The only people excited about AI art are people who don’t understand art to begin with

AI can provide a useful framework or starting point for actual creativity, in the same way that idly scrolling through Twitter can provide inspiration for a rant about the dangers of AI art, writes Ryan Coogan

Why are so many people invested in pushing AI art when they clearly don’t have any real interest in the discipline in the first place? (Getty)

Have you ever wondered what lay beyond the borders of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa? Or what was on the pavements to either side of the Abbey Road album cover? How about the rest of the cityscape in Van Gogh’s The Starry Night?

If the answer to any of those question is “yes” then I have good news for you: that isn’t how art works. There is no “rest of” Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, because the work begins and ends with what Hopper saw fit to paint. There are no secret extra shapes to be found beyond the borders of a Mondrian, because he didn’t draw any. Even in a photograph like the cover of Abbey Road, where there was activity outside of the frame that we aren’t privy to, it’s irrelevant, because the artist didn’t photograph it.

Try telling that to AI-obsessed tech bros, though, whose endless affronts to the visual arts reached new heights of obscenity in the past few days, when several Twitter accounts began posting AI-generated images of what famous works of art might look like “beyond the frame”.