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How many monkeys would it take to produce AI Art?

If ten thousand monkeys typed for ten thousand years what’s the probability of one putting out the complete works of Shakespeare?

According to a popular thought experiment called the “infinite monkey theorem”, if you sat monkey’s down in front of typewriters and let them bang away for some length of time, chances are they would be able to produce the complete works of Shakespeare at some point.

Of course someone would have to find the salient pages amont the mountain range of pages produced, and organize them.

Sometimes this theory is described as 10,000 monkeys typing for 10,000 years – with fresh monkey’s brought in as the older monkey’s tire and expire at their desks.

The mathmatics are fascinating if you are into that sort of thing and is explored in this Wikipedia page – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

If infinite monkey’s can recreate Western civilizations greatest literature, surely AI art can search the web, grab images, blend it together and produce flat, pixel based versions of the world’s greatest artwork — and we don’t even have to wait 10,000 years.

Consider this – If I type in “cat, hat, newspaper, Spanish” and you also type in the same keywords, two possible results will be returned by the AI software:

  1. Two identicial images
  2. Two different images

In both situations, where is the individual creativity from the “artist”? Where is the artistic vision shown?

Both results show no difference between the “artists” typing in the keywords. Identical images exposes the clinical operation of the software. Different images the result simply shows some randomizing within the software.

Is there a personal style expressed among the various artists “work”? Would you be able to recognize a certain AI “artist’s” work at an art show?

If anything, AI artwork is recognizable as…drumroll…computer generated AI Art more than it would be recognized as human created artwork.

Don’t be lazy. Don’t be mediocre. Don’t become a factory churning out widgets. Keep your authenticity. Keep your own personal artistic vision and put it into your work. Don’t give your creativity over to a computer algorithm, as creativity is what makes us human.

Art Prints

Further Reading about AI “ART”:

Is AI Art Theft? https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/is-ai-art-stealing-from-artists

Is AI Art Unethical? https://artprof.org/pro-development/discussion/is-a-i-art-unethical-is-it-theft/

Calling AI Art a photo or painting is fraud – https://1x.com/magazine/permalink/9557

AI art is theft – https://medium.com/@coryscottshaw/a-i-art-is-theft-c5aabc198f31

AI Imaging is a Pox, a Fraud and a Thief https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2023/10/ai-imaging-is-a-pox-a-fraud-and-a-thief.html

‘It’s the opposite of art’: why illustrators are furious about AI https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/jan/23/its-the-opposite-of-art-why-illustrators-are-furious-about-ai