Art is a form of communication, it follows all the same principles as any form of it, it requires a message, an emitter of the message and a receiver of the message. The receiver needs to understand the language of the message in order to understand it. Consider modern art being shown to people hundreds of years ago. 

Art also requires consciousness because what distinguishes art from other forms of communication is that it uses a craft in order to communicate a feeling, emotion, thought or idea. And these require consciousness in order to be genuine. 

The machine, as it is today, cannot be conscious, it cannot be self-aware. In science fiction we normally see the singularity, the moment when machines become conscious, presented as a big-bang moment, spontaneous and for no reason. However, self-awareness is organic, where exactly I do not know and I presume as of now no other human knows either. Self-awareness exists somewhere in the organic matter, it evolved with us. We know this is true because all humans are conscious, it would be quite the coincidence if it just so happened, for no reason that a spark of consciousness happened to all humans.  

A side to this is that humans are working on bio-technology. In doing so, it is very likely that it will eventually transfer consciousness to the machine, making the singularity a much more probable future than we could expect otherwise.  

Back to art though, I often see the argument if AI can create art. True art, because it lacks consciousness, it cannot. A product that a human would perceive as an artistic endeavour, connect to in some meaningful way, yes. None of these things are questions for debate, they are all facts. AI ‘art’ has been entered and won numerous contests, so it does not matter what the judges knew, they are humans, they connected with it, so that’s it, it worked.  

Just as we have seen with crafts and other human related activities, especially those that provide cohesion to society, such as services, we have introduced machines to produce these products and services and humans have been made into a new different type of product where the very ‘human touch’ is part of the experience, human interaction is a commodity in this case. So we can expect that at the rate AI pseudo-art is progressing, corporations will begin releasing AI generated ‘art’ probably even misleadingly sold as human produced and may even go to the length of having humans claim they produced the work in order to give it authenticity and sell it more. This will continue to grow to the point where most art is AI ‘art’.  

The machine has the potential of producing a product uniquely tailored to a person. But as the machine takes on more roles and is involved more in teaching and developing humans, it will likely bring them in the same direction meaning that rather than creating different products it would only need to create one because all humans would have been raised under the same umbrella of thought.  

Whilst the extended part of this, where the machine is also raising humans is in a much more distant future, AI taking over creative industries is a much closer potential. As we have seen with the development of cities and losing the third space, the development of technologies that inadvertently put barriers between human interactions such as screens, headphones, cash registers and even cars. Many have studied and spoken at length of the effects of social media in society. An art without consciousness behind it, without a ‘soul’, where there is no real communication, will create a void and bring us closer to our interaction and dependency with the machine as well as distancing us from each other even more. This is a very real danger that I do envision to be in a nearer horizon than many would be willing to accept.  

In communication there is a tremendous amount of information that is non-verbal, in a way it is not explicit. This is also true in art. When an artist works on a product and puts layers upon layers on it for a wide variety of reasons, this is things like the little details that are due to a story from their childhood, the colours they choose or just about everything else. They are adding these elements of non-verbal communication to their work. And just like any form of non-verbal communication they operate in the unconscious mind, not the artist nor the audience is fully aware of it and they would not be able to describe how it came to be. Film studios often try to replicate films with a small budget that worked incredibly well, and so they dissect it and try to bring all the same elements only for it to fall flat. The reason this happens is because they are not bringing the same levels and depth the original film had. The pseudo-art produced by the machine would have the same effect.  

The question we should ask though is if we want it to, and my answer is no. I do not need to communicate in this way with a machine. For as long as capitalism is allowed to reign over the world, we will likely see the future I have described, where the vast majority of artistic work is produced superficially and lacking in depth by a machine.