Could art as a profession eventually be replaced by technology?

[Queen Michael]

I believe that given enough time, all human tasks can be handled by technology. With that said, this won't stop humans from being skilled and producing good work.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Untill we get computers that can read our mind and put it on paper either with words or pictures... no.

 

[Hoplon]

Many many years ago, my uncle graduated with a degree involving airline scheduling, however, with the progress of computer systems, he quickly found himself out of a job and his degree pretty much useless. Situations like this, of course, get me thinking about my own job. I'm a commercial artist. I design t-shirts and do a little freelance illustration on the side, but I'm pretty much the "art person" at the company I work and I end up doing...everything else art related as well.

One thing that I regularly notice from customers is this idea that because my art is done on a computer, it's easy. I mean really easy, as in it's not uncommon for someone to expect beautiful, finished work in less than 24 hours. Of course computers do make things easier, I have an "undo" button for example, but there's still a lot of "old fashioned" work involved. I still need to be able to draw, since people come up with some very wild ideas, the kind of things that can't be found in clip art libraries.

Art tools also seem to be moving toward and favor a traditional approach. People prize hand painted textures as oppose to push button filters and tablet monitors such as cintiqs try to mimic the feel of pencil and paper.

So while the technology seems to be moving in favor of aiding artists, rather than replacing them, why is the viewpoint that it takes so little effort so prevalent?

Could there be a future in which computers replace artists?

Personally I don't believe so, because even if computers were able to perfectly mimic exactly the image a person has in their head, it would feel "mass produced" and I believe people will often prefer something that another person had to put time and effort into making, but I'm curious, what do you think Escapist?

A.I. might be capable of replacing an artist, but short of that you are going to need people. the tools will get more powerful etc but are still likely to take a lot of training to use.

 

[Johnny Impact]

Everyone thinks everyone else's job is easy.

Architecture: 'All you do is draw pictures of buildings, how hard is that?' Well, it requires years of education before it can be done right. Technical drawing alone is an exhaustively precise discipline, I know because I've had classes in it. And that's only a small part. Could you design a ten-story apartment building that accommodated reams of law on zoning and safety, was aesthetically acceptable, would come in on budget, *and* wouldn't collapse on itself? Didn't think so.

Cooking: 'All I see when I go to a restaurant is the end product, a dish of food I will mangle in ten minutes, how hard could it have been to make that?' I've got a recipe book that purports to be simple, yet some of the recipes require over two dozen steps. It takes all afternoon and leaves you with an armload of dirty cookware. And that's not even high-class restaurant food!

Art (I don't draw for a living but I do it well enough that I get called an ahhhhtist): 'Hey, I see flashy company logos everywhere I go, they must be easy to make! I'm starting a company, couldn't you whip me up a gorgeous logo?' "For how much money?" I asked when that question was put to me at work by a deeply stupid person whose presence I could barely tolerate. 'Well....couldn't you just do it as a friend?' I said something like, "Ah, no. First of all, I'm not your friend. I barely know you, and I dislike you intensely. Second, friends don't abuse each other like that. A friend might help a friend move and take no money but he should at least be given pizza and beer for his efforts. Third, you're not smart enough to run a business. If you were smarter, you'd know that. I'm not wasting ten-plus hours of my time to help you crash and burn."

Even when people do things that are obviously very difficult -- Olympic gymnastics, for example -- the rest of us have no idea, NO IDEA of the iron discipline and tens of thousands of hours of brutal exercise it takes to reach that point. We think we do, but we don't.

TL;DR: I don't see the human mind and experience being replaced in our lifetimes, possibly not ever. The value of tools is only fully expressed when they are wielded by a master craftsman. A chisel alone is just a hunk of metal. In the hands of most people it can find use around the home and workplace. But when you hand it to Michaelangelo........

 

[Ravenbom]

Well they can't replace creativity, inspiration or even happy mistakes.


