In an ever fragmented, free market economy, any given user of the internet has the potential to become a content creator, exploiting tools at their disposal to create and extract value in different forms and flavors. The generation of memes, images, videos, and reels is a key element of the ‘passive income’ generating machine that we call ‘creator economy’, now exacerbated by AI. Since late 2023, AI tools allow ‘users’ or ‘content creators’ to generate images faster than any living artist with a very high standard of quality. The matter here is, what is quality in this context? Putting aside the fact that the use of AI tools is objectively irresponsible in terms of its indiscriminate use of energy, water, and unpaid labor, using new technologies as part of the creative process is not necessarily detrimental to the development of the arts. What is detrimental is the full delegation of the creative process, which is essentially a humanly way of thinking.

When you go to design or art school, you learn soon enough that producing quality output is not nearly as important as developing and following a process that leads you to a consistent, intentional result. Not only is a process necessary for quality results in art and design, but a conscious effort to divert from the first idea. I had a teacher that used to say that we can think of ideas as snowflakes; you will have millions of ideas, but if you fail to evolve them and devise a plan to realize them, they will melt as soon as they touch the ground and be back to nothing. The tricky thing about any sort of creative exercise is that we need to catch those snowflakes by setting. What the AI tools allow people to do now, is to skip altogether the process that allows to consciously and consistently turn ideas into reality. An idea, in itself, is never inherent of value, it needs to be developed and evolved through multiple iterations until it can reach a point where it can be considered final. A true, real idea is never the first idea. When we look at AI generated images what we are really looking at is at a perfect prototype of the first idea.

What happens, then, when audiences can no longer tell the difference between perfect prototypes and crafted ideas?

On one hand, artists and creators are further discouraged from pursuing their creative processes. Members of the creative industry already face enough challenges to pursue their craft; added to the equation of precarious work conditions, low pay, vulnerability towards ever changing market trends, they now have to compete with a machine that can create images in seconds. How can they compete? How can we ensure creators are fairly compensated for the value we demand out of them?

Secondly, by flooding audiences with fake images that look complete, but are not quite finished, the dialogue that exists between iconography, pop culture and social media is further contaminated by the idea that the real is irrelevant. In this sense, the surreal becomes a safe harbor. The individual is further pushed into an echo chamber of herself, where her convictions are radicalized in a manner that can never really materialize or be attained.

In the field of robotics and most recently in computer graphics animation, ‘uncanny valley’ was a term first coined in the 1970s by Japanese robotics professor Masahiro Mori, in which he described the eeriness that people experience when interacting with a robot that looks almost too close to a human, but not quite. This concept started taking traction with the exponential improvements made in the field of robotics and the wide-spread use of physical robots in shops, public spaces, and even households in some countries. Prosthetics, robot hosts in expos and humanoid robot assistants are some examples of consumer products that finely calculated the grade of human appearance their robots could have without producing an ‘uncanny’ effect on consumers.

AI tools are machines, a kind of robot to put it bluntly, even though they are not embodied in some form of hardware. Could the concept of ‘uncanny valley’ be applied to the interactions that take place between AI generated art and the human experience? How do the aesthetics around engaging with images in pop culture change, and how do these new interactions shape the work of artists?

A response to the perfectly generic kind of AI generated images is imperfect routine, vulgarity and the surreal. The audience looks for authenticity where there seems to be none, as if attaining ideal beauty through images had been banalized to the point of being considered irrelevant or mundane. A similar thing could happen to the artist, who might seek to push figuration beyond reality, hyperrealism and even abstraction. We can see this trend by looking at works for art which prefer blurred images, exaggerated proportions and a return to the surreal.

When an artist thinks of an artwork, they are not necessarily expecting to please the viewer with an outcome. They create from within, a desire to manifest their experiences and emotions onto the world, a desire that unless written properly in a prompt, is inexistent within a machine. Economies, markets, and constant pressure to capitalize on any kind of value push us to skip the process, to reach conclusions fast and cheap. What’s the point of drowning in perfect images we don’t enjoy looking at? Why do we produce art in the first place? Who really benefits from generating such amounts of images at such speed? New technologies have emerged and changed the way we create since as long as art exists, the point is not to demonize a tool just because it is new, the point is to ask ourselves if new technologies expand our creativity or hinder it. Most importantly, we need to raise the question of whether the futures we embody as creative practitioners by choosing certain types of artifacts and processes are futures which are fair, but most importantly, enjoyable.