The Weekly: Technology and Art, a conflict in purpose
It has taken me longer to get this edition of The Weekly out. It’s partly because I have been organizing my thoughts around art and technology. I am starting to worry that tech is doing art dirty. I also suspect that technology’s impact on art, is a precursor to tech’s troubling impact on humanity at large – art is the proverbial canary in the coal mine.
With that in mind, I started listing a few questions around Art and its relationship with Technology that I will start exploring in the coming weeks. I start with a thesis on how they were destined to be in conflict.
Technology and Art, a conflict in purpose
The primary purpose of technology is to make things cheaper. The primary purpose of art is to make things richer. I suppose the two were destined to collide. But it was not always so.
Technology drives prices down. That is its core function. It drove down the cost of inking words on paper, and then the cost of replicating the written words into thousands of copies, before inventing the PDF and the internet to deliver words digitally at near-zero costs. It economized the cost of traveling between any two random points on Earth. You can now travel distances farther, faster and cheaper than ever before – and that has been the case at least for the past 50 years. Such price point decimations are abundant in other sectors of the economy: energy, food, clothing, housing or entertainment.
Art, in contrast, is always trying to add-on. At its core, art is expression. It is trying to offer more context, add more color, preserve old remains, recover what was lost, and create fresh perspectives. And I am not thinking only about visual arts. Endeavors of creation – from literature to jet engine design – are quintessentially about offering something new in this world. Something that did not exist before. Interestingly that can sometimes mean new technology. Software engineers sometimes like to describe their code as elegant, or beautiful. Coding can sometimes feel more like an art form, and less like engineering. And the enrichment from such creative works, always incurs a material cost.
Such conflicting influences might suggest a history of tussle between art and technology. One is cheapening things, while the other is enriching things. Oddly though, art and technology have had a very symbiotic relationship – so far.
I often think of technology as chiseling away at existing stuff, to make that stuff cheaper, while (hopefully) unlocking newer piles of stuff. For instance, here is a centuries-long technology arc that aided the creative/artistic endeavors in visual and literary arts: in the beginning you could write or paint on parchment; then on paper; you could then print on paper; and eventually capture words and art digitally. And symbiotically, technology breakthroughs are often powered by creative and artistic thinking that is often needed to make breakthroughs. The Renaissance movement, from the Dark Ages in Europe, likely remains the most notable example of when art directly fueled critical thinking, and prompted advances in science and engineering.
Having said all that, I find that symbiosis decaying. This latest cycle of LLM-based tech is really putting a dampener on a millennia-long collaboration between art and technology. And it is not just causing an identity crisis for art: what qualifies as art anymore? A more urgent question has taken root: how can one make money from creative works – essays, drawing, paintings, dance videos, acting – when a computer can generate digital renders of such works on the cheap? Generative AI is really cramping the economics for artists and writers, the world over. It is a real question as to why kids will need to learn how to write and draw in school, without the aid of a chat bot … especially when the chat bot is able to write and draw. Journalists are panicking the world over. Photographers are not sure how to make their work stand out as distinct and authentic – the “what is a photograph?” question is smoldering with a dim-red hue right about now. Even performative arts are not getting spared with video generation taking off like wildfire, just as 2025 is drawing to a close.
In the previous rounds of technology, you could see newer distribution channels emerge for art. It remains unclear if this cycle brings novelty in how creative works are consumed. i suppose time will tell. I am not holding my breath. I worry.
Life is for Living
Instead of rushing through life, I find myself standing still more than I used to. It has allowed me to notice life around me. And when not intensely private, I capture it with my camera.
Caught this on a recent Starbucks run. The tall ceiling and the giant lamps struck me as very factory-like, very industrial. Decided to capture this in black and white given the gloomy weather this winter. The sharpness of the black hues with the white shine of light cut right through my own moodiness, and somehow got me into a better spirits!
#art #ArtEconomy #GenAI #LLM #Technology
