I don't see how he or anyone else could have predicted how his invention was going to change music and popular culture. You just can't predict what a new technology is going to do to styles.

Yet, with all the trends I've talked about, we can still predict gross trends. Future AI tools are not going to look like simple text-to-image. So much of the debate has been around typing in a text prompt and getting an image. That is a fad. It's often very boring, superficial art. The interesting action is where data-driven techniques occur deeply within existing artistic pipelines—things that give artists lots of control to make things that are truly unique in ways that are very different from how they worked in the past. Artists are going to find great ways to use these tools that are much more powerful than just a text prompt, and new styles and techniques will emerge.

This also means that non-experts will have new ways to create and communicate. However, it's going to cause many painful disruptions for artists and a redefinition of what an artist is. That's going to be really painful and change a lot of how artistic production works. It creates difficult ethical challenges: Who benefits and who is harmed? What guardrails or adjustments need to be put in place to account for these changes?

I believe that good art will always be hard to make. There will always be discerning audiences who care about the human behind the work. Pure automation is not interesting. We care about things that are unique and special, and that requires more than just typing a prompt. We're always going to care about artists. AI is not a human-like person and therefore not an artist. All so-called AI-generated art is really human-made art. This technology is going to create significant benefits and also harm. It's going to change how we make, benefit from, and understand art. The question is: how do we develop tools, guardrails, and safeties so that we, as much as possible, benefit our own humanity through these new technologies?

The Primordial Imperative of Expression

To ask what constitutes art is not to propose a problem of classification, but to interrogate the very boundaries of human self-awareness. Long before formal language crystallized into syntax, and long before societal structures demanded codified records, the human species felt an overwhelming, inexplicable compulsion to leave a trace of its interior life upon the exterior world. This impulse was neither utilitarian nor accidental; it was an ontological necessity. To exist as a conscious entity is to experience the unbearable weight of solitary perspective. Art was born precisely at the intersection of that isolation and the desperate desire to bridge it—a gesture of hands reaching across the abyss of individual subjectivity to declare: I was here, I felt this, and this is what it meant to exist.

In its most unadulterated form, the artistic act is an act of translation. It takes the formless, chaotic, and often painful reality of internal experience—grief, ecstatic wonder, mortal dread, quiet tenderness—and gives it a shape that can be perceived, held, and understood by another mind. This process is inherently visceral. It is bound to the beating of a physical heart, the firing of biological synapses, the decay of organic flesh, and the relentless march of linear time. Art is not merely the final object produced; it is the physical and emotional cost exacted from the creator during its birth.

When we strip away the institutional clutter, the market valuations, and the academic jargon that clutter our understanding of culture, we are left with a stark, luminous truth: art is the transmission of human consciousness from one mortal being to another. It is an act of radically honest witness. In an era increasingly dominated by automated systems that promise to render creation effortless, we are forced to confront a foundational question that our ancestors never had to ask: Can meaning exist when the cost of creation is reduced to zero?

To create is not to compile data, but to bleed meaning into the void. It is the insistence that individual suffering and wonder have an absolute, irreplaceable dignity.

The Mirage of Synthetic Mimicry

We have arrived at a peculiar epoch in human history—one characterized by a profound confusion between form and essence. Automated generative tools, powered by vast computational networks and statistical probability models, can now synthesize prose that mimics the cadence of human melancholy, compose symphonies that echo historical genius, and render images of startling technical complexity. Faced with this dizzying fluency, modern society is tempted to declare that the boundary between biological and synthetic creation has finally dissolved.

Yet, this conclusion rests upon a fatal misunderstanding of what a machine actually does. A statistical model does not write from a place of grief; it calculates the probabilistic distribution of words that historically accompanied human grief. It does not paint from an encounter with beauty; it averages millions of human decisions made during previous encounters with beauty. The computational apparatus is a mirror of hyper-refined complexity, reflecting our own historical output back to us stripped of the living breath that generated it in the first place.

This distinction is not a matter of romantic sentimentality; it is a matter of fundamental truth. When an algorithm generates a poetic text, there is no one behind the words. There is no central consciousness that risked anything to utter them, no soul that lived through the terror or joy being described, and no spirit that will suffer the consequences of its own revelation. It is an echo without a voice, a ghost without a body. To mistake this computational simulation for art is to mistake an electrocardiogram reading for the warmth of a human chest.

