Generative AI images are the new Dada and Surrealism
A mirror reflecting collective chaos back at us
Anyone who went to art school can tell you Dada and Surrealism was a response to the chaos and tragedy inflicted upon humanity during the First World War. Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray conveyed that the world was nonsense, humanity is irrational and disoriented, and art should reflect this.
While there was a semblance of reality in the work, Dada and Surrealism subverts what we see in the world, leaving us teetering on the edge of truth and falsehood.
I can’t help but find similarities between Dada and Surrealism to the odd mutations inherent in AI-generated images. That seventh finger, a face without eyes—it’s of a world that superficially looks right, but on deeper reflection is woefully off-kilter.
Maybe the absurdity of AI appeals to us because subconsciously we know it suits our current zeitgeist. Maybe we’ve returned to feeling the world is unstable, irrational, and untrustworthy. We made those source images, and it may be due time our collective internet archive is now mashed up through the looking glass.
I most definitely agree the look and feel of a lot of this AI-generated imagery is surrealist. Many of the images are alternate realities that look normal at a glance, then get weirder the longer you stare.
But the human Surrealists and Dadaists were creating this type of art very intentionally as a statement about their experiences; and AI is generating it because, well, it doesn't actually understand (at any meaningful level) the shapes and lines it is emulating from its training data.
I'm not really convinced this AI imagery does appeal to most of us. Maybe it's just interesting because it's new, or cheap, or both? By the time the six-and-seven-finger problem is resolved we'll probably be sick of the whole aesthetic.