“No, I hate Ai,” writes @yorxfoly on Instagram. “Proud people sharing images that their computer spat out and thinking they have any sort of artistic vision, makes me sick.”
He and others with a split of opinions on the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) to make art are reacting to a post by Charlie Engman sharing an opinion piece he has written for Art in America. Titled “You Don’t Hate AI, You Hate Capitalism”, the New York-based artist’s article sets out to reframe the reductive and often binary debate about AI art.
More reflective than derivative
The thrust of it is that we have been thinking about AI all wrong. Criticism of the technology—or, rather, hatred of AI—centres around the idea that it is derivative, and that it steals from artists. Engman argues that AI merely reflects our own prejudices and desires, and that it lays bare the myths of the art market and how value is shrouded in mystique, and questionably attributed to originality—which he says is bogus.
We are not asking wider questions about who else is exploited by large tech firms in the process of making content, he says, and the same is often true of the art world. “Whom do they enrich, and whom do they impoverish?” he quotes from the 2017 manifesto of Logic(s) magazine.
Although it inevitably dissolves into a Marxist critique in the latter part, the essay is one of the more nuanced and insightful articles you will read on the subject this year, peppered with eminently quotable sentences that read like T-shirt slogans written by the ghost of Guy Debord. “When we look at the output of AI, we see alternately yassified and mutilated glimpses of ourselves and our communal structures,” Engman writes. “AI images are funhouse reflections of a sociopolitical reality receding in the rearview mirror.”
Get messy
Engman’s frustration with the present discourse around AI is that many people have not actually given it a go. “They’re thinking of it in a very abstract sense,” he tells The Art Newspaper in a video call, “where maybe they’ve seen some other people’s examples of what they’ve done with it, or maybe they’ve spent a couple afternoons dinking around with it, and it hasn’t produced something exciting to them. And so all sorts of assumptions about its capacity and its meaning and how useful or not it is—all these social and utility questions around the technology—they’re informed by a lack of research.
“My interest comes from what I’ve been able to get out of it and what it does for me—on both the artistic and mystical level. It surprised me, and then I had to figure out where that surprise was coming from… People are not even willing to get messy with it, to get into the muck. So, it felt important to demonstrate what it does for me.”
Weird and wrong
People will get to see just what when Engman’s latest book, Cursed, is published this month, with a launch at the Paris Photo fair (7-10 November). The images in the advance copy that The Art Newspaper saw are peculiar, funny and disturbing at the same time, particularly those featuring his mother, who is an ever-present muse in Engman’s work. He embraces AI’s visual distortions, saying: “The weirdness of it—and the wrongness of it; the way that it incorrectly reproduces knowledge, or tries to synthesise things in ways that are often inhuman, for lack of a better way of describing it—I find that very instructive. You can learn a lot by the negative example… The way that it got it wrong gets me a little closer to what I was trying to express.”
“The book also has this kind of weird eroticism throughout, mixed with violence,” says his publisher, Bruno Ceschel. “It’s at once both pleasant and disturbing.” And yet the images look quite different to the Surrealist schlock that we have become accustomed to with generative AI, which Engman describes as, “like Deviant Art, this deep internet nerd culture of visual representation”. He adds that, “because there’s such a glut of that type of imagery, people assume that it’s only good for that”.
One thing to note about the book is that it operates almost exactly opposite to the article in Art in America. Where the essay is precise and articulates a clear position, Cursed is almost unreadable in the conventional sense.
“It’s a testament of his research as an image maker,” says Ceschel. But what is it actually about, I ask? “To tell the truth—I don’t know what it is. And that’s why I’m interested in it. There are some books that clearly are what they are. But there are others, like this one, in which the images just have something. They have a kind of quality that is mesmerising… The essay rationalises some of these ideas and tries to figure them out. For the book, you don’t need to know it’s AI. It’s an image book, and it functions as such.”
Look, don’t read
Engman agrees. “The book is not about AI really, which is why it’s not didactic. It doesn’t have any text. I very specifically made the choice not to include any sort of explicative quality to it, because I didn’t want to trap it into this technological discourse. Because, to me, the whole interesting part is what it enables, what kind of visual qualities and capacities [arise] from AI, or what is emphasised through AI that was not so prominent in other media that I had used before.”
It seems strange to see this evolving new technology used by an artist to make a physical book. But to Ceschel, “The book is the work.” He’s yet to see good prints or lightbox presentations of AI images, whereas “the book has kind of congealed them into an image that is now fixed”. Cursed, says Ceschel, “is a testament to a moment of radical shift, where an artist really thought about pointing at AI as an art form. And it will be judged as such.”
• Cursed (2024) by Charlie Engman, published by SPBH Editions and Mack