The Ethics of Intersubjectivity

At the heart of every genuine artistic encounter lies what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas described as the ethical encounter with the Other. When we read a novel written by a living person, or stand before a painting rendered by a human hand, we are engaged in a sacred form of listening. We are allowing another human subject—with all their flaws, contradictions, and finite mortality—to instruct us on what it feels like to inhabit their specific corner of the cosmos.

This relational dimension is non-negotiable. Art operates on a principle of radical empathy: it demands that we step outside the narrow confines of our own ego and acknowledge the absolute reality of another person's inner world. When a reader wept over the fate of Anna Karenina, they were not merely reacting to ink on paper; they were participating in a shared moral universe constructed by Tolstoy out of his own deep, tortured understanding of human weakness and desire.

Synthetic generation completely dismantles this intersubjective bridge. Because an algorithm possesses no subjectivity, any attempt to form an empathetic connection with its output is an exercise in narcissism. The user is not conversing with another human spirit; they are staring into a digital lake, falling in love with their own reflected prompts. The relational circuit is broken, leaving the spectator isolated in a hall of mechanical mirrors.

Human Subject (Creator) ---> Mediating Object (Art) ---> Human Subject (Witness)

[COMMUNION]

Synthetic Generator ---> Simulated Output ---> Isolated Consumer

[NARCISSISM]

The Aura and the Price of Convenience

In his landmark essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin spoke of the "aura" of a work—the singular, irreplaceable presence of an artwork in space and time, tied to its history, its physical maker, and its unique origin. In our current digital landscape, we are witnessing the final, aggressive erosion of this aura. The cultural sphere is being flooded with an infinite supply of frictionlessly produced media, designed not to challenge or elevate, but to satisfy immediate appetite and optimize engagement metrics.

The promise of automated creation is convenience: the elimination of effort, time, and technical discipline. But in the realm of human culture, efficiency is not a virtue; it is a catastrophe. The value of human expression is directly proportional to the resistance met during its realization. The struggle to translate an intangible thought into a physical form—the wrestling with language, the physical exhaustion of the canvas, the grueling revision of line and tone—is precisely where meaning is forged.

When creation becomes effortless, it becomes weightless. A world inundated with billions of instantly generated images and texts does not become culturally richer; it becomes saturated with ambient noise. When every artifact is available at the touch of a button, no single artifact can command reverence. We risk entering a state of cultural amnesia, where we are surrounded by endless content yet starved of a single authentic voice.

Mortality as the Necessary Condition of Meaning

It is one of the great paradoxes of existence that beauty is inseparable from decay. Human art derives its poignant power precisely from the knowledge that both the creator and the audience are temporary creatures bound for the grave. A mortal life is defined by its limits: we have a finite number of days, a limited capacity for love, and an absolute appointment with non-existence. Because our time is limited, every choice we make, every word we write, and every mark we leave carries weight.

A computational network knows nothing of time or mortality. It does not age; it does not fear death; it does not watch its loved ones wither; it does not experience the tragic transience of a summer twilight. It operates in an eternal, disembodied present, indifferent to the passage of centuries.

How, then, can an entity that cannot die speak to us about the terror and beauty of being mortal? It can mimic the vocabulary of death, but it cannot comprehend the grief of a funeral. It can simulate the language of romance, but it has never felt the racing pulse of a lover's touch. To look to non-biological entities for guidance on the human condition is an abdication of our own lived experience. Meaning cannot be calculated by an entity that has nothing to lose.

The Historical Continuum of the Human Mark

To fully grasp what is at stake in the current technological crisis, we must view artistic creation as an unbroken lineage extending back to the dawn of humanity. When a Paleolithic human pressed their soot-stained hand against the damp limestone of a cave wall, they were performing the exact same fundamental act as a contemporary novelist laboring over a manuscript. Both were using the tools available in their era to assert their presence, to record their perception, and to leave a witness for those who would follow.

