by shaun lawton
One potential consequent artistic expression for a painter would be to do away altogether with the brush, canvas and paint, while concentrating instead on manifesting actualized imagery from an oblique variety of approaches, both invented and newfound, along with stumbled-upon techniques, many never to be recovered or repeated, and to build up one's palette of possibilities into a virtual or digital databank stored in a cloud with limitless capacity for containing a wide variety of textures, hues and tones necessary to convey aesthetic sculptures rendered into livid, flat imagery illuminated by electronic lighting and able to be printed onto high quality glossy photopaper to be framed under glass and mounted on a wall in any modern gallery of art.
This describes the advent of synthography and merely one of its limitless applications in the realm of graphic art and design, and in the creative commons world of interconnected mass distribution of popular memetic bytes and pieces copy-pasted ad infinitum into a sort of cellular compounded library of universal congress, one may easily determine for themselves that it's not anyone's property per se, but rather the very medium a commodity-prone society yearns to consume, in a manner of speaking; art for its own sake.
One of many culminations of consumerism will come when the masses, feeling they need artwork in a manner similar to people currently addicted to inking their bodies with tattoos for example, are provided with their need by a legion of newly budding synthographers, just another new breed of artists getting to work with the priceless new tech facilitated by artificial intelligence algorithms. It's somewhat analogous to how the writers of the future will be programmers, not in the sense that authors have always (in a manner of speaking) programmed the imaginations of their legion of readers over the years, but rather in the sense that it will still be necessary for words to be generated by a human mind, correctly spelled and ordered, in language terms that AI can decipher, process and articulate, with proper context and accuracy, for the purposes of further guiding AI algorithms into deeper than ever before recesses of the human imagination.
Even though many human beings presently and in the near future addicted to the pure essence of art and literature may not have exactly mastered the art of reading the text themselves, it's perfectly fine because AI can narrate the stories and poetry for us, material which just so happens to be written by a living, breathing person, known as a writer, for the software to render into veritably any language. The difference to be refracted through the eyes and ears of the beholder.
Human writers and artists aren't threatened to be displaced by machines, because human beings who persist (despite the rising flood of artificial competition) will remain perfectly capable of standing out all the brighter for it, and with far more lucid definition than any of the countless carbon-copy cloned passages conjured automatically by even the most sophisticated chat models being developed. Don't reject the technological singularity thinking it's something new to be questioned. Embrace it because we were all born into it as a matter of course.
