Thinking at Half Speed

A good friend of mine sent me a portrait of himself, generated by AI in the style of Vermeer. It had been sent to him by a colleague who was arguing that art doesn’t need human beings, and had sparked a debate. He wanted to know what I thought.

My immediate response was that I loved it. It stopped me. I kept thinking about it. By the next morning I’d decided: it’s art.

His response was “No.” Then he explained why.

Art, he argued, isn’t an object — it’s a relationship between two human beings, with the object as the means of communication. The portrait contains him, deliberately posed to make a point. It contains the colleague who chose to take the photo and apply the style. The AI made no artistic contribution. No more than the camera.

That’s a fair point. But then he said this: anything of meaning you see in it is purely human connection and human choices.

And that was it. He’d answered his own question.

The portrait is exactly that — human intention, human meaning, transmitted through a tool. Whether that tool is a brush or an AI model doesn’t change what’s happening between the people involved. He set the definition, and the portrait met it.

I made one more point: deciding what is and isn’t art has always been the job of elitist gatekeepers. Photography wasn’t art. Jazz wasn’t art. Film wasn’t art. The pattern is pretty consistent.

And here’s the thing that settles it for me. The fact that we’re even having this argument means the portrait is already doing what art does. It provoked thought, debate, feeling. It made me feel something the moment I saw it.

You might not want it to be art with every fibre of your being. But that ship has sailed.

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Postscript

My friend came back to me a little later. He conceded — graciously — that saying “No” had been missing the bigger picture. What he’d originally meant, he said, was that the AI had made no artistic contribution. But the portrait had acted as an object that communicated between human beings. Which, by his own definition, is exactly what art does.

We agreed to leave the question of AI’s artistic contribution for another time. That’s a harder argument, and probably a longer one.

“It’s about bloody time!” was his response to my agreement. Which feels like a good place to end.