Throughout millennia of technological transformation—the invention of the printing press, the camera, the synthesizer—the core of art remained anchored to human agency. Technology altered the medium, expanded the palette, and democratized access, but it never sought to replace the human mind as the primary origin of meaning. The camera required the photographer's eye, their choice of moment, and their moral perspective; the printing press multiplied the writer's voice but did not compose their sentences.

The modern paradigm of automated generation represents a radical and dangerous rupture from this historical continuum. For the first time, technology is not being used as an extension of human intent, but as a replacement for human interiority. It invites us to surrender the act of thinking, feeling, and imagining to automated systems, reducing human beings from active creators to passive consumers of algorithmic output.

Every mark made by a human hand is a declaration of defiance against entropy. To surrender the hand is to surrender the history of our own self-determination.

The Mechanics of Devaluation

When a society begins to treat automated output as interchangeable with human art, it sets off a devastating economic and cultural cascade. The first casualty is the social valuation of artistic labor. Creation has always required years of quiet discipline, failure, reflection, and economic risk. Artists surrender stability and material comfort to cultivate the sensitivities required to produce meaningful work.

If the market is flooded with synthetic imitations that can be produced in seconds for fractions of a cent, the economic viability of human creation collapses. Society begins to view artistic labor not as a vital public good, but as an inefficient bottleneck. The young painter or writer is told that their years of dedicated study are obsolete, replaced by statistical models trained on the very work their predecessors created without consent.

The deeper tragedy, however, is not merely financial; it is existential. As human creators are marginalized, the cultural ecosystem loses its diversity of perspective. Automated systems are inherently conservative; they generate content by averaging past patterns, reinforcing existing biases, and flattening idiosyncrasies. The strange, radical, uncomfortable, and revolutionary voices that historically pushed human consciousness forward are smoothed away in favor of agreeable, statistically optimized mediocrity.

Reclaiming the Sanctuary of Solitude

To resist the total subsumption of culture by automated systems, we must recover a deep appreciation for human solitude and slow gestation. The digital age has conditioned us to demand instantaneous output, constant connectivity, and frictionless consumption. But authentic art does not grow in the glare of real-time optimization; it requires darkness, quiet, and time.

The creative process is fundamentally a gestation. It requires period of silence where an individual sits with their own confusion, grief, or wonder, allowing thoughts to settle and intuition to mature. This internal work cannot be accelerated by hardware upgrades or algorithmic prompts. It is a slow, often frustrating discipline that demands patience and spiritual endurance.

Disconnecting from the synthetic feed is not an act of backward-looking nostalgia; it is a necessary defense of mental sovereignty. To step away from automated generation and return to the blank page, the uncarved block, or the silent instrument is to reclaim the integrity of one's own mind. It is a refusal to allow software to dictate the boundaries of our imagination or the vocabulary of our feelings.

The Moral Imperative of Artistic Valuation

It is a mistake to view the defense of the arts as a secondary, frivolous concern—a matter reserved for aesthetics while the "real" business of society proceeds through economics, science, and political engineering. The state of a civilization's arts is the ultimate measure of its moral health. A culture that honors its storytellers, poets, painters, and musicians is a culture that values the complexity of the human spirit. Conversely, a culture that views art as disposable content to be automated is a culture that has begun to view humanity itself as redundant.

We must cultivate an aggressive, uncompromising moral clarity regarding the value of human expression. We must learn to demand origin and accountability in our cultural life, insisting on knowing that the book we read was lived by a human writer, that the music we hear was felt by a human composer, and that the image we behold was rendered by a human eye.

This valuation must extend into our institutions, our educational systems, and our daily choices as consumers of culture. We must teach young people that the difficulty of art is not a defect to be eliminated, but the very source of its dignity. We must build spaces that protect human creators from economic exploitation and technological displacement, recognizing that without them, our society will become an intellectual wasteland of polished, heartless automation.

The Perpetual Flame

Despite the overwhelming momentum of technological integration, there remains within the human spirit an indomitable core that resists complete mechanization. We are, at our foundation, story-telling creatures who hunger for authentic connection. No matter how sophisticated synthetic systems become, they will never be able to extinguish our innate recognition of lived truth.

