Van Gogh, Sunflowers
I wrote briefly last weekend about the new image generation capabilities of ChatGPT–4o. I called these impressive and game-changing.
However, my position on AI-generated art and images is simple:
Creativity is about having a point of view. It’s how we learn to look at the world and respond to it. That’s what makes us human. It’s why art can make us feel something. And it’s why we respond best and feel most connected to systems that are extensively human, even when they involve technology.
Sunflowers
In 2019, Tate Britain in London hosted a major exhibition: Van Gogh and Britain. I remember the day I went to see the exhibition, as I managed to get over to see it after a day of running a workshop in London Bridge. I’d previously seen Van Gogh’s work elsewhere in different galleries, including a trip to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam as part of a sixth-form art trip.
The exhibition brought together some of Van Gogh’s most famous paintings, like Starry Night over the Rhône. But there was one particular painting I really wanted to see – Sunflowers – one of Van Gogh’s famous series of paintings, which normally lives in London’s National Gallery, but had been lent as a centrepiece of this exhibition.
There is something special about seeing paintings up close, especially oil paintings. This is the type of work where you can stand back and take in the picture, but also stand close enough to see the individual brush strokes and marks of the artist.
When I reached the painting towards the end of the exhibition, Sunflowers didn’t disappoint.
Faking art
I’ve been interested in why AI-generated art feels so fake. With the latest advancements in AI-image generation, this is possibly about to change. The promise is that anyone can now generate an image in the style of Van Gogh or other famous artists with a simple set of prompts or the click of a button.
Until now, many AI images have felt more like the aesthetic you get from the artwork on the walls of a budget hotel room. It’s sort of not really there because it’s not real art. Or it feels like a copy or imitation of something else. It’s something generic or average, selected to appeal to everyone and no one.
This makes sense. With generative AI we are experiencing another step in what might best be described as the age of the average. We have generic art to add to generic house decor, generic fashion, and generic places – where every high street or every newly built housing estate looks the same.
The world has enough average
If you care about good design, then we need more originality, not more average.
The same point is relevant to different types of art. Great films are not the average. They have a point of view. They say something new or say it in a new way.
Another example is writing. It was recently reported that OpenAI is promising agents with a high level of ability in creating writing. But I don’t want to be tricked into thinking something is a human story and point of view, simply because it’s not.
I can wait for future authors to find their voices, understanding that their shared experiences will result from a hard-earned process. The process of looking, thinking, and committing words to the page. Words and ideas that come from them, but also eventually come alive through other people’s experiences.
What do you see?
I’ve been using the example of Sunflowers for much longer than we’ve been debating the use of AI-generated art and images.
For Van Gogh, art was looking at a sunflower and saying what do I see?… It’s not what sort of sunflower does the public want to see? Or, what will be popular? It’s definitely not what is the best average sunflower?
Another story I like is about the artist L.S. Lowry. He famously took long walks home through the streets of Salford before painting his now famous industrial scenes. Lowry didn’t rely on sketches and there were no photos. He simply observed and responded from memory, creating a style and view of the world that was totally unique.
Design in an AI-era
Design is also about starting with a point of view. Someone has to look and ask themselves what do I see?
For this reason, I still think design has an important role to play in an AI-era.
The difference here is how design is intentional with understanding other people’s needs and experiences. But there’s something fundamentally human about owning how that translates from intent to form and function, committing to an idea, a point of view, and shaping and responding to how that idea becomes real. It’s the importance of how we test our ideas. How we can adapt and change in human ways in response to what best meets the needs of others.
Something more human
I heard the presenter and broadcaster Hannah Fry talk about the topic of AI and creativity, where she rightly explained that in art, as in life: “It’s the human part that makes it interesting.” The art is the human ideas. It’s what you can see or share with the world.
For services, it’s what makes them human that is unique. It’s people and how they interact. How they place something of themselves into meeting the needs of others.
In our systems, human is what connects and makes people seen. While AI probably does work for some degree of universal design and automation, real life is local, and it’s connected in ways that are unique to every place.
Great design, like great art, shapes how we see the world. It challenges ideas, accepted norms and the assumptions we hold. Good design gives us ideas to believe in and vision to work towards. So despite how powerful technology is becoming, it’s okay that design demands a point of view because the world needs imagination, inspiration and reinvention to make progress.
We don’t need more average. This is why it’s still relatively easy to spot AI-generated ideas, content or outputs. Real ideas carry the weight of a point of view. We can work with this, design with it, and test it.
We need more Sunflowers. And we need people who are prepared to see and respond to the world in ways that are unique to them and others – what do you see?
This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 20 years. You can follow all of my posts by subscribing to this RSS feed. You can also find me on Bluesky and LinkedIn.