"Art" is a very broad term and in that way, there are things that ONLY computers could ever produce.
Art, which encompasses tradition gallery work, installations, architecture, games, photos, movies and literature (for anyone who hasn't taken a college literature course, the first day you'll have a discussion about "what is literature?" someone will eventually say "the written word" which is not right because my to-do list is not literature, the correct answer is "art") which leads to the question:

What is art?

Art is that which expresses the ineffable. It's why we say "a picture is worth a 1000 words", because art explores that which can't fully be expressed. In other words, art expresses something that must be felt. Which is why the topic of "what is art?" is highly subjective. Good art is always subjective and polarizing.

So can a machine produce art? Yes. Art that no human could ever produce? Yes. Why?
Because no piece of art is ever truly finished without an audience, because as I said, art is about how something makes you feel. Can a computer or a machine do things to make you feel? Absolutely.
Emotion doesn't have to come from the artist, just the audience.
Imagine a world where Wall-E was real, dutifully stacking trash on a planet after a 1000 years of abandonment. I think it would be evocative which would make it a work of art, not simply neat trash piles.

 

[Hagi]

I do believe that theoretically the human brain isn't unique in any way. There's no magic there, it's 'just' amazingly complex.

As such, theoretically, a computer is capable of doing anything a human can. It's just a matter of building one with equal or greater complexity.

That theory though. In practice I've my doubts we'll get there. Not because computers can't. But because it's a long way there with many, many things that could go disastrously wrong along the way.

 

[Slenn]

Why not? We have already computer programs that can solve problems they encounter even if the solution isn't within their original programming. Problem solving also requires some creative thinking.

While the latter is plenty true, machines are not very good at pattern recognition unless they're programmed to be that way. As one of my graduate committee members put it: "Humans have very high input and very low clock speed. Machines have very low input and very high clock speed." And that's part of the reason why an AI on the level of human intellect will not be seen for at least a century.

You can punch in a complicated sequence of instructions into Mathematica, a very high-end computational engine, and it will spit out the answer based on what the human operator might be looking for. I've done more than enough problems with Mathematica to say that while it does a good job at recognizing complicated patterns, such as solutions to differential equations, it cannot solve the entirety of the problem; It's up to the human to interpret the pattern that's outputted. More often than not, computational engines like Mathematica, need to be sorted out.

Well they can't replace creativity, inspiration or even happy mistakes.

"Art" is a very broad term and in that way, there are things that ONLY computers could ever produce.
Art, which encompasses tradition gallery work, installations, architecture, games, photos, movies and literature (for anyone who hasn't taken a college literature course, the first day you'll have a discussion about "what is literature?" someone will eventually say "the written word" which is not right because my to-do list is not literature, the correct answer is "art") which leads to the question:

What is art?

Art is that which expresses the ineffable. It's why we say "a picture is worth a 1000 words", because art explores that which can't fully be expressed. In other words, art expresses something that must be felt. Which is why the topic of "what is art?" is highly subjective. Good art is always subjective and polarizing.

So can a machine produce art? Yes. Art that no human could ever produce? Yes. Why?
Because no piece of art is ever truly finished without an audience, because as I said, art is about how something makes you feel. Can a computer or a machine do things to make you feel? Absolutely.
Emotion doesn't have to come from the artist, just the audience.
Imagine a world where Wall-E was real, dutifully stacking trash on a planet after a 1000 years of abandonment. I think it would be evocative which would make it a work of art, not simply neat trash piles.

Just to comment on this:

I like this interpretation a lot, because it puts a romantic tone on what the thread's been talking about. You could also probably apply this logic to things produced in nature, but not by human hands. One could say that the patterns produced in honeycombs by bees or the gorgeous flowers in an expansive meadow to be a form of art. They made things that no humans could construct on their own.

But then you have to consider if the impetus behind the creation was to make a piece of art. Wall-E with his trash piles might be interpreted as art to some people. But like the flowers and the bees, they had no intention to make it art in the first place. They just did what they did naturally. I would say that impetus, is also a reason why the question "what is art" is highly subjective. When the forces of nature created the snowdrifts of Antarctica and the turbulent clouds of Jupiter, some might interpret them as artwork as well.