A child pick up a piece of charcoal and drawing on a sidewalk is not attempting to optimize a workflow; they are engaging in a sacred, timeless rite of human presence. An elderly poet revising a line of verse by a window is not seeking market efficiency; they are making peace with their own mortality. These quiet, unmonetized acts of creation are the true bedrock of civilization. They are the small, persistent flames that keep the cold night of total mechanization at bay.

Art is not a luxury, nor is it an automated utility to be streamed into our senses for passive entertainment. Art is the sacred conversation that humanity holds with itself across time, geography, and death. It is the record of our wounds and our triumphs, our darkest fears and our most audacious hopes. To preserve that conversation—to keep it human, fragile, difficult, and profoundly honest—is the paramount cultural duty of our time. We must ensure that as long as human beings inhabit this earth, we will continue to look one another in the eye and tell each other, in our own raw and unautomated voices, precisely what it is to be alive.

The Illusion of the Pristine Studio

We live under the sway of a persistent myth: that true creation requires absolute tranquility. We idealize the image of the artist or thinker in a serene, sun-drenched studio, surrounded by silence, order, and immaculate tools. We imagine that brilliant thoughts descend like gentle dew upon a mind entirely unruffled by the turbulence of the world. This romantic portrait is appealing, but it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of creativity. Order does not generate energy; it merely organizes it. The true spark of creation rarely arrives in moments of static comfort. It is born out of disruption, uncertainty, and cognitive upheaval. Chaos is not the enemy of art and insight; it is the primordial soil from which they grow.

To understand why chaos fuels the imagination, we must examine the nature of order itself. Order strives for symmetry, predictability, and efficiency. It consolidates what is already known, refining existing models and optimizing established routines. Yet refinement is not invention. When a system—whether a culture, a science, or an individual mind—becomes too orderly, it exhausts its capacity for original thought. It turns in familiar circles, perfecting its methods while losing the ability to imagine anything outside them.

Chaos, by contrast, is a state of unbounded potential. In physics, entropy measures disorder, but in the realm of mind and culture, chaos represents an unmapped terrain of raw possibility. When the structures that organize our thoughts collapse, established rules lose their hold over us. Categories dissolve, boundaries blur, and concepts previously kept apart suddenly meet and fuse. It is precisely within these unexpected collisions that the muse awakens—not as a calm spirit offering gentle advice, but as a lightning bolt forged in atmospheric tension.

The ancient Greeks understood this intuitive truth. In Hesiod’s Theogony, creation does not begin with structure or light; it begins with Khaos—the vast, dark, unformed abyss that precedes all shape and definition. From this primeval void, Gaia (Earth) and Eros (Desire) emerge. Myth reveals what logic often forgets: form can only arise from the formless. Before something original can exist, the old structures must give way. Creation is an act of architecture built upon the ruins of past certainty.

The Tyranny of Unbroken Order

Order is essential for preserving civilization, transmitting knowledge, and refining craft. Without it, human effort dissolves into directionless noise. Yet when order becomes absolute, it transforms into a quiet tyranny. Hyper-regulated environments produce a mental stiffness where novelty is viewed with suspicion and variation is treated as error. In an overly structured system, every element has a fixed place and a predetermined function. Nothing unexpected is permitted to disrupt the pattern.

This calcification affects individuals and entire institutions alike. In academia, hyper-specialization often produces work that is technically flawless yet conceptually stagnant. In the arts, strict adherence to canon and technique can result in beautiful artifacts that say nothing new. When a mind feels entirely secure within its framework, it stops asking fundamental questions. It relies on cognitive shortcuts, mistaking familiarity for truth and routine for mastery.

"The enemy of art is the absence of limitations, but its execution demands the friction of the unknown."

From an information-theoretic perspective, absolute order contains almost no new information. A signal that is entirely predictable carries no surprise, and without surprise, learning stops. Chaos introduces the noise, anomalies, and disruptions that force an information system to adapt, reconfigure, and grow. Novelty requires a degree of error—a departure from the blueprint. Without the courage to allow systems to fracture, we sentence ourselves to a perpetual cycle of repetition.

