What artists can do that AI cannot (and vice versa)

AI is missing an important component of what many in the arts world consider vital: lived experience.

In Ai Weiwei ‘s view, “life is art, art is life”. AI doesn’t have a life, which is a major limitation on its ability to truly create art through experience.

In a recent New Yorker article, staff writer Kyle Chayka points out how AI fails at the classic exercise of drawing hands typically assigned to beginners. While the average human also struggles to draw hands well, many of us can do better than the multi-number and dissociated hands we see in AI-generated images through observation and practice.

Humans have an amazing feature where our brains fill in gaps. For example, those with macular degeneration, which impairs vision, experience what is known as “perceptual filling in,” whereby the brain fills in the visual gaps. Our brains picture what a hand looks like in all sorts of contexts, even if we can only see one angle at a time. We understand that the part of the hand not visible from a single perspective is indeed still present in the real world, and our human brains account for this visual gap based on our lived experiences.