What might post-AI art and design look like?
Do you know the singer Charli xcx? No, me neither.
As it turns out, Charli xcx is not in any way the kind of artist I would listen to. Yet somehow YouTube thought it should show me this design analysis by Linus Boman of the album art of her latest album Brat.
It was out of shear morbid curiosity that I even clicked on the video, and after watching it I still had to do more research on what even was Brat.
At least YouTube got the design part right I guess.
While possibly a little tongue-in-cheek, when taken in context with this article by Cory Doctorow I shared in my newsletter last week, it starts to paint a bit of a picture of what post-AI art and design might actually look like.
As AI threatens, or rather as AI megacorps threaten to replace artists and designer, how exactly will they respond? Let's be real, artists and designers won't ever be replaced, but as culture and environment influence art, so too will AI.
Desktop Publishing
In Doctorow's article, he talks about how the democratisation of publishing through the advent of 'desktop publishing' effectively had a built in resistance to co-option by corporations.
In essence, because the design of zines, leaflets, and newsletters was now in the hands of the Great Unwashed, they were ugly. Those publications didn't follow conventional design rules, because the enthusiasts producing them didn't know those design rules. Not ugly by design, but ugly through an absence of design.
Ugly enough that trained designers would, as Doctorow puts it; rather break their fingers and gouge out their eyes than produce pages that looked like that.
Thus, the ugliness formed a built-in defensive mechanism that prevented corporations, and the designers working for them, from co-opting the aesthetic and commodifying it for profit.
This lead to a discernible difference between what was authentic and what had been co-opted. These weird and ugly zines, fliers, and newsletters were authentic. The personality of the "publisher" was photocopied directly onto the page*. There was somebody, or somebodies, with intent. Somebody to connect to.
* As a side: when was the last time you photocopied something?
When people connect around common interests, values, or ideas, communities are formed. Within these communities, unbound by money and design rules, new styles and subcultures were given opportunity to germinate. Including but not limited to weird and wonderful countercultures.
I remember these zines stacked on local skate and surf shop counters when I was a kid.
Fast-forward to today.
Nothing has co-opted faster and to as great an extent as the image synthesis models developed by our latest (and greatest) batch of megacorps. And as technologically impressive ML image synthesis is, as expected, it is incapable of offering anything authentic. To quote Doctorow again:
"Eeriness" here is defined as "when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there is nothing present when there should be something." AI is eerie because it produces the seeming of intent, without any intender:
Punk Design
For clarity, when I say punk I don't mean the aesthetic, but rather the philosophy. The anti-establishment, antithetical, and anti nonconforming.
And when I say design I'm mostly referring to Graphic Design rather than Industrial Design. Only because Graphic Design has more fully felt the impact of the image synthesis hype than Industrial Design has (yet).
Referring back to Linus' video, he also highlights the same rule-breaking design that desktop publishers used all those years ago. The stretched, resized, and resized again font goes against almost every typographic rule, and yet exudes human intent. These things are not artifacts, they are deliberate.
Perhaps contrary to desktop publishers of the past who may have been ignorant of the rules they were breaking, I expect whoever created the Brat album art knew very well what rules they were breaking and precisely how to break them for the precise effect they were after.
A very punk thing to do.
And like the punk sub- and counter-culture styles of the past, this type didn't just sprout from a vacuum. Type like this has been evolving in meme culture for a long time. Again, something no corporate designers would ever willingly co-opt.
An Immune Response
Humans are nothing if not resilient, creative, and resourceful. Especially when it comes to art and design. As AI-generated everything continues to poison the well, it will be interesting to see how creatives respond.
How will they do things AI can't do? How will they be unique? How with they be authentic?
I suspect we'll see more rule-breaking with intent.
Rather than some artifact or hallucination because the AI doesn't know what it's doing (because it doesn't), artists and designers might begin going to great lengths to break things in very specific ways that produce very specific [human] reactions in viewers or users.
Something that reflects the personality of the creator. And as I wrote in my earlier AI piece, consumers will identify with these creatives and their story. People will connect, communities will grow.
I would also expect this immune response to not just apply to AI art and corporate design, but also to the Pinterestification of Industrial Design. Brave designers, and brave companies, that push back against samey, inoffensive design to produce unique products for their people.
Extrapolating out the timeline, the question might be what happens if this trend (if it becomes a trend) continues. It's quite possible we see a polarisation of design languages.
On one extreme we might see everything looking like an iPhone. The distilling out of anything remotely unique in order to appeal, and therefore sell, to the most people possible.
On the other extreme we might see the rule-breaking, shock design that represents the punk philosophy. Design that makes your parents avert their eyes and rallies a small yet passionate community.
A punk design languages as wide and varied as the communities that planted them.
Some will love it. Most people will probably hate it.
But that's the intent.