Consider how routine affects daily perception. When we navigate familiar streets or perform habituated tasks, our consciousness goes on autopilot. We stop truly seeing our surroundings because our internal predictive models anticipate every visual detail. It is only when the unexpected occurs—a missed train, a sudden storm, an unfamiliar path—that our sensory apparatus wakes up. Chaos strips away the haze of familiarity, forcing us to engage directly with the world as it is, rather than as we expected it to be.

The Sublime and the Derangement of the Senses

In 18th-century philosophy, Immanuel Kant drew a vital distinction between the Beautiful and the Sublime. The Beautiful belongs to the realm of order, form, and harmony; it pleases us because it aligns neatly with our cognitive capacities. The Sublime, however, strikes us when we confront something vast, formless, turbulent, or terrifying—a raging ocean, a mountain precipice, a shattering storm. The Sublime overwhelms our immediate ability to comprehend it, plunging the mind into temporary bewilderment.

Yet this bewilderment is precisely what elevates the spirit. Confronted with the Sublime, the mind is pushed beyond its comfortable limits, forced to expand its capacity to absorb the incomprehensible. Chaos acts on the creative imagination in much the same way. It disrupts our cozy, bite-sized categories and forces us to confront forces larger than our existing concepts. In wrestling with this disorientation, the creator reaches for higher forms of expression, forging language, art, and philosophy equal to the intensity of the experience.

"A poet makes himself a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses." — Arthur Rimbaud, Letters of a Seer

Arthur Rimbaud famously argued that the artist must cultivate a "reasoned derangement of all the senses" to break through the domestic placidity of conventional thought. Rimbaud understood that comfortable, orderly perception acts as a filter that dims the vivid complexity of reality. By disrupting routine perception, the artist bypasses conventional mental shortcuts, exposing the raw, unmediated currents of existence.

This aesthetic shock-therapy lies at the heart of the romantic and avant-garde traditions. When the French poet Gérard de Nerval walked a lobster through the gardens of the Palais-Royal on a blue ribbon, or when the Surrealists developed automatic writing to bypass conscious editing, they were deliberately inviting chaos into their creative process. They sought to break the executive control of the logical mind, allowing subterranean images, buried memories, and wild associations to surface unfiltered.

Historical Cataclysms as Aesthetic Engines

The historical record confirms that the most revolutionary artistic shifts rarely coincide with times of placid prosperity. Instead, they erupt out of periods of intense societal trauma, rapid technological displacement, and moral collapse. External chaos shatters the reigning intellectual consensus, rendering existing artistic vocabularies obsolete overnight. When the world no longer makes sense, old forms of storytelling feel hollow and inadequate.

Consider the birth of Dadaism during the First World War. In 1916, as millions of young men were consumed in the mud of Western Europe, a group of exiled artists, poets, and dissidents gathered at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. They saw the war not as an isolated tragedy, but as the logical, monstrous outcome of European rationalism, nationalism, and bourgeois order. Logic had led directly to slaughter.

"How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, of worms, of everything nice and neat, fractionated, verbalized, humanized? By saying Dada." — Hugo Ball, Dada Manifesto

In response, Dadaists like Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, and Hannah Höch embraced absurdism, chance, and phonetic nonsense. They cut up newspapers to assemble poems by drawing words randomly from a hat; they created photomontages out of fractured media images; they staged chaotic performances designed to shock audiences out of intellectual paralysis. Dada was an intentional application of artistic chaos, designed to destroy a corrupt aesthetic order and rebuild culture from the ashes up.

Out of Dada’s deliberate madness grew Surrealism, and out of the ruins of interwar Europe came Modernism. Writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot did not experiment with stream-of-consciousness narrative or fragmented poetic structures simply to be difficult. They did so because the linear, omniscient narrative techniques of the 19th century could no longer convey the fractured experience of modern life. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land reads like a mosaic of broken cultural fragments because it was written in a world that had literally fallen apart.

The Neurobiology of Friction and Cognitive Disruption

Modern neuroscience offers a compelling perspective on why turmoil often fuels creativity. The human brain is essentially an advanced prediction machine. Its primary goal is to minimize surprise, conserve energy, and construct reliable internal models of the external environment. To accomplish this, the brain filters out vast amounts of sensory information, relying on well-worn neural pathways to process daily life with minimal effort.

