Blog / 2024 / How Social Media and AI Are Making Art Boring

August 1, 2024

[video transcript]

As someone who shares their art on the internet a whole lot, it may seem silly for me to condemn the World Wide Web as a “factory for conformity” and no place for art. But I hate the idea of pretending like crappy things aren’t happening just because we haven’t figured out a solution yet, so here we are.

At this point, I think the best ways to bring exciting art into your life on the regular is:

  1. to seek in out in your everday and notice it in unexpected places.
  2. to sign up for artists’ mailing lists, with a special emphasis placed on signing up for the mailing lists of artists who aren’t on social media.

I have two mailing lists, one for people who only want updates once a month and one for those who’d like to be notified whenever I publish something new on my blog.

paintings and a drawing by Gwenn Seemel
a sampling of square art by Gwenn Seemel

In 2020, just before quitting corporate social media, I made two full collections of art in the square format that Intagram likes so well: Baby Sees ABCs and Lifesavers Fan Art. While it’s true that I made square art before I got on Insta—most notably the 56 paintings for this series which I created three years before I got on IG—my compositions in a 1-to-1 ratio definitely amped up when I had Instagram’s pretty grids on my mind.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

We behave differently when we know we’re being watched. It’s why most of us don’t pick our noses in public; it’s why many of us have trouble dancing when we’re not alone. Our social awareness can be a total good. It can help us to think more about other people and be nicer and more ethical in our behavior. But it can also stymie us—block us up.

And I think a good example of that stymieing is on social media, and the way that social media reinforces a narrow standard of beauty. I think a lot of people these days have trouble posting a pic of themselves on social media without first doctoring that pic so that it adheres more closely to that standard of beauty.

And the same is true in art. I don’t think that most creatives are doctoring photos of their art before they post those photos, or at least not a whole lot. I think it’s worse than that. I think that artists these days are only making art in the first place that adheres to some narrow standard of beauty or popularity—what’s going to get the “likes” on socials. So they’re not even making other kinds of art.

For my part, when I was corporate social media, one of the things that I did to adhere to standards was I was making more and more art in a square format, because on Instagram that square is so powerful, right? That grid when you go to someone’s profile on Instagram—those square windows onto whatever format of image the person has posted. Those squares matter. And so I started making more and more—composing work in the first place—as a square.

One of the ways that I resisted the pressures of social media was that I did not post images of the process—the making of an artwork—not generally until the artwork was already finished. And this is important becaus I think that the difference—or one of the main differences—between an artist and someone who maybe has some artistic skill but maybe wouldn’t consider themselves an artist is that the artist knows when an artwork is finished. And that’s not easy: to know when to stop working on a piece is a big deal. And when you post process images of an artwork before the artwork is finished, even if all the comments are positive—it’s all “likes”—just the fact that there are eyeballs on that vulnberable part of that process is going to change that process. That observation is going to change how the artist acts as they continue to make that artwork.

And this is a problem. It’s a problem that doesn’t just exist for humans anymore. It’s also a problem in AI generated images as well, because AI generated images are just stuff that’s made out of our stuff, right? So it reflects—that kind of imagery—reflects our social awareness: some of it good, but a lot of it blocked—a lot of it stymied. AI image generators are essentially factories of conformity, and that means that what’s coming out of them is more of that same narrow standard.

So if you are someone who loves art, I am sorry to tell you that you’re going to find less and less of it that’s of interest on the web. And that breaks my heart because the internet was so important to me when it first began. It was such this place of creativity and of encounters and of inspiration. But, more and more, it’s a place of boring homogeneity. Conformity, just to an extreme.

So if you love art and you don’t want just that same-sameness, you’re going to have to look eslewhere, not on the internet.


Maybe this post made you think of something you want to share with me? Or perhaps you have a question about my art? I’d love to hear from you!

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