Art doesn’t (just) try to represent nature, but tries to behave like, or come into being like nature. How a picture (whether it is painted, photographed, printed, etched, doodled) is made usually conveys more meaning than what it depicts. A picture is the tail end of a process, and the picture is legible as the outcome of that process. It’s meaning is always read against its coming into being.

AI focuses entirely on the picture as representation. It is currently not possible to ask AI to make a picture by using Monet’s or Kandinsky’s process. The pictures produced look like, but don’t behave like. AI pictures are missing a fundamental part of how pictures convey meaning to humans. Perhaps this is why they generally feel so flat and affect-less.

On the flip side it might be an interesting thing to train machines to make pictures by statistically sampling processes of making, and set them loose to create without specific representations in mind. Outcomes would explore a latent space of process rather than a latent space of mimicry.

The photo camera is a hard black box, ( hardware), which contains a program, (software). It is a rather primitive apparatus. That program contains, in its turn, all the photographs which this camera can "take". Which is a vast, but no infinitely vast amount of possible, "virtual", pictures. Those virtual pictures constitute the camera memory, and it is with that memory that the photographer is in dialogue. His commitment is to realize some of those virtual pictures according to information contained in its own memory, and to produce new information.

function ELIZA GENERATOR(user sentence) returns response
   Let w be the word in sentence that has the highest keyword rank
   if w exists
       Let r be the highest ranked rule for w that matches sentence
       response ← Apply the transform in r to sentence
       if w = 'my'
           future ← Apply a transformation from the ‘memory’ rule list to sentence
           Push future onto the memory queue
       else (no keyword applies)
           Either
               response ← Apply the transform for the NONE keyword to sentence
           Or
               response ← Pop the oldest response from the memory queue
   Return response

“The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get us out of those routines. When we hear music or poetry or stories, the world opens up again. We’re drawn in — or out — and the windows of our perception are cleansed, as William Blake said. The same thing can happen when we’re around young children or adults who have unlearned those habits of shutting the world out.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin

Artificial Intelligence liquidates the agalma of the artist, by showing that a subject is not necessary for the production of art. And indeed, it only concerns this specific kind of agalmatic art. But if Harry Potter thinks he escaped unscathed, he is wrong. It is the fundamental structure of agalmatic art that has been exposed as fraudulent. The poets, as Pindar wrote, the poets lie too much. The only serious lie an artist can utter, is that they are not lying. The truth is, we must be unrepentant apostles of falsehood. What the reactionary abhors in art made by Artificial Intelligence, is nothing but that the trick has been revealed; that an agalmatic art, founded on the authenticity of the artist, has become unviable. The artist is canceled: this is the time of art.

But then the possibility opens up for an art that would abandon the givens of agalmatic art, for an art that would operate beyond the subject, beyond authenticity, beyond lived experience, an art of abrasive honesty regarding its material and its inauthenticity, an art that would employ new means, without the illusion of a subject or an author, an art that would use identities, molar ensembles and personal narratives as mere artistic material, an art that would employ human life not as a source of truth but as a fountain of affects, an amoral, triumphant, raw, exuberant art — a woke brutalism.

The artist must rain down on the crowds with showers of petals, they must have their horse elected to the senate, they must play purple mandolins over burning capitols, they must whip the sea into submission and garland the summer night with a more dazzled snow, they must ride transsexual dolphins over the edge of chaos and return, bearing flower crowns and quick tears, with homeric laughter, a sure eye, and a triumphant stride, violent, elated, over-sensitive, whimsical, and mournful, a stethoscope on the chest of life, pitiless like the sun, a sphinx without a riddle lording over the blue. Anyone who has ever taken a look at Ediacaran biota knows it: the intellect is anarchic. Nature is only made of monsters. Let us create.