This efficiency is vital for survival, but it is fatal to original thought. When our internal models work perfectly, we operate on cognitive autopilot. We reach for familiar metaphors, accept standard explanations, and follow established habits. Creative breakthroughs require what neuroscientists call "cognitive flexibility"—the ability to break away from habitual modes of thought, abandon outdated mental frameworks, and forge novel neural connections between previously unrelated concepts.

THE COGNITIVE CYCLE

• ORDER: Predictive models reduce cognitive friction.

• DISRUPTION: Novel/chaotic input breaks existing patterns.

• SYNTHESIS: Brain constructs new, more complex frameworks.

Disruption acts as a catalyst for this flexibility. When we experience emotional turmoil, deep grief, sudden displacement, or existential disorientation, our brain’s predictive models fail. The executive control networks that enforce cognitive discipline loosen their hold. In this state of disorientation, the brain's default mode network—associated with daydreaming, memory integration, and spontaneous conceptual synthesis—interacts with sensory input in unusual ways.

This neurobiological friction explains why so many iconic figures produced their most visionary work during deep personal crises. When life strips away our psychological defenses, we can no longer rely on superficial assumptions. Forced to confront reality without our usual filters, we are compelled to construct new, deeper frameworks of meaning to replace the ones that failed us.

Serendipity, Accident, and the Materiality of Art

Beyond its psychological effects, chaos serves as an engine of accidental discovery—what we call serendipity. In a strictly controlled environment, every variable is managed, which means the unexpected is systematically excluded. Yet true innovation frequently arises from anomalies, mistakes, and unintended side effects. Chaos introduces the random variations that push an artist or researcher beyond their conscious intentions.

Consider the role of physical accident in the visual arts. The painter Francis Bacon frequently spoke of the necessity of making "involuntary marks" on the canvas. To break through his own conscious habits and cliché images, he would fling paint at the canvas with a rag or sponge, intentionally creating a mess he could not fully predict or control. He would then look into that chaotic splash of color and texture, searching for half-formed figures and suggestions of form that his conscious mind would never have conceived.

"I want a painter to brush paint on the canvas as if he were throwing a stone at a wall. I want the mark to be made by an act of chance that shocks the eye into seeing." — Francis Bacon

In music, unexpected errors often open entirely new creative directions. During a legendary recording session for Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, the pianist Bill Evans intentionally introduced sparse, ambiguous modal chords that left the traditional harmonic structure open-ended. Rather than resolving harmonies cleanly, the musicians were forced to improvise in real time over unfamiliar, shifting musical landscapes. By stepping into harmonic uncertainty, they created one of the most celebrated jazz albums in history.

Scientific history is similarly filled with breakthroughs born of productive disorder. Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin occurred because a stray mold spore drifted onto an uncovered petri dish left near an open window in a cluttered laboratory. Had Fleming maintained an impeccably sterile environment, the mold would never have landed; had he rigidly discarded contaminated samples, he would have missed the bacterial death zone around the mold. The breakthrough lay in his willingness to pay attention to an unexpected disruption rather than dismissing it as a ruined trial.

The Perilous Edge: Romanticization vs. Reality

While chaos is an indispensable catalyst for creation, it is crucial to avoid a dangerous romantic fallacy: the fetishization of suffering, mental collapse, and destruction for their own sake. Chaos alone does not create art. Unchecked turmoil, severe psychosis, and addiction do not make a person creative; more often, they cripple the mind, destroy relationships, and silence talent prematurely.

The tragic lives of figures like Vincent van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, or John Berryman are often cited to argue that great art requires personal ruin. But a closer look reveals that Van Gogh did not paint during his worst psychotic episodes; he painted during periods of recovery, when he could bring discipline, focus, and craft to bear upon the chaotic emotional territory he had traversed. His genius lay not in his suffering, but in his rare ability to construct radiant order out of deep inner agony.

THE CREATIVE VECTOR

• PURE ORDER --> Sterility & Cliché

• PURE CHAOS --> Destruction & Silence

• CREATIVE EDGE --> Chaotic Input + Disciplined Form

Chaos provides the raw, unshaped marble, but discipline is the chisel. Without an "Apollonian vessel"—the structural skill, technique, and stamina required to give form to experience—chaotic energy simply dissipates into noise. The painter must still understand color and light; the poet must know rhythm and syntax; the scientist must master methodology. Creation occurs at the razor edge where chaotic energy meets disciplined craftsmanship.

