Perspective: a human skill AI can’t emulate
Keith Haring, “Unfinished Painting,” 1989
You might be familiar with the painting above. Without any additional context, what is the relationship between the image above and the one below?
Image posted on Twitter of DALL.E 2’s so-called “completion” of Haring’s “Unfinished Painting”
Over the last few years, a horrifying-to-me trend has popped up now and then on social media: people exclaiming how cool it is to “complete” a famous work of art using AI. This doesn’t make much sense to me (more on this later), but the case I’m about to show you, the internet rightfully exploded on seeing the doctored endproduct.
Here’s the background on the two images above: as this Smithsonian article reports a Twitter user named Donnel fed Keith Haring’s “Unfinished Painting” into an AI art generator. The post reads:
The story behind this painting is so sad! Now using A.I. we can complete what he couldn’t finish!
I remember seeing this post, and feeling incandescent anger. Haring wasn’t just a famous artist with an enviable social circle (he hung out with Grace Jones, Andy Warhol, and Basquiat, and the pictures of them out partying are a delight). He wasn’t just a quirky artist who created graffiti-style work worldwide, including a now-lost mural on the Berlin Wall at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum.
Haring was a political artist who painted "Unfinished Painting” mere months before he died of AIDS in 1990.
After his diagnosis with HIV in 1988, Haring became an activist in a time before there were any effective treatments for HIV. This was a time when it was somehow acceptable for Rush Limbaugh to have a segment on his radio show called “AIDS Update” where he would read names of the dead and then play bells and whistles to celebrate. This was only a few years after President Ronald Reagan’s press secretary, Larry Speaks, made repeated jokes about the first thousand deaths from AIDS in 1982. It was a terrifying and traumatizing time. But Haring was determined to change it.
As a 1989 L.A. Times article describes his work:
“Keith Haring does not believe in elitist art,” Gruen says. “He believes art belongs to the people, in the greatest possible accessibility.”
Haring often uses his art to convey political messages: anti-crack, anti-apartheid, safe sex. The artist has long worked with children to increase their understanding and awareness of AIDS. For canvases, he has used everything from the Berlin Wall to school walls in inner-city ghettos.
The only visible signs of Haring’s illness this week were the faint, beige lesions of Kaposi’s sarcoma, a form of cancer that often afflicts those with AIDS.
“My life is my art, it’s intertwined,” says the artist, many of whose close friends have died of AIDS. “When AIDS became a reality in terms of my life, it started becoming a subject in my paintings. The more it affected my life the more it affected my work.”
In short, Keith Haring was a badass who changed the world for the better through his art and his activism, artistic and political. This painting that AI supposedly finished was one of his last works before he died. He left it unfinished on purpose, as a symbol of all the art he wouldn’t make. He died in 1990 at just 31 years old.
“Unfinished painting” is powerful because it’s unfinished. You can feel the loss. AI cannot feel that loss—it is a predictive language machine, not a person—and it cannot convey those deep emotions.
So why are so many people online trying to “finish” famous art? Why are they fooling around with other people’s art instead of creating their own?
Or, in other words, what are they missing about the nature of art and art-making?
As best I can tell, people who see themselves as creative outsource work to AI for the following reasons:
They don’t see the harm. AI is a just a fun program to noodle around with!
They want to say they’ve made art, but don’t want to struggle through the messy parts.
They don’t understand what making art means, or how it differs from what AI can do.
They make things! They’re just terrified that, as hard as they’re working, their work won’t be good enough. No one will notice them without adding AI to their processes, because they think AI can make their work more perfect.
Here’s how I see these four reasons working out in practice:
The “no harm done camp:”
People believe using AI can just be a cool, shiny toy without consequences because that is the predominant cultural narrative. Universities use it, the government uses it, entertainment conglomerates use it, their friends and neighbors and classmates use it. There are some sources that explain how horrifying AI is for the environment, that it’s endangering our water supply and making global warning worse. But corporations have bought into AI companies’ promises big time, and they can’t jump ship without serious economic consequences. It’s in corporate best interests to have us see AI first as a fun diversion, and then as a tool in our jobs, and finally as a necessity to being human.
