Sometimes we stumble upon insight in unexpected places. Late last year, for example, I read perhaps the most precise description ever written about AI-generated art in The New York Times comments section. The article described what happened when a man named Jason Allen submitted an image generated by the AI program Midjourney to an art contest and won. (Long story short: Artists got mad.) While the story focused on the debate over the ethics of AI image generators, the comment had nothing to do with thorny moral considerations. Instead, it described how the winning work looked. “Congratulations to Mr. Allen on coaxing an algorithm to spit out an image that looks like a 1970s prog rock album cover,” it read. The commenter’s handle? Cynical Observer.
Cynical, maybe. Observant, definitely. “Like a 1970s prog rock album cover” is a perfectly pithy way to convey what this new generative AI art scene frequently mimics. Allen’s winning entry resembles a French neoclassical painting with a sci-fi twist. Womanly figures in flowy sienna and white robes stand in a vast ornate chamber with a vaguely alien cityscape in the background. It’s not offensive or anything—calling it “moderately groovy” is apt—but let’s just say the first-place award would make more sense if the judges of the art contest were, like, all the remaining living members of Jethro Tull.
In the past year, a slew of AI image generators have whipped up a galactic amount of buzz. Trained on vast data sets containing billions of images hoovered up from across the internet—animated stills, iconic photographs, the work of artists living and dead, memes, screenshots, selfies, even porn—these programs produce images that can look disconcertingly close to what a human might make, give or take a glitchy hand or two. Midjourney (and similar programs like Stable Diffusion and Dall-E) has provoked awe, anxiety, anger, and questions: Will this AI take jobs from artists? Where does copyright law land? Can machines ever truly produce something original? Should I feel guilty for making a picture of Tony Soprano having a cappuccino with Shrek and sharing it with my group chat?
All good questions, ones people will likely be vehemently debating for years. Lost amid the hype and hand-wringing, though, is another query: Why does so much AI art look like it could be on a ’70s prog-rock album cover?