No.
Photography wasn't the end of painting. Film wasn't the end of Radio and somehow Boris Johnson wasn't the end of the Conservative party. Familiarity lingers.
But we love to speculate and indulge in some disaster and doom fantasies. It gets the primitive lizard part of our brain tingling. If there's something we want more than anything in modern society, it's to feel something. Anything. Just look at the political divide, it's fuelled by addicts chasing the dragon of righteous anger. I'm good, you're bad and that feels nice.
Art has always been a reflection, reaction and comment of society at that particular point in time. The reason is very simple, art comes from the people who make up that society. One big dysfunctional family, all expressing themselves in the best way they can and often just pissing everyone off in the process because, "In my day, artists walked 10 miles in the snow to grind their own pigment. That's a real artist, non of this paint in tubes nonsense."
Drawing nobs on toilet doors, Pickling sharks, painting a picture of a woman with an ambiguous smile or shooting self portraits of yourself rejecting gender norms. Art is expression. Art is us leaving our mark on our world and pointing to the universe and saying, "I existed."
That point on expression is an important one. There are many ways to express your artistic compulsions and they're not necessarily though physical artistic talent.
Lets take Damian Hurst's shark as an example. 'The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Something Living' was a piece of art commissioned by Charles Saatchi. So already we have a collaboration between two people, the commissioner and the artist. The art needed both to exist. I hate to burst your Hurst bubble but Damian also didn't actually catch the shark himself, he commissioned a fisherman to catch the shark. He approached a fisherman and asked for a shark 'big enough to eat you'. This is starting to sound a little bit like the process of AI art don't you think?
Damian Hurst asked a fisherman for a big shark, the fisherman went away caught a big shark and gave it to Damian. Hurst gave a request with set parameters and then waited for the result. He didn't make the shark, or choose the specific shark. He did however, commission and curate the process.
And that's the point.
Damian Hurst is an Artist. 'The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Something Living' is art. Yet he didn't physically make it.
When you use an AI to generate art, you give it a request and it goes away does it's AI shark fishing and then presents you with an image based on what you asked for. You commission the AI to make something and then curate the results, you then chose which of the AIs creations you would like to present as Art. So you're basically Damian Hurst.
AI art isn't the end of Artists, it's just a new medium to work with. What it does do more than anything else though is that it makes creating art far more accessible to people. People without trained artistic skills such as drawing or painting can now commission an AI to bring their ideas to life. There will inevitably be people who take issue with this approach and will no doubt denounce this work as, "Not real art!" But in what way is that different from any period in history when a new creative medium has emerged? "That's not real music, they're just pressing buttons on a computer. Real music is played on a lute!"
I commissioned Wombo Dreams to create 3 pieces of art. I gave it the prompt words, chose it's painting style and then selected the following three images from hundreds of offerings, subtly tweaking the input words until I got the results I was looking for. As a Director of Photography, my career is based around bringing Directors visions to life through my own eyes. This was a nice creative holiday to ask someone else, in this case Wombo Dreams, to bring my own vision to life through their eyes.
The following three images are the results of our collaboration.