This delicate balance requires what John Keats called Negative Capability—the capacity to remain in "uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." The weak mind demands immediate resolution, rushing to slap a superficial label onto an unsettling experience. The strong creative mind can endure the discomfort of chaos, allowing ambiguous images, conflicting emotions, and messy ideas to sit unresolved until a deeper, more organic synthesis emerges on its own time.

The Algorithmic Desert: Creativity in the Age of Optimization

If historical eras were threatened by excessive turmoil, our contemporary world suffers from the opposite malady: the hyper-optimization and sanitization of human experience. We live in a society obsessed with friction-free efficiency, predictive algorithms, and total control. We design our daily lives to eliminate inconvenience, surprise, and disorientation.

Our digital environments are carefully curated to deliver content that aligns with our existing preferences. Predictive text finishes our sentences before we fully formulate them, recommendation engines suggest what we should consume based on our past habits, and navigation apps ensure we never take an unplanned turn. While this offers extraordinary convenience, it poses a quiet, systemic threat to the human creative spirit.

"When you eliminate all friction from life, you also eliminate the sparks."

By banishing chance, discomfort, and disruption from our daily lives, we risk eliminating the very friction that sparks original thought. When thought becomes frictionless, it tends toward derivative monotony. Without unexpected detours, jarring encounters with opposing viewpoints, or the humbling experience of being lost, the imagination relies on pre-packaged answers. The current crisis of cultural homogenization—where popular music, cinema, and literature often feel manufactured by committee—is a direct consequence of a culture that fears chaos and penalizes creative risk.

We have built a world that values safety over discovery, forgetting that art demands a degree of peril. When art is stripped of danger and unpredictability, it turns into mere entertainment—a pleasant, easily digested product designed to soothe rather than transform. To keep the muse alive in an age of automated convenience, we must deliberately resist this slide into sterile predictability. We must find ways to invite meaningful disruption back into our intellectual lives.

Cultivating the Productive Storm

Inviting productive chaos into one's life does not require courting disaster, seeking out trauma, or burning down one's life. Rather, it means cultivating an attitude of radical openness to the unexpected, building a lifestyle that values curiosity over comfort and discovery over routine.

Strategies for Creative Disruption

• Break Cognitive Routines: Regularly alter your daily habits. Walk unfamiliar routes, read outside your field, and engage with art that initially confuses or repels you.

• Embrace Intentional Disorientation: Seek out environments, ideas, and cultures that challenge your foundational assumptions and force you to re-evaluate what you take for granted.

• Maintain Messy Workspace Boundaries: Allow space for unorganized brainstorming, untidy notebooks, and half-formed ideas before rushing to organize them into polished outlines.

• Reframe Errors as Information: Treat mistakes, missteps, and unexpected failures not as embarrassing setbacks to be hidden, but as rich informational sources revealing uncharted territory.

• Practice Delayed Resolution: When confronted with a complex creative problem, resist the urge to adopt the first easy solution. Sit with the ambiguity and let competing ideas clarify themselves over time.

By practicing these habits, we train ourselves to view chaos not as a threat to be neutralized, but as a partner in the creative process. We learn to step into uncertainty with curiosity rather than fear, trusting that our minds possess the innate resilience and craft needed to transform raw disorder into lasting meaning.

Coda: The Dancing Star

The relationship between chaos and the muse reveals a fundamental truth about human existence: we are meaning-making creatures forged in an unpredictable universe. We do not create in spite of life's turmoil; we create because of it. Chaos is the living ocean upon which the human imagination sails. It threatens to capsize us at every turn, yet without its currents, winds, and storms, we would remain forever marooned in stagnant waters.

The muse is not a pristine, distant deity presiding over a quiet temple of static perfection. She is a spirit born of the tempest—present where light meets shadow, where comfortable structures break down, and where the human heart dares to stare into the storm and sing. Her voice is heard not in the echo chamber of our certainties, but in the quiet, insistent melody that emerges when we attempt to make sense of a world falling apart.

