Matteo Wong’s latest piece in the Atlantic is an excellent antidote to Ted Chiang’s swing-and-a-miss piece condemning AI as “not real art” – even if he stole my headline (sort of)!

This paragraph of Wong’s seems worth capturing here for posterity, as it speaks to the role of “choice” in Art – something which Chiang’s piece (I think wrongly) got hung up on:

Some of the most towering artists and artistic movements in recent history have divorced human skill and intention from their ultimate creations. Making a smaller number of decisions or exerting less intentional control does not necessarily imply less vision, creativity, brilliance, or meaning. In the early 1900s, the Dada and surrealist art movements experimented with automatism, randomness, and chance, such as in a famous collage made by dropping strips of paper and pasting them where they landed, ceding control to gravity and removing expression of human interiority; Salvador Dalí fired ink-filled bullets to randomly splatter lithographic stones. Decades later, abstract painters including Jackson Pollock, Joan Mitchell, and Mark Rothko marked their canvases with less apparent technical precision or attention to realism—seemingly random drips of pigment, sweeping brushstrokes, giant fields of color—and the Hungarian-born artist Vera Molnar used simple algorithms to determine the placement of lines, shapes, and colors on paper. Famed Renaissance artists used mathematical principles to guide their work; computer-assisted and algorithmic art today abounds. Andy Warhol employed mass production and called his studio the “Factory.” For decades, authors and artists such as Tristan Tzara, Samuel Beckett, John Cage, and Jackson Mac Low have used chance in their textual compositions.

What’s being described here also meshes with something the US Copyright Office tried to argue – again, I think wrongly – in their Zarya decision, that to be considered the “author” of a work, somehow the artist/creator/author must be able to visualize or conceptualize somehow the work ahead of time. It’s a very very flimsy line of thinking that doesn’t hold up well under scrutiny vis-a-vis art history, as Wong illustrates with ample references above – and which I countered in my own submission to the Copyright Office last year.

Earlier this year, I rebutted basically the same exact point as Chiang’s, put forward this time by author Neal Stephenson in the Atlantic, where he wrote:

“If your only way of making a painting is to actually dab paint laboriously onto a canvas, then the result might be bad or good, but at least it’s the result of a whole lot of micro-decisions you made as an artist. You were exercising editorial judgment with every paint stroke. That is absent in the output of these programs.”

First, before launching into my rant, I want to just contrast that with another quote I found from photographer Phillip Toledano in 2023, who basically lambasts this whole idea that there is no “choice” that goes into AI art.

The funny thing about AI I’ve realized is that, in some ways, you have to think about it more consciously than you do when you’re making a photograph. For instance, if I’m making a picture with AI, I have to think about who’s in the picture. What do they look like? What are their expressions? What ethnicity are they? What’s the weather like? What’s the vantage point of the camera? What lens am I thinking about using? Is it black and white? Is the color correct for this particular era?

I’ve been working on a new somewhat larger painting lately, and reflecting on all of this. And what I have been sensing in myself when I am either writing or painting – especially when I am in the “zone” – it’s almost more like my “choice” functionality has somehow been switched off, or almost muted. When it’s going really well, I’m not consciously all that aware of making any choices at all.

Chiang claimed that in a text of 10,000 words, you make 10,000 choices. But that’s not really true at all for me. Most of the time, what comes out is much more automatic – a lot more like Ray Bradbury describes here, where you make the intellect (the chooser?) sort of get out of the way, and ride the emotional reality of the lived moment that the writing or art ultimately represents.

There is a lot of looking, a lot of inward and outward sensing, which is then made manifest by taking action on the work material. But it does not manifest itself in my sensorium as “making choices.”

Making choices, the way Chiang describes it, feels more like what I have to do when I’m trying to buy some random maybe shitty product on Amazon, and I have to decide whether a customer rating of 4.4 stars, and 717 sales in the last is better than one of 4.2 stars, and 1,136 sales, and whether all or most or any of the many effusively positive or negative reviews on the actual product are really real people, and if they are, whether my own experience is likely to match theirs. That kind of shitty scenario of having to sift through the endless surfeit of choice, well that seems to me more like the kinds of “choices” that maybe Chiang is talking about with regard to his theoretical conception of what makes art & writing processes “valid” or not. If that’s the kind of thing other people experience when they do art, I feel bad for them. Because that’s not what it’s like for me!

Go read Wong’s piece – it’s worth it.

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