The Horror of AI Art

We asked the machines to learn from us, and it produced cosmic horror. What does that say about us?

AI Art created on the Dream app with keywords “Ghost House” overlaid on the surprised author.

As a content creator, I’m delighted by AI. I have access to limitless art without copyright. I can create eye-catching images for my Medium posts, beautiful music to play behind my YouTube videos, evocative covers for my books, even the poems that might proceed each chapter, all without the meddlesome IP that might legally haunt me some day, and without paying one cent to a human being.

Therein lies the irony. Is this the end of the gig economy? What use will we have for artists in our content driven age? How long before AI masters prose, assembles a factual news story (or a fake one), a screenplay, or a novel?

That already happened. Knowing this, or, more precisely, now knowing that you didn’t know this, makes you doubt everything you read.

First we lost the gatekeepers. Now we’ve lost the humans altogether.

“Every story tells a story that has already been told” — Umberto Eco, 1984

Of course there is nothing new under the sun. After 400 generations, anything we feel has been felt before.

And that’s why AI works.