The Now Competitive Art Market
A fundamental philosophy of game theory is competition vs cooperation. We largely thought that all aspects of the world were pure competition. This is what we thought Darwinism was. The strongest, fastest, and smartest survive. The rest wither away. It is partially true, but Darwinism is really about finding the best way to survive.
Cooperation
This is easily seen through the competition lens. That’s how Darwin saw it firsthand. But the other lens is cooperation. It is the “I scratch your back, you scratch my back” philosophy. We see this a lot in plants and forests.
A forest is like a hivemind. Just one prominent living being. All broken down into trees, bushes, and grass. When one tree isn’t getting the resources it needs the trees around it send him what it needs. This goes against the original “rules” of Darwinism: That the tree that can suck up the most amount of resources will survive and the rest die. The trees don’t do that, instead, they create this symbiotic relationship of resource sharing.
The idea is that the other surrounding trees will share their resources with a tree in need, so when the day it is running low on resources the trees around him will share. They coexist with one another, not compete. But maybe in a way they do compete. Not in the traditional sense of competing with each other but with humans and animals.
Competition
Humans and Animals eat plants, fruits, and vegetables all the time. Humans use trees for buildings, furniture, and fires. Maybe the species that survived are the ones who were able to cooperate. Some tree species might have competed with each other, but that spread their resources so thin that humans and animals made them go extinct. The only ones that survived are the only ones who could cooperate with one another. Real Darwinism. They used cooperation to compete.
There really is no such thing as not competing. Everyone is always and will always compete with one another. There is no such thing as everyone just cooperating with one another and working together. It is just not going to happen. That would be a utopian dream. You can however use cooperation in an effort to compete.
You see this in sports. Team sports are the most straightforward example. You literally cooperate with your team to compete. Without your team, there is no way you survive the competition. Or combat sports, many fighters train together and spar. They are cooperating to prepare for the competition.
I believe this is one of the essential core concepts of economics that everyone should know. This is why economics should be taught at such a young age. It is to understand value, incentives, and competition. Especially before going to college and choosing a career path. You should understand cost-benefit analysis before you make one of the top three largest purchases in your life. But that’s a completely different topic.
Artificial Intelligence and Art
The reason I mention this is because of the new technology of Artificial Intelligence (AI) art. Essentially AI art has a database of millions of images. It tags or categorizes them by color, style, material, object, etc. (basically it collects the metadata of the images). Then someone types into the computer what art they are looking for. The computer generates a new image from the input words, based on a combination of the art with matching tags in its database.
Some people in the art community, especially college art graduates, are upset about this method of art. Claiming it is theft. But little do they know that everything in life is theft. One of my favorite books that influences me to keep writing is called ‘Steal like an Artist‘. It’s called that because artists steal from one another all the time. No one is original, or I should say very few are original. The vast majority of people just steal from others. Knowingly or unknowingly.
Art AI does exactly what artists do, it is just a machine doing the work instead. I like to think of it like woodworking. I can build a beautiful table using a certain wood and bevel type, maybe with a certain engraving on it. Any human can see that and do the same thing. Or they see it and built a machine to do the same thing and mass produce it. There is nothing wrong with that because it is not exactly the same. It is a variation. That is how new technology is created, through variation in old technology. As soon as you disallow variation, you disallow advancement in the field.
AI Ethical Concerns
There are ethical concerns about the AI model. As it has been “trained using other people’s original work.” Again going back to the word original. So is every artist’s work created 100% unique and no outside inspiration was used to influence the work? This would mean their work is not an imitation. But the vast majority of art is a form of imitation. That is what the AI is trained to do, be an artist, or in this case imitate what an artist would do.
Art AI is mass-produced art, that is all. No different than mass-produced, cars, furniture, phones, or any other item. All these things can be produced by hand, and some still are. The majority of people don’t care about a product if it is produced by hand or by machine. They just want the functionality of the product. And art frankly has very little functionality. Therefore quite easy to mass produce using AI.
The Value of Art
The increasing use of cheap AI art is a prime example of the true value of art. If people don’t care about the history of the artist or their work, and just want a cool piece of art then AI art is for them. And a lot of people fall into that category. There are very few people who are art connoisseurs.
Now some do care about the creative process and the background of the artists. Those are the real target audiences of an artist, or at least should be. Typically those are wealthy people who have time to care about those things. Or other artists.
The only reason art is valued is because of the artist and the story behind it. No one cares about your piece of artwork. People care just as much about my thoughts and these articles as they do about a random artist’s artwork. Zero, zip, zilch, nada, no one cares. It’s not a bad thing, it is just the way the content market operates.
Woodworking
It is the same with woodworking. I would have loved to be a woodworker as my career. But no one cares about the time, effort, and creativity I put into my work. Why? Well, you can get a perfectly mass-produced table for a third of the cost, and looks exactly the same. Oh well, such is life. The ones who do care about what I do are other woodworkers.
For example, I was talking to a friend who is a woodworker as his profession. Talking about one of his clients wanting cherry wood for their kitchen cabinets. They wanted cherry because a friend told them it was a more luxurious wood type for cabinets. Which it is, it tends to be more expensive. But when my friend completed the cabinets, the client asked him if he could paint them. He said he could but that you don’t want to with the kind of wood you are using, as it decreases the quality and luxury of the wood.
They didn’t care, they wanted white cabinets. So he does a light coat of white paint. The client comes back and asks for another coat. He obliges. The client then asks for a third coat of white paint. By this point, you can’t even see that you used cherry wood. He hung up this disgrace of a piece and the client was pleased.
In essence, this story just shows how most people don’t care about art. They want what they want and could care less about anything else. Some really care, they want quality hand-crafted cherry wood cabinets. Or the handmade artist’s painting. They find it valuable, typically because of the name of the artist who created it not the art itself. These people are the exception, not the rule.
AI Art Decreases Arts Value?
Too many complaints about AI art are that there is a lot of value in handmade art and AI art diminishes that. But that is simply not true. As the creator, you don’t get to determine the value of your product. The consumers do. AI art doesn’t change the value of anything, it just shows the true equilibrium in the market.
Art is about a story, and 99% of artists don’t have one. Or don’t have a good one. Without that your art is not valuable. AI art is art without the story for a fraction of the price. It is exactly the same thing that 99% of artists provide, but cheaper. Quick plug for UBI. Automation is coming for every job. That is partly my job as a Data Analyst, automate as much as I can. What do you do when your job is replaced by computers and automation? Get a new job in another field or work on optimizing the automation in the field you were replaced in.
The Art of AI
How about the art of programming such a model? Is that not a beautiful art form? It is art form that is the creation of the imitation of life. Quite impressive, in fact, could be even more impressive that artists ‘original work.’
We are training computers to understand what humans perceive as beauty. We as humans can’t even fully grasp that idea. What makes something beautiful? Too complex of a question. But we taught the computer to understand us. It tried to make art and we said ‘yay’ or ‘nay’ if it was good. It learned over time to make good art.
Anyways, artists need to learn competition. Just because you are an artist and it took you a long time to make something doesn’t mean people deserve to value it. You are being out-competed by a computer. What are you going to do? Complain and be defeated? Or maybe use cooperation to beat the competition. Work with the art AI to generate better quality art, and tell a better story. Or make your own art AI that uses your ‘original’ style. Maybe then you will realize it isn’t as original as you may have thought.