AI art is a remix, and we are experiencing an epistemological crisis about it because we don’t have a culturally sanctioned status for the remix as art.

Digital and electronic cultures, dance music standing out as the primary example, have for decades understood art in more layered fashion than the current mainstream paradigm.

In the underground cultures of dance music, originals can be repurposed endlessly as ”building blocks” for new layers of art, in the form of the remix and the art of the DJ.

These cultures do not reject the idea that a remix or a DJ has a purpose of it’s own, or claim that only the originals matter like some mainstream art critics or record industry strongmen have recently stated. The performance: the order, the emphasis, the presentation, is what matters. The story told by the remix artist with the originals has purpose, if it speaks to the listener’s sensibilities. Bad remixes don’t excite anyone, these are called ”train wrecks” for a reason.

The skill and the art of the DJ as an artist in their own right however, has not been properly acknowledged by the mainstream art paradigm. Even if the reality on the ground is that most art we consume is indeed a remix of some kind, the concept of ”original” has to be shoehorned on everything nevertheless. You are either a copy or an original, there is no in-between.

Enter AI art tools, and a nascent moral panic surrounding them: Effectively the machine learning tools do nothing dissimilar to what the DJ or remix artist were already doing. They allow the user to become a ”DJ of pictures”, to tell a new story by using existing pieces of art as tools.

The moral panic is largely an epistemological crisis: We don’t have a socially acceptable status for the legibility of the remix as art in it’s own right. Instead of properly appreciating the remix and the art of the DJ, the remix, or the meme cultures, we have shoehorned all the cultural properties associated onto an 1800’s sheet music publishing -based model of artistic credibility. The fit was never really good, but no-one really cared because the scenes were small, underground and their breaking the rules was largely out-of-sight. In the case of Hip-Hop music, the issues of licensing beats were pushed into the background, while the rapper took the mantelpiece of ”the original artist”. Controversies with sampling were discussed as anomalies, from...

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