The “credit-seekers”:
Just not wanting to do the work but wanting the recognition anyway comes from a combination of laziness and fear, the same kind of combination that has led people to steal from artists for as long as that’s been possible. Learning to create things, whether it’s art, writing, performance, music, feels like a high-stakes game. We worry that people will laugh at us if our work is bad, in part because people are jerks to young people just learning to make things. Artists in any medium keep going through the ugly phases of their work, but it will always be a temptation for some to just steal and take the credit.
The people who don’t get what art is/does:
Not understanding what art is is another societal educational failure–let’s come back to this one when I talk about perspective below.
The fearful artist who gives AI a go:
The people in the last category are the ones this post is mostly for, truth be told. There seem to be unending numbers of creative people who are making things, who get so into their own heads that they end up outsourcing their work to AI in a panic.
I’ll admit that my first reaction to running into one of these in the wild is unhappy puzzlement. “But you’re so good at what you do? Why would you sell out to a system built on stolen work, when you don’t want people to steal your work?” Another variation of this are creators who would never use AI in their own medium, say, visual art, but are happy to use AI when they talk about their art, which then devalues their original making by sounding like a confused robot.
But, my big feelings about AI use aside, when I started working on this post, I realized that using AI because you’re afraid no one will like your original work has more to do with external pressures and anxious perfectionism than the creative being a cartoon villain.
This fear of not being enough, whether in making art, or writing–even if the writing we’re talking about is emails–that is a fear that strikes at the heart of the human condition. I wrote about imposter syndrome in my last post here, and it seems to me that this urge to declare that they’re completing others’ art, that doing so is their creating something new touches on the same issues.
Returning to Haring’s “Unfinished Painting”—why is the original captivating, and the “completed” version slop?
To answer these questions, we need to consider the artistic concept of perceptive.
What is perspective?
The Tate Gallery in the U.K. gives two excellent definitions:
Perspective in art usually refers to the representation of three-dimensional objects or spaces in two dimensional artworks. Artists use perspective techniques to create a realistic impression of depth, 'play with' perspective to present dramatic or disorientating images.
Perspective can also mean a point of view – the position from which an individual or group of people see and respond to, the world around them. You might, for example, hear people saying 'from my perspective' or referring to the point of view of a particular group or set of beliefs: 'the youth perspective' or 'the feminist perspective'.
Here, I’m referring to the second type of perspective, the one that expresses point of view. Haring’s perspective in “Unfinished Painting” is that of a dying man who mourns everything he didn’t get to create.
The “completed” version has no sense of either kind of perspective. If you look at the original, you can see Haring’s distinctive figures woven into the top quarter of the canvas. But if you look at the second image below again, you can see a figure circled in green in the top left, which is Haring’s original work. But when you look at the rest of the image filled in my AI, all you can find as far as figures are the grotesque headless/limbless monsters AI was able to conjure. It’s the painting equivalent of AI giving people 8 fingers and no elbows.
They’re meaningless, and there’s no perspective, no point-of-view, to be found.
DALL.E 2’s so-called “completion” of Haring’s “Unfinished Painting,” with a green circle around the figure Haring painted in the top left and red circles surrounding quasi-humanoid figures lacking heads and/or limbs that AI made
Perspective comes from the soul. And AI is basically the anti-soul.
Take another example, a video showing how Johannes Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid” might be expanded.
Why did the DALL.E 2 program add these particular figures/objects? What changes about how you perceive the milkmaid in light of the expansion of the scene?
Proponents of AI art might make a few kinds of defenses of the expanded work above.
Vermeer painted a variety of realistic scenes in the home. Doesn’t it make more sense to see more of the kitchen, a child, and so on? Isn’t this actually better than the original by expanding the scope?”
Vermeer was clearly a perfectionist, and this adds to the perfection by making the painting more than it was before. Why make such a big deal if the completed version is better?
