Why is everyone ‘improving’ art with AI?

Art isn’t good enough, humans are obsolete. That’s the message we’re given by the AI art enthusiasts who are popping up across social media feeds faster than you can say Generative Adversarial Network.

However, they’re no longer content with simply making their own art, they’re now ‘improving’ the art of the past. If you’ve recently been on TikTok or Instagram or X (RIP Twitter), you might have seen their attempts to answer such burning questions as: What does the rest of the Mona Lisa look like? What if Piet Mondrian painted Nighthawks? And how can AI improve Christina’s World?

They start a thread or record a video and they show us how easy it is to use their favourite generative AI tools to create art even better than the artists themselves. With their incessant upbeat tone and their simple ‘call to action’ syntax it seems like they’re talking to dogs. And, predictably, their attempts bring nothing but outrage from people who pride themselves on being cultured, who jump into the comments to condemn or correct them. Philistines! How can they not appreciate true masterpieces? Do they not understand historical context, critical theory or aesthetics? They might not, but that doesn’t matter, because the art doesn’t matter. If you’ve clicked, you’ve been scammed.

This isn’t true for everyone: there might be a few people out there who really believe in this technology, and there will certainly be some who are paid to advertise it. But more often than not it’s simply rage bait, it’s engagement farming, it’s classic internet trolling. And it works. Look at how many people have commented or quoted or screenshotted or otherwise engaged with it.

In the age of algorithmic feeds, social media platforms use engagement to decide which accounts to promote. The AI enthusiasts are provoking arguments to ensure that their profiles are always promoted. What does this bring them? Depending on the platform it might bring in advertising revenue, it might open them up to brand collaborations, or attract customers to their own products – online coding courses, dubious cryptocurrency and NFTs. If you’re verified on X, as many of these AI enthusiasts are, you can earn real cash for hitting engagement targets.

Once you know what to look for, you can see it happening everywhere. The script is the same each time: desecrate a work of art with a few clicks and prompts, start a ‘how-to’ guide, disagree with any commenters, and watch the hate clicks roll in! But why does it work so well? Perhaps it’s because the easiest people to scam are confident and convinced of their own superiority, and no group is more confident and convinced than art connoisseurs. They’re desperate to show off their knowledge and erudition and sometimes their collection. Yet, for people who pride themselves on their eye for detail, they often miss the big picture.

The funny thing is, both sides are wrong – none of this is new or controversial. The entire history of art could be written up as artists using the latest technology to ‘improve’ artworks. What was the Renaissance but a series of artists asking “How can we make the Virgin Mary hot?”, “What does the rest of the Laocoön look like?”, “What if Hercules was alive today?” and updating the paintings and sculptures of the past by making them more vibrant, more vivid and more sexy? Not just that, but for well over a century, artists trolling artists has been a genre of its own. It all started off with Marcel Duchamp submitting a urinal to an art exhibition, and continued when he drew a moustache and a lewd, humourous caption on a postcard of the Mona Lisa.

At the end of the day, you’re not going to win and you’re not going to convince them, because they’re not looking for art, they’re just looking for controversy. So, next time you see one of these posts, just scroll on by.