Fully Automated Luxury Crochet
By S. Parke, featuring Miranda Wright
I’m pretty sure crochet is one of the few things that can’t be done by a machine. The list of human-made crafts is depressingly short. Crochet, and filigree, a process where careful hands twist wire made of precious metal into affectingly intricate designs. Elaborate beadwork, hair braiding. Gold leaf still requires a light human touch, in which sheets of gold are hammered and gilded upon art and furniture. These are tiny, beautiful, often traditionally feminine crafts, which still require delicate fingers to create.
This is all that remains untouched by machinery and tech within the art world. Once hailed as the final bastion against automation, the art world has been infiltrated by AI artists. Not limited by inspiration amassed solely through individual experience, an AI may scan the archives of the world and emulate work that, like human art, has the power to affect and influence. Machines can play chess and write poetry, and they can produce digital paintings, with various TikTok trends seeing users feed AI a stimulus such as a song or a phrase and asking them to produce art around it. Even at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, robot gardeners replaced Buddhist monks to tend to the zen gardens. Raking the sand in patterns that mirrored the movements of the athletes, Jason Bruges’ The Constant Gardeners enthralled spectators, an art experiment exciting to all except those who remembered that the original purpose of zen gardening was as a form of meditation.
Bruges’ The Constant Gardeners is a good summary for everything that is, to me, wrong with AI art. Its very existence presupposes that creating art is solely a means to a spectatorial end, and thus destroys one of the fundamental purposes of art which is to engage with the process of creation. Art provides an outlet for people to discharge energy creatively, whether that be a Buddhist monk drawing in the sand as part of a meditative process, or a spotty teenager writing shitty poetry on a napkin to dispel teenage angst. For people like my friend Miranda, crochet is how she funnels out excess energy. Diagnosed with ADHD, crochet keeps her hands busy while she chats or watches telly. Fidgety energy becomes a tiny red devil hat, a quilt, an olive-coloured top with fluted sleeves.
This is not to negate the creative process of designing an AI. The coding and programming of an AI has as much value as crocheting, painting, writing and other traditional artistic forms. The issue is when the AI, produced as a by-product of the programmer’s creative process, develops autonomy and becomes exclusively concerned with production. For Miranda, output is never the sole reason she crochets.
Of course, for many people, machines programmed to maximise production represent liberation. Aaron Bastani wrote a convincing manifesto called Fully Automated Luxury Communism in which he advocates that “technology can be used to create a post-scarcity economy of widespread prosperity.” For those schooled in the teachings of Bastani, automation presents a vision of a post-work utopia. To some extent, I buy into this. I’m aware that the mechanisation of things has been revolutionary in many ways. It has made many things quicker, cheaper and cleaner. AI awards more efficiency, more accuracy; it has liberated many people from terrible jobs and enabled access to things once too expensive to buy.
However, to my mind, automation should pertain to necessity, and not passion. If a machine creates clothes so that people have something to wear, then that has value in an automated utopia. But if a machine creates clothes as part of an artistic experiment, then it compromises the purest means of human expression. While the novelty of AI art has a certain allure, what does it mean when a robot can replicate the fundamental parts of the human experience? When machines eventually learn how to crochet vast, fabulous masterpieces, it will no doubt be a breathtaking display, a beauty with every right to be hung on gallery walls and artfully arranged in the bedrooms of socialites. In my opinion, for all the visual and technological spectacle, there is an emptiness that always persists in AI art. It’s the lack of emotional gain from the automated creative process which I find so off-putting. Speed running the process to maximise output, an AI will not crochet a rug to stave off boredom. It will not carefully loop wool in a manner akin to a meditative experience. It will not make a tiny red devil hat simply because it thought that it would be beautiful.
