The Value of Generative AI Art Lies with the Psychology of Essentialism
This is the second of a multi-part series on the influence of Generative AI on music and human creativity. If you haven’t already, you can begin with the first piece here.
Bill Murray’s life was saved by a painting.
During a 2017 interview about his role in the film Monuments Men, depicting the true story of a team of art historians who helped rescue stolen paintings during WW2, Murray was asked about his own experiences with art.
“The film asks the audience to imagine what the world would look like without art in it. What would your life be like without art and creativity? Is there a moment in your life that you can pinpoint where art really mattered and made a difference for you?”
Murray thinks for a moment, before unfurling his story. He tells us of a time when, as a much younger actor coming up in Chicago, he was struggling to find his way on stage. One night in particular, as he describes, “I was so bad, I just walked off the set”.
Crestfallen, the young Murray just kept walking. And walking. And walking.
A few hours went by. Murray descended into a state that was increasingly aimless, and increasingly dark. “At some point, I realized that I had gone in the wrong direction. Not in terms of where I lived, but in terms of my desire to stay alive.”
Completely adrift, he eventually winds up, unwittingly, at The Art Institute of Chicago. He stumbles because, in Murray's words “I was just ready to die”.
It’s there that he has an encounter with a painting that turned everything around: The Song of the Lark, by The French artist Jules Breton. It depicts a woman working in a field, at sunrise. “I saw it that day and thought, ‘well, there’s a girl who doesn’t have a whole lot of prospects’, but the sun is coming up anyway.. That gave me the feeling that, I too, am a person, and that I get a new chance every day when the sun comes up.”
It’s a touching story, and a stunning testimony for the transformational power of art. To the interviewer's question, “what does art mean to you?”, this story distills it with aplomb: art has the power to profoundly transform us.
Essentialism is Key to Understanding The Transformational Power of Art
In light of recent advances in art created through Generative AI, there’s an open question about whether or not it can retain this transformational power. Can a work of art, that is created through AI, still retain this level of potency?
This is a big question, and there’s a lot to unpack. The first though, is to recognize that the way we perceive art, like the way we perceive nearly everything, isn’t purely an immediate, sensory process. It's not just about how something looks, or about how the song sounds. Instead, our experience of art is about what we believe about it what we’ve come to believe about its origins, and about what we understand, implicitly, about its deeper meaning.
This is the psychology of essentialism: when we look at an object, or a work of art, we implicitly perceive it as having a deeper essence that transcends its physical properties. The essence - the story behind it, and what we’ve come to believe about it - massively influences how we value it.
To evaluate the potential for Generative AI Art to carry transformational power, we need to first understand the influence of essentialism on the perception of art.
The Psychology of Essentialism in Art
Essentialism has a massive influence on how we see otherwise ordinary objects. It helps explain why, for example, items that come in contact with celebrities can increase dramatically in value. A rocking chair will cost you $20 at IKEA, but the specific rocking chair sat in by John F Kennedy? It carries with it a deeper story - an essence. In 2016, JFK’s rocking chair was sold in an auction for $74,000.
The essence is seen to transcend the physical world - even when the object is damaged, the essence remains. As we’ve seen, essentialism helps explain why a piece of Brittany Spears' chewing gum - which allegedly flew out of her mouth at a concert, was able to fetch $14,000 at an auction.
Essentialism has a particularly important role to play in the perception of art. Research on the psychology of art appreciation finds that the essence itself carries immense value. In one experiment, Yale scientists George Newman and Paul Bloom presented people with works of art which were either labeled as the originals, or as identical, pixel-for-pixel forgeries. The participants exhibited a strong preference for the originals, citing a sensitivity towards the process of artistic creativity as their key motivation.
All in all, when assessing a piece of art, we’re sensitive to non-sensory factors: our beliefs about the creative process, the origins, and ultimately about the artwork’s essence dramatically alter our perception and appreciation.
Essence as The Soul of The Art
You can think of the essence as an art piece as being similar to the art’s “soul”: it’s its mystical residue that reflects the deep humanity of its creator. And just like the soul, the essence of an artwork transcends the physical work itself.
