It’s not easy, but with a lifetime of dedication to the craft, many people become virtuoso guitar players. They learn the intricate nuances and details of the instrument and attain a level of mastery over it as if it were an extension of their mind. Some of the best instrumentalists even transcend traditional techniques of guitar performance and find their own ways of creating music with the instrument, like using it as a percussion voice. Alex Misko’s music is a beautiful example of virtuosity and novel techniques on the acoustic guitar.
No amount of such dedication can make you a virtuoso at Guitar Hero. Though also an instrument of sorts, Guitar Hero does not admit itself to virtuosity. At the cost of a lower barrier to entry, its ceiling of mastery and nuanced expression is capped. Its guardrails also prevent open-ended use. There is only one way to create music with Guitar Hero — exactly the way the authors of the video game intended.
I think great creative tools are more like the acoustic guitar than Guitar Hero. They:
- Allow for virtuosity and mastery, often enabled by a capacity for precise, nuanced expression; and
- Are open-ended; they can be used in surprising new ways that the creator didn’t anticipate.
Creative tools like Logic, Photoshop, or even the venerable paintbrush can be mastered. In these creative tools, artists can deftly close the gap between an image in their mind and the work they produce while worrying less about the constraints that the tool imposes on their expression. And where there are constraints, they are free to think beyond the tool’s designed purpose.
Both capacity for virtuosity and open-endedness contribute to an artist’s ability to use a medium to communicate what can’t be communicated in any other way. The converse is also true; if a creative instrument has a low ceiling for mastery and can only ever be used in one intended way, the operator can only use it to say what’s already been said.
Every established artistic practice and creative medium, whether acoustic instruments, digital illustrations, photography, or even programming, has standards of virtuoso-level mastery. The communities behind them all intimately know the huge gap that spans being able to just barely use it and being a master creative. Virtuosos attain their level of intimacy with their mediums from extensive experience and a substantial portfolio that often takes a lifetime to build up.
When new creative mediums appear, it’s never immediately obvious what virtuoso-level performance with that medium looks like. It takes time for virtuosity to take form, because several things have to happen concurrently to open up the gap between novices and virtuosos.
- People must develop a sense for distinguishing the bad from the good, the novice from the experienced. This is a muscle that a community of practice develops over time through exposure. At the invention of the photograph, how could people tell a good photo from a bad photo? All photos were just photos, as long as they captured reality faithfully. Today, photographers and even the general public exercise strong opinions about what separates great photographs from mere eye candy.
- The tools and instruments for creating with the medium must advance to a degree where the artist’s role is not about making the new technology work, but about using it as a form of expression. Nascent technology doesn’t stop an artist at the frontier from incorporating technology into their craft, of course, but it’s much easier for a community of practice to coalesce around a new medium when not every member has to learn to operate the technology behind the medium before creating anything.
- The community of practice must separate itself from previous artistic practices and standards of mastery, and come up with their own in-group standards of quality, broadly accepted techniques, and value set. Early musicians using the synthesizer had to separate themselves from keyboard players, and early photographers from traditional painters. I think we’re witnessing a similar schism today with artists using AI models separating themselves from the traditional “digital art” community of practice, establishing their own standards of mastery, quality, and values.
These changes happen in lockstep with each other: as tools improve, people must refine their sense for telling the bad from the good, and as the standard of mastery diverges from previous artistic medium’s standards, a new community of practice forms, slowly, over time. As a new community forms around the new medium, there is more space for its practitioners to develop their own sense of mastery and refine their toolset.
Electronics, software, and computing have all birthed their own communities of artistic practice through this process. I’m reminded of computational artists like Zach Lieberman. I have no doubt AI models will lead to another schism, another inception of a new legitimate creative community of practice with its own standard of virtuoso performance, cornucopia of tools, and unique set of values. AI models will become a creative medium as rich and culturally significant as animation and photography.
But we are clearly at the very beginning:
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Popular culture still judges AI artwork by the standards of traditional digital art rather than a new set of values.
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Creative tools today use AI to cheaply emulate or automate existing artistic techniques rather than embracing AI as its own kind of creative material. AI, like every other creative medium (photography, animated film, electronic music) has its own texture that I think practitioners will come to embrace. Artists like Helena Sarin have long demonstrated it. Today’s tools are built for the old world rather than the new.
Today’s tools for AI art also tend to have an extremely low ceiling for mastery. Many commercial tools meant to be accessible, like DALL-E, are so basic and guardrailed in its interface that it’s difficult to imagine any person become a virtuoso (there’s a ceiling to how complex prompts can be), let alone find a novel way to use the tool in a way its creator didn’t expect. This is why many artists I know are gravitating toward more complex, open-ended tools like ComfyUI, and perhaps soon Flora. Tools built first on prompting, like Midjourney, have also expanded their feature set over time to allow for other more nuanced forms of expression.
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The AI creative tools of today are still mostly designed as augmentations for existing communities of practice like digital illustrators, photographers, or animators. There are pockets of nascent scenes emerging specifically around using AI as a creative medium, but in my view, we are barely on day one.
Over time, I think we will see creative tools built natively around AI separate itself from tools for augmenting existing mediums in applications like Photoshop. We’ll witness virtuoso levels of performance for expressing new ideas through this new medium, as difficult as it is for us to imagine now what such mastery might look like. We’ll see artists use neural networks and data in ways they were never meant to be used. Through it all, our capacity for creation can only expand.
I feel lucky to be present for the birth of a new medium.
Thanks to Weber Wong and Avery Klemmer for helpful discussions that sparked many ideas in this post.
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