 

[viscomica]

Oh, man! I surely hope so. Just so that the artistic community would go bersek about it and all chaos would break loose. (grabs popcorn)

Out of curiosity, why do you feel this way?
Or do you just like watching people get angry in the same way people watch car accidents?
Not that I have any problem, I'm just wondering.

I'm joking. Of course I won't be alive by the time it happens.
In all seriousness though, if things progress as fast as they are, eventually (not now, not in 50 years, but we'll get there) art related jobs and soooo many other jobs we now take for granted will just disappear. Maybe other jobs will be created in their place. Maybe not.

 

[Fox12]

I believe that given enough time, all human tasks can be handled by technology. With that said, this won't stop humans from being skilled and producing good work.

I'm of the opinion that humans will simply integrate technology into themselves in order to maximize their own potential. Most labor jobs will probably disappear with time, but art is something uniquely human (or at least sentient). It's subjective, and touched by culture. It's something based on our own understanding of what makes us human. If you want to bring up psychology, art comes from the collective subconscious. It's created by humans, for humans. I don't think a machine could understand that. I can't imagine a machine ever being able to produce something of real quality. Not at high art standards, anyway. Even if it replaced art on a commercial level, it would be one of the very last fields to go. I've seen scientists try to create a theory of art, or try to make art building robots, and they're really bad at it. They're behind by... centuries. They can't understand it themselves, so their little machines can't either. No, I think people will use technology to increase their own cognitive abilities, and thus increase their capacity to create better art.

Artists will never disappear, though their tools and forms will change over time. Shadow Puppets aren't really in vogue anymore, but now we have film, literature, and video games, so different types of art are being produced. If OP is just worried about his job then, no worries, you'll be long dead before machines could even begin to understand art.

 

[MrHide-Patten]

It already has, it's called the Camera, but in all seriousness...

So while the technology seems to be moving in favor of aiding artists, rather than replacing them, why is the viewpoint that it takes so little effort so prevalent?

As a long time digital artist I can attest to simple ignorance. I don't know how to fix a car, so therefore I do not know how long it would take to fix one. Also there's an idea of 'the wonders of technology' as in they're so inept in what a computer can do, in that they assume you can do anything with a button press.

However there are quite a few apps out there that aid in drawing likeLazy Nezumi, which aids in drawing smooth lines (I don't use it personally, so I can't exactly call it 100% affective).

Could there be a future in which computers replace artists?

I think we'd have to wait for true artificial intelligence, or simply our definition of art, as in was it the computers intention to create 'art' or a context menu.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Untill we get computers that can read our mind and put it on paper either with words or pictures... no.

This seems a silly thing to say. An artist can't read your mind and put it to paper, and often times they can't put their own ideas to paper either, not exactly the way they envisioned them. That's why artists are never totally satisfied with their work.

 

[stroopwafel]

Ultimately I think so. Artists don't convey 'emotion' but rather we attribute emotion/association/meaning to a piece of art. That is not to discredit an artist's talent obviously, but it also explains the wide variety in taste b/c not 2 people perceive something in exactly the same way. So there is no reason why a computer couldn't eventually generate something individual people attribute similair emotions too.

I think it's more a sentiment that since only people 'understand' emotion it takes another person to communicate it as well. Which I don't think is necessarily true as emotions are just constructs of our own thoughts. Hell, some people get emotional from a piece of strawberry cake.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Well the first one is simple humans 101: everyone believes their shit is the hardest while everyone else has it easy.

Can a computer replace artists... well not until we have a half way functioning AI. At this point they can compose patterns that they recognize in our work and compose something from those patterns to a point we won't know if it's artificial or not. But they can't do stuff by description/demand because that would require human like understanding, so a half decent AI is what it will take.
But ultimately yes, it might be the last thing but even our creativity will eventually become completely irrelevant to an economy along with everything else we got to offer as meat bags... at that point it will probably be pointless to even have an economy.