The age of AI is upon us, whether we asked for it or not. Not a day goes by without some hollow drumbeat sounding out the news that a hitherto perfectly fine feature of our lives will henceforth be “powered”, “enhanced”, or completely created by AI. Don’t turn the page, please: this is not another saddo anti-AI diatribe. My AI cynicism long ago morphed into AI boredom. The results of all the general generativity have been maddeningly middling at best.
What does AI have to do with art, you may ask? Or perhaps you won’t, having been subjected to far too many iffy generated pictures during that first aggressive AI waterboarding a few years ago.
A couple of weeks ago, one of Google’s tech wizards was extolling the benefits of their latest model (Genie 3, which presumes the existence of an older, not-as-good Genie 1 and 2). He did so by using it to “step into” an image of Edward Hopper’s famous study Nighthawks, showing us how you could (in a limited and clumsy way) wander about inside the world of the painting. There was, unsurprisingly, nothing of particular interest, because all it was doing was generating a Potemkin village.
In one sense, using AI to make paintings interactive is the ultimate version of something that began long ago in what one of my students called the late 1900s, when Microsoft Encarta allowed you to look at art in a digital way. In another, it’s a perfect demonstration of just how fundamentally the people who are influencing our technological outlook misunderstand what is great and good about art and the imagination.
If you’ve never seen Nighthawks and you’re currently asking Grok to show you a picture of one of the most recognisable paintings in American art, that’s okay. It’s probably a result of how our ways of knowledge-seeking have been railroaded in recent years. Your chances of stumbling upon something surreptitiously are greatly minimised now that all your information portals are divided into streams of suggested content based on the whims of a couple of pasty tech-weirdos. It’s like being in a driverless car that suggests where you ought to go and what landmarks you ought to see.
Not that you asked, but I first came across Nighthawks via that ever-bubbling fount of reference, Tom Waits. Nighthawks at the Diner, Waits’s amazing 1975 album, is a work of musical high art that captures the vibe of late-night big-city loneliness Hopper’s painting evokes so strongly. I like art that creates conversation across genre and format, and so I did what would today be known as a deep dive, which is how I learned a lot about Hopper, his manner of depicting modern life, and the way you can suggest so much about the human condition using quiet things like shadow and solitude.
Over the years, many an intrepid Hopperphile has tried to pin down the location of the diner, to no great end. All evidence suggests that Hopper composited his diner from an array of places. It obviously doesn’t matter, since the painting is not about a specific place but about a mood and a sense of feeling. In a simplistic sense, he was doing what AI does, only without the wonky uncanny-valley effect that AI-generated images evoke. Like all good art, Nighthawks leaves you the space to inhabit it, to supply it with your own meanings. It follows, then, that using an AI tool to peer beyond the framing is missing the point spectacularly.
An imagination-bereft way of imagining the world is degrading. AI makes no sense in the realm of art because AI is effectively designed to discourage you from using your imaginative capacity. A technology whose organising principles are located in summarising, compiling, and parsing is by necessity a reductive technology, no matter all the time it promises to save. Art is no country for timesaving: the very point of it is to step outside time, to pause, so that you can experience something profound.
A few weeks ago, I attended Meleko Mokgosi’s exhibition “Spaces of Subjection”. The artwork is a gallery-wide tableau in multiple chapters, made up of annotated frame-by-frame recaptures of The Gods Must Be Crazy. For those of us who like art, the exhibition seems like a welcome antidote to the incessant Ask-Grok banality presiding over the present: it asks you to linger, to read, and to take your time, and a lot of what you’re looking at provokes confusion and head-scratching. When you’re new to the world of art, your first instinct is to try to interpret everything. Knowing is a way to quell anxiety. But, slowly, you realise that the true joy of art lies in how it estranges you from what you know. I’ve watched The Gods Must Be Crazy more times than I care to admit, but here was an exhibit that turned it into something unfamiliar and interesting. And all without an AI assistant in sight.
From the September edition of Wanted, 2025