To fear chaos is to fear the very mechanism of growth and renewal. To embrace it—with open eyes, a steady hand, and a disciplined spirit—is to step into the infinite stream of human creativity. In the end, the ultimate measure of an artist, a thinker, or a culture lies in their relationship to disorder: whether they cower before it, seeking shelter in comfortable dogmas, or step out into the storm, gather the lightning, and fashion it into a dancing star.

The Unique Synthesis of Art and Mathematics

Maurits Cornelis (M.C.) Escher (1898-1972) is celebrated for his unique ability to represent the perfect fusion of mathematics and art, bringing these two seemingly disparate worlds together into a singular, cohesive vision. Born in the Netherlands, Escher began his professional life as a graphic artist specializing in woodcuts and lithographs, with no formal training in mathematics. His artistic direction was irrevocably shaped by a visit to the Alhambra palace in Spain, where he became captivated by the geometric decorations of the Moorish tiles. This experience became a defining moment, sparking a lifelong exploration of the mathematical concept of tessellation.

Tessellation: From Abstract Geometry to Fantastical Worlds

At the core of much of Escher’s work is tessellation, the mathematical principle of dividing a plane with regular, repeating patterns or "tiles" that fit together perfectly without overlapping or leaving gaps. While the concept is mathematically fundamental and deeply connected to the principles of symmetry, Escher’s genius lay in his ability to elevate this abstract idea. Instead of using simple geometric shapes, he infused his tessellations with a human and fantastical dimension. He populated his planes with intricate, interlocking figures of animals, lizards, draconic creatures, and goblins, transforming a Stark mathematical concept into a vibrant, imaginative world.

The Evolution of Escher’s Work: Two Distinct Periods

Escher's artistic career can be broadly categorized into two distinct periods. His early work was largely intuitive, driven by his personal fascination with repeating patterns and tessellations without direct collaboration with mathematicians. However, his work entered a new phase of profound depth and sophistication after he began to engage with the mathematical community. In this later period, his art delved into much more complex and abstract concepts. He explored themes of dimension, the topology (or shape) of space, and the nature of infinity. His artistic inquiries were so forward-thinking that some of his work has been seen as anticipating advanced scientific ideas; modern cosmologists have even theorized that the shape of our universe might be "Escher-shaped," suggesting his art touched upon deep features of modern cosmology.

Exploring Infinity, Paradox, and Perception

In his later period, Escher created some of his most famous and mathematically rigorous pieces. Using only basic drawing tools, he produced Circle Limit III, an astonishingly accurate representation of space as it edges towards infinity. The work’s precision was so remarkable that, nearly 40 years after its creation, mathematicians confirmed it was mathematically correct down to the millimeter.

Escher was also deeply inspired by paradoxes and visual illusions. He was fascinated by the work of mathematicians like Roger Penrose, who created the "impossible triangle" and by the peculiar properties of the Möbius strip, an object that appears to have only one side. He used these ideas to create iconic images that look convincing at first glance but defy logic upon closer inspection. These visual illusions serve as a powerful commentary on the nature of perception, demonstrating that our brains do not passively see the world but actively interpret sensory input and make assumptions. Escher's work gives this interpretive part of the brain a "real workout," challenging our understanding of what is real and what is possible.

An Enduring Legacy in Mathematics and Art

Until his death in 1972, Escher remained intrigued by the concepts of infinity, reflection, and perception. His legacy endures, particularly within the world of mathematics. His prints are ubiquitous in university mathematics departments, adorning walls and appearing in textbooks. This is because his art speaks directly to mathematicians, offering a tangible, visual representation of the abstract beauty they find in their field. From a modern perspective, mathematicians understand more clearly what Escher was trying to achieve and can now even write down the formulas that describe the mathematical ideas behind his intuitive creations. Ultimately, M.C. Escher’s greatest contribution was his ability to bridge the gap between two cultures, using his artistic skill to show the wider world that the subject of mathematics is, in its essence, beautiful.

Most popular Esher work

M.C. Escher

Hundred Rabbits is an artist collective that documents low-tech solutions with the hope of building a more resilient future. We live and work aboard a 10 m sailboat named Pino in remote parts of the world to learn more about how technology degrades beyond the shores of the western world.