But once again, to evaluate the expanded piece as art, we must consider its point of view. I have watched that video multiple times, and the point of view makes no sense to me.
The original piece showed a milkmaid working alone, the light streaming in from the top right, and illuminating part of the room. It feels like a natural depiction of what a milkmaid would be doing. In the expanded edition, there is a rather enormous crowd watching her at work, including people peering through windows and a child under the table. I can’t imagine any circumstance in which a milkmaid pouring liquid into a basin is an extraordinary event. But this AI expansion turns this woman’s workday into a spectacle.
The questions we should ask are
Why expand this painting in this way?
What does adding a crowd serve?
What is gained by changing the mood conveyed by this painting so dramatically?
But of course we cannot ask AI—it is not a thinking being, so it does not know why. This is a bit of machine-learning that has inserted the composition of other famous paintings into this one, whether it makes sense or not.
The next objection to subjecting this expanded piece probably goes along these lines: “But we know so much less about Vermeer than Haring. How can we even determine what his perspective might be?”
It’s true. There is a real lack of information about Johannes Vermeer and his motivations. However, that does not mean we cannot make inferences based on his work-processes. In an article for the U.S. National Gallery, Diane Richard makes a top ten list of things people might not know about Vermeer. The eighth item on this list— “Vermeer was more spontaneous than we thought”—dismisses the objection from lack of knowledge easily.
Thanks to the polished, controlled paintings we see, we often think of Vermeer as a perfectionist.
But chemical imaging has given us a glimpse of an impetuous, even impatient artist.
Vermeer sometimes began with a painted sketch, then quickly added a bold underlayer to plot out forms, colors, and light. He even used a material containing copper to help speed the drying of black pigment—so he could move more quickly to the painting’s final stages.
Maybe we can’t feel as intimately familiar with Vermeer as we do Haring. What’s more, Vermeer’s work doesn’t feel as personal as modern art. There’s a layer of formality that’s hard to navigate unless you’re an expert in art history.
But we all know what it is to be impetuous and impatient. We all know that if we’re working on something, whether it’s work or a hobby or a packed itinerary on an eagerly-anticipated trip, we get caught up in the moment. We walk faster. We hyper focus on the task at hand (or at least we ND folk do!). We try to speed up the process to get to the good stuff.
To be impetuous or impatient while creating, you must have a creation that’s bursting out of you, something to express in your art, no matter your medium.
There’s a reason Vermeer painted a milkmaid working, alone in a room, with the light streaming in from a window in a particular direction. Even we don’t know his reasons, this painting is specific. It is a selection of choices that show us his perspective.
The point of art, the reason we love it, is the way it transports us to another world through an artist’s perspective we never could’ve imagined.
The reason we still show and look at Vermeer paintings is because his artistic choices make us feel something. We encounter Vermeer’s milkmaid, and through her, Vermeer himself. The same is true of Haring’s works. Haring’s figurative, stylized pieces are about as far from Vermeer’s realism as an artist can get.
But we can have relationships with all sorts of art. We can love novels and biographies, reality tv and period dramas, graphic novels and artworks by the famous masters of centuries past. What all of these relationships have in common is the way their unique perspectives captivate our attention, make us feel or experience something new, or make us feel seen.
Yes, in a world where it seems like everyone is pushing AI, it can be hard to believe you are enough.
It’s hard to not get swept up in the hype about perfecting creative output.
But the cure for that is digging deeper into your art, into your perspective, not giving up what makes your art authentically yours.
And you are enough. So is your work.
Finally, if you want to cry over all the treasures unmade by one of the luminaries of my childhood, watch the documentary Howard about Howard Ashman, brilliant lyricist of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin fame, whose life was also cut short by AIDS.
So much is lost when society ignores a plague,* so many have been lost to HIV/AIDS, and due to current U.S. government polices many more will die for no reason beyond cruelty.
May their memories be for a blessing.
*Yes, Covid included. Wear a mask, if only so people like me can continue being alive, and I can keep writing this blog. Being immunocompromised is really fucking hard these last 6 years, not that it was easy before.