Can there be too much art in the world?

I’ll clarify before I proceed: here in this place where I live and spend my days there has never seemed to be any risk of art saturation. We are too few artists in a large community. I am writing to you from a medium-sized city on the Canadian prairies, a government town with a backbone in agriculture and natural resources. We would happily tell you that we have amazing festivals, interesting architecture, and a blossoming art scene… but honestly, they are all shimmering dots on the landscape or calendar connected by long lines of drab nothingness. 

Thus, the reason I posit the question is a bit of a personal one.

It is a question of the amplification effects of generative AI particularly in places where there are an abundance of artistic spaces yet to be filled, and too easily filled by opportunistic algorithms. 

In fact, in a place like my own city where there are many gaps that could be filled by such amplification algorithmic art could easily outperform the efforts of the small (but dedicated) art community. 

It’s not about spirit or effort, but simply volume and practicality.

I spent a week in Paris this summer and the place is lovely, crammed with centuries of human artistic expression inside, outside nearly every building, and painted on the walls and streets, too. For AI to get a foothold there—it feels like so much more of a challenge.

But here (where there is an appetite for culture but seemingly limited humans to construct it) the generative wave could easily become too much… if we let it. And my personal real world, much like the algorithmically generated slop overload of the internet, could clutter up with works of AI art (art, in the loosest definition of the word) and drown out the human voices. 

Video screens with generative slop advertisements are already an eyesore along roadways. Posters in shop windows and taped to notice boards are increasingly spat out by some lazy designer who asked a chatbot for an assist. We’ve displaced our a once-thriving local media with national news aggregators. We are little more than whistle stops on travelling music and theatre productions that are calculated rebakes from larger cultural centres. The latest few food establishments that have gained traction here are imported viral social media darlings with influencer cachet and overpriced menus. And it is early days.

Is it too much, and do we locals stand a chance to hold onto our own artistic identity against the tide of calculated culture?