As social media and the Internet have transformed the world, people have learned that clicks and likes are the best way to get noticed. People are using AI to reveal secrets that AI reportedly discovered, and this gets a buzz going and generates sharing and engagement in the article. However, AI hasn’t solved a mystery or revealed any secrets. These stories are more about how great AI is than they are about art.
Is AI Teaching Us Anything New?
There were reports by Oxia Palus, which is a company founded by machine learning doctoral students. They weren’t art historians, and they used traditional X-rays to reveal layers beneath the surface of works by Modigliani and Picasso. They claimed a new discovery, but in reality, the AI takes pieces or fragments of layers and creates new works that could be what was underneath.
This doesn’t teach anything new about the artist of the methods. It is common practice for artists to paint over their works, but this new tech isn’t coming up with anything that is worthy of news from an art history perspective.
Using AI in Art Makes AI Less Frightening
When AI creates fake political speeches or uses facial recognition to monitor people, it frightens the public. It shows the potential AI has to infringe on individual liberties. It is less frightening to hear that AI could piece together lost works of art by masters. However, these types of articles imply that computer scientists are better able to do historical research on art than art historians, and this simply isn’t the case.
At the same time, funding has been reduced for the humanities and increased vastly for the sciences. The data and analyses given by tech are too simplistic to give the complete picture. Art historians understand how people thought during different time periods, and they examine how art shaped the world and influenced future generations. A computer algorithm isn’t capable of this. AI simply recreates the past and shows you what might have been, but it can’t add context.