We see this, for example, in the case of Banksy’s painting, Girl with a Red Balloon, which was discussed in the consumer neuroscience book, Blindsight. In October 2018, the painting was sold at an auction for $1.4 million, but the moment the gavel struck and the bid was accepted, it “self-destructed” - the frame turned into a mechanical shredder, cutting the painting into thin vertical slices.
Ironically, the stunt dramatically increased the value of the art. Why? An augmentation of the painting’s essence, which was now infused with an even deeper meaning. The new owner didn’t just own a Banksy painting, they owned the Banksy painting that was shredded in a unique act of meta-performance art. As the new owner later explained in an interview, “When the hammer came down last week and the work was shredded, I was at first shocked, but gradually I began to realize that I would end up with my own piece of art history.”
As Blindsight distills, “Banksy did not destroy a million-dollar piece of art at that auction; he created one.”
The Artist as a Major Source of Essentialist Influence
Girl with a Red Balloon is a stunning testimony to the power of artwork’s essence: even when the art is physically destroyed, its essence—our underlying beliefs about that object, the story we tell ourselves about it—lives on. And it is an object’s essence, as much as or more than the object itself, that we value and find pleasurable.
These essentialist beliefs come in many shapes and stripes, but a big component is the beliefs of the artists themselves. This is closely related to the fact that, as we’ve seen, art is an age-old medium of human communication.
You listen to a song, and you feel that you know something about the musician. You look at a painting, and you’re not just seeing the painting, but the feeling, however subtle, or the painter looking back at you. In other words, experiencing art isn’t merely a sensory process - it carries and expresses deeper meaning.
This deeper meaning was likely at play, for example, in Bill Murray’s feelings towards The Song of The Lark, an encounter that saved his life.
The Psychology of Essentialism in an Era of Generative AI Art
As we’ve seen, Generative AI presents us with a categorically new way of experiencing creative works. At any other point in human history, the artistic output was a reflection of the artist’s humanity, and a means of expression that could be felt, interpreted, and assimilated by the audience.
The biggest shift Generative AI presents us may be in divorcing these two types of artistic experiences: Separating the immediate sensory experience from the perception and interpretation of a deeper essence. Or perhaps instead, replacing this space reserved for essentialist beliefs about the artist, human creativity, and human nature with our essentialist beliefs about A.I.
Overall it suggests that what AI will deliver is a way of experiencing art which is, more than anything that has come before it, purely sensory and immediate. It's about how the art makes you feel in the moment, the pleasure it may or may not provide, and nothing else.
Perceiving art in this way feels entirely new and unprecedented. But it’s alien to everyone except one person: Rick Rubin, arguably the most successful producer in modern music. And now, as we enter an era of Generative AI Art, his way of perceiving music may be more important than ever.
The Song of The Lark, by Jules Breton (1884), Public Domain | Creative Commons License
This is a multi-part series on The Psychology of Generative AI in Art and Music. Next, we explore the psychology of artistic experience and how it’s influenced by AI. Be the first to get the the next piece by signing up here (for free)
About the author
Matt Johnson, PhD is a researcher, writer, and consumer neuroscientist focusing on the application of psychology to branding. He is the author of the best-selling consumer psychology book Blindsight, and Branding That Means Business (Economist Books, Fall 2022). Contact Matt for speaking engagements, opportunities to collaborate, or just to say hello
References for Generative AI, Musical Creativity, and Humanism
Alexander, A. (2024). “Heart on My Sleeve”: An AI-Created Hit Song Mimicking Drake and The Weeknd Goes Viral. SAGE Publications: SAGE Business Cases Originals.
Franko, G. F. (2013). Terence and the Traditions of Roman New Comedy. A companion to Terence, 33-51.
Hiatt, B. (March, 2024) A ChatGPT for Music Is Here. Inside Suno, the Startup Changing Everything, Rolling Stone
Savage, M. (Jan, 2023) Nick Cave says ChatGPT's AI attempt to write Nick Cave lyrics 'sucks', BBC News
Verma, S (2021). "Artificial Intelligence and Music: History and the Future Perceptive". International Journal of Applied Research. 7 (2): 272–275
