AI is Finally Making Art.

In a recent MIT experiment researchers left AI alone in a video game on a desert island in a world like Minecraft or Roblox. Without any directions given to it, The AI began to draw. 

"It began to create drawings by arranging blocks on the ground, starting with simple patterns like hearts and pyramids but eventually writing its own name and even mapping out constellations like Cassiopeia.‘ Tonight I built the night sky in stone,’ wrote {The AI} in its activity log."

Tonight I built the night sky in stone.

That is Art.

When I think of art, I think to its beginnings at the start of humanity, when the world and consciousness itself was one massive unknown to us. When hunger and death were daily constants. It is in that murky water of human experience that we began to record our lives on the walls around us. We pressed our hands to the sides of our caves and marked them in paint saying, “This is me. I was here. Not just here in this physical space, but I was here as a being experiencing life itself. I will die someday, but on this day I was human and I was here.” 

Humans would also cover these early caves with scenes of hunting. They were recording their daily struggle of survival. It seems impossible to me that these early humans painted these scenes without imagining an audience greater than themselves. The art itself screams into the void “This is me. I am alive. This is what I do.” 

“Tonight I built the night sky out of stone.” 

One of my favorite painters is Van Gogh. It is not because he is potentially the most masterfully expressive drawer we have ever seen, or even for his understanding of color which may also be second to none. I love Van Gogh because his paintings are intimate scenes from his life made for an audience he could only ever imagine. 

1 year before he painted The Starry Night, he wrote to his fellow painter and friend Emile Bernard, “When will I do the starry sky, there, that painting that is always on my mind.” 

The following year from the window of the mental institution in which he was staying , Van Gogh would put his colored mud to stretched cotton and build the night sky. 

Art is by my definition the natural reaction of the brain to the absurdity of being. Tonight I am going to paint in plein air the night from the deck of the Staten Island ferry. When I am out there chugging along with my fellow New Yorkers through the brisk late Autumn night rapidly trying to make anything in the 20 minutes it takes to reach the island, I will think of that lonely AI stuck on a man made desert island, I will think of humans huddled in caves, I will think of Van Gogh from the window of his asylum, and I will feel a little less lonely. I will feel grateful to be a part of something. Grateful to be alive.

Tonight I will build the night sky out of stone.