What Can A.I. Art Teach Us About the Real Thing?

An actual, if elderly and ailing, Havanese is looking up at me as I work, and an Avedon portrait book is open on my desk. What could be more beguiling than combining the two? Then my laptop stutters and pauses, and there it is, eerily similar to what Richard Avedon would have done if confronted with a Havanese. The stark expression, the white background, the implicit anxiety, the intellectual air, the implacable confrontational exchange with the viewer--one could quibble over details, but it is close enough to count. My Havedon is, of course, an image produced by an artificial-intelligence image generator--DALL-E 2, in this case--and the capacity of such systems to make astonishing images in short order is, by now, part of the fabric of our time, or at least our pastimes.