Key Takeaways
- AI tools by Google for creatives focus on speed.
- Art is about slowing down, both in the process of making and enjoying the finished product.
- Rushing art goes against the core essence of creativity, as mistakes and process are integral to artistic growth.
Earlier this week, at the Google I/O conference, Google announced numerous AI upgrades or entirely new AI features geared towards creatives. That includes VideoFX powered by Veo, which is a generative video model, enhancements to ImageFX with Imagen 3, Google DeepMind’s latest image generation model, and MusicFX, an AI-powered music creator.
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To promote these new AI tools, Google enlisted the help of various artists and musicians. One common thread was that AI makes it possible to make art faster. Just about everyone who spoke in the video promo mentioned something related to speed. “We can visualize things on the time scale that’s 10 or a hundred times faster than before,” Kore Mathewson, a Google DeepMind Research Scientist, said in the video in reference to VideoFX.
Art isn’t about speed
Indeed, the ability to speed things up seems to be one of the main selling points of AI. There’s the constant refrain that it makes it faster to get work out. Sure, producing work quickly is, at times, necessary. But there’s much more to art than just output. The desire to speed up the process feels very akin to a magic pill that makes us fit and strong with minimal or even zero work. It’s not actually that realistic or feasible, and even if it was, it misses the point.
As an artist, the main reason I keep coming back to creating is that it forces me to slow down.
Art is meant to be a thoughtful process. As an artist, the main reason I keep coming back to creating is that it forces me to slow down. Modern life is focused on a constant go-go-go mentality. Art takes me out of that, providing a reset. It makes me pause, think, observe, think some more, and repeat. Speeding up the process would take away a big part of the enjoyment and reason I have for creating.
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Wyclef Jean, one of my favorite musical artists, also appeared in the video. “The tools are capable of speeding up the process, the process of what’s in my head, getting it out. You’re able to move light speed with your creativity,” he explained in the video. While there are times when it certainly would be nice to get those ideas out of my head immediately, in my view, art is largely about the process and one that shouldn’t always be sped up.
I’m not alone in this thinking, either. Artist Roy Lichtenstein was quoted as saying that “the importance of art is in the process of doing it, in the learning experience where the artist interacts with whatever is being made.” That’s not to say that you can’t learn from using AI, but by speeding up the process, you reduce the time to learn, thus reducing the potential to learn. Spending time with your art is what allows you to grow and develop your work, and speeding that up could have quite negative consequences.
Don’t rush mistakes
The quote that got me most fired up during the presentation was from Donald Glover. “That’s what’s cool about it. It’s like you can make a mistake faster; that’s all you really want at the end of the day. At least in art, it’s just to make mistakes fast,” Glover said. I have not once wished to make mistakes faster when making art. Mistakes are critical to the art-making process and shouldn’t be rushed. Some of my best work came about from mistakes, but those mistakes were a result of many compounding mistakes. It’s a slow process and one that wouldn’t be as useful if I rushed through it.
I have not once wished to make mistakes faster when making art.
Art-making is a deeply personal process. Everyone approaches the subject differently and thrives in different conditions. But I think the idea that we should rush our art pushes it into a very industrialized, capitalistic format, which strays from the main goals of art. While final output is, of course, essential, the process and time it takes to create art is just as important.
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Instead of trying to rush through that part, we should be embracing the time and let art be an escape from the rest of our busy modern world and let AI possibly focus more on time-consuming, mundane tasks.
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