I am an artist.
I am a poet, a writer, a researcher and someone who is attempting to be a novelist, and I have unfinished projects in spades. From poetry that lost its rhyme midway through the stanza, to stories where I have misplaced the plot line, my unfinished projects outnumber my finished ones in many ways.
When Generative AI first made its appearance, my thoughts were mixed—the more it appears the more I hate it. I am aware that “hate” is a very strong word, but it is the only one that matches the emotion that I feel towards Generative AI.
To clarify, “Generative AI” is things like, AI art generators, ChatGPT or Jasper Chat. These things create from supposedly nothing, but, in actuality, these generators are taking their material from examples online, anything online, meaning that they could be violating copyright or taking examples from independent artists. Generative AI is different from the kind of AI that runs machinery, that is, not the AI I want to talk about here.
Unfinished Painting by Keith Haring from "The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire"
There is a need for the human element when creating. The soul of a piece is in the way that the art makes you feel, and AI art is lacking in this. But it is not only in paintings or in art but in writing as well. Those who attempt to use Generative AI to create fantasy worlds find that the worlds created are knockoffs of the famous worlds we love: J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World, J.R.R. Tolkein’s Middle Earth or C.S. Lewis’s Narnia.
There is no individuality found in Generative AI.
While this article is about Generative AI and all of its negative aspects, it is also about the Art of the Unfinished—those paintings and musical pieces either left unfinished intentionally or due to death, which in some ways can be argued as intentionality.
Keith Haring is a well known artist of the late 20th Century, who is recognizable if you have ever been to the central U.S. where you have seen his paintings as murals and as merchandise that you can purchase from most major national parks. Haring is one of many who employed the Art of the Unfinished in one of his last works, titled “Unfinished Painting.”
The painting begins in the top left hand corner and features Haring’s classic “dancing man” style. Around one-fourth of this painting is complete, featuring dancing men in dark purple and emphasized with white detailing and expression-filled strokes of paint. At the outer edge of this completed portion, the paint drips down the canvas, staining the rest of the space that Haring would have painted in, had he chosen to finish the painting. The right side of the canvas is blank.
Haring died in 1990, after 31 years of life and ten years of making art. He left this painting unfinished as a testament to all of the lives lost in the AIDS crisis.
The question of “What could Haring have done, had he lived a lengthy lifespan?” is one that is posed to this artist and to many others. I have asked myself this question about the composer Tchaikovsky and the mathematician Alan Turing, Anne Frank and many others who died far too early in their creative careers. Haring attempted to answer this question in an interview in 1987; “Amazing how many things one can produce if you live long enough. I mean, I've barely created ten years of serious work. Imagine 50 years.… I would love to live to be 50 years old.”
But what does Haring have to do with Generative AI when he died years before it was even a thought?
In January of this year, a Twitter thread revealed that someone had used Generative AI to complete the painting. The user stated, “The story behind this painting is so sad! Now using AI we can complete what he couldn’t finish.”
The backlash was immediate and upsetting.
Perhaps, the AI user didn’t realize that the story is the point of the “Unfinished Painting.” Perhaps he didn’t realize how disrespectful it was. Perhaps I am just being optimistic.
The choice to complete Haring’s painting was wrong and dismissive of everything that Haring did in his life and everything the painting means for this artist and his time period. It negates the meaning and beauty of the original painting and dismisses the struggle of the thousands of people who died that Haring was honoring with this painting.
The Art of the Unfinished is employed in every creative field, through intentionality like Haring, or through death, like with Bach’s Unfinished Fugue, or Schubert’s “Symphony No. 8.”
Generative AI is damaging, no matter its intentions.
And the Art of the Unfinished is beautiful, in its own incomplete way.