On bad art - play, puns, and the shortcomings of artificial intelligence

But when she parted hence, she left her groome
An yron man, which did on her attend
Alwayes, to execute her stedfast doome,
And willed him with Artegall to wend,
And doe what euer thing he did intend.
His name was Talus, made of yron mould,
Immoueable, resistlesse, without end.
Who in his hand an yron flale did hould,
With which he thresht out falshood, and did truth vnfould 

- Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (Book 5, Canto 1, Verse 12)

As the hype concerning generative artificial intelligence is rising and increasingly affecting various parts of society, I have found myself reflecting on the frustrating discussion about its use for the creation of images and novels. Several claims have been made regarding the possibility of using AI for writing novels, and most of these - as far as I know - fail to acknowledge that what is produced is assembled from stolen bits and pieces from existing novels, and require unethical amounts of energy to produce. Another significant point here is that images and texts assembled through generative AI are also bad - not only of a bad quality, but bad because they have no meaning to them. These products are bad art because the badness has no other element to it than badness.  

What I am writing here might at first seem both hermetic and obtuse, yet I do want to distinguish between between art that can be considered bad in terms of its quality, and art that is bad because it has no meaning. These thoughts have been offset by watching episodes of the animated TV series Batfink, a Batman parody that first aired in 1966-67, and my examples are taken from some of these episodes. My main point, however, is that no matter how one evaluates the series Batfink as art, it will always be better than anything produced through the use of generative AI. The reason for this is that the badness of Batfink - to be presented in more detail shortly - has a meaning to it, and that meaning is due to the series being created by human beings. 

 

 

Screenshot from Batfink, episode 77, The Trojan Horse Thief

Batfink was an animated series that parodied the Batman TV series that ran from 1966 to 1968, and might arguably have been intended to benefit from some of the popularity of the Batman franchise. The protagonist is an anthropomorphic bat (with features that also resemble both a cat and a mouse), who fights against various criminals together with his servant Karate, a human sidekick who follows a well-established trope of being both ethnically other and less intelligent (such as Mandrake the Magician's sidekick Lothar, for instance). The series ran for 100 episodes of around 5 minutes each, and is notable for its ludicrous plots, its pompous dialogue, its myriad of over-the-top supervillain antagonists. Moreover, the series relied heavily on recycled animation. Although this is common in a lot of animation, the Batfink series recycled its scenes with such frequency as to appear as a deliberate lampooning of the practice. When considering what animators were capable of producing in the 1960s, the Batfink series is definitely cheaply produced, and it might also be called bad due to its cheap production. 

However, even if we accept the label bad for the series, Batfink also reminds us that badness - here meaning low quality - is not without depth, and not without creativity. Because of this depth and because of this creativity, a series such as Batfink has a kind of cultural merit that can never be attained by anything produced by artificial intelligence. First of all, the dialogue, the plots, and, perhaps above all, the implausibly lucky escapes from deadly situations, are all part of a satirical tone that serves as a loadbearing beam for the series - it parodies and mocks the superhero genre, something that can only be done with intent, with deliberation. 

Secondly, the series contains a plethora of puns and references to various cultural products and to elements specific to its own period. These are deliberate details aimed at an audience expected to catch them, to understand them, and to appreciate them. While most episodes are full of these, a few examples will suffice here.  

One case in point is episode 77, The Trojan Horse Thief. Immediately, the title points to the central reference, namely the story of the wooden horse by which the city of Troy was captured, as recounted in the epic poem The Iliad, attributed to Homer. In the cartoon episode, the horse is a vehicle used by the recurring supervillain Hugo A-go-go to perform robberies. The animated horse is very different from its legendary reference point, in that it is not disguised as a sculpture, it is not given as a present, and it is not brought into a walled city in order to open its gates from the inside. Instead, the mechanical horse is used as a battering ram to break into bank vaults in broad daylight, and although it does contain a human being inside it, that human is its driver, not a contingent of soldiers. If human creativity had not deliberately parodied the legend of the Trojan horse, the appearance of a mechanical horse in an animated series would have no depth to it. Instead, there is a play on a very famous legendary episode.  

  

Screenshot from Batfink, episode 77, The Trojan Horse Thief

A second example is from episode 9, Nuts of the Round Table, where the aforementioned Hugo A-go-go uses robot knights on horseback - living horses this time - to rob banks. Once again, the title indicates the cultural reference that has inspired the plot, namely the legend of King Arthur's knights of the round table. Moreover, the pun on nuts - as in nuts and bolts - is a nod to the robotic nature of these knights. The pun and the reference are both outcomes of human creativity, and they are made deliberately and easily recognisable. 

In addition, it is worth noting that there are two further elements that might also point to topoi from the literary repository to which the stories of King Arthur belong. First of all, the horse - as seen in the screenshot below - is white, a classical image ultimately drawn from Revelation 19:11-16, where the rider on the white horse is a Christlike figure. (Importantly, this is not one of the four horsemen mentioned in Revelation 6.) The white horse is a feature of numerous medieval legends, and has remained a symbol of chivalry in modern cultural parlance. Perhaps the white colour of the animated horse is a nod to this tradition? Moreover, the automaton knight also features in various old stories, be it Talos of Greek legend (mentioned, for instance, in Argonautica), or its early modern version Talus from book 5 of Edmund Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queene, used in this blogpost's epigraph. I do not know whether the animators and script writers of Batfink were familiar with this topos, and I do not know whether the automaton knight is a nod to this literary element. Importantly, however, because the automaton knight was created by human creativity, there is a possibility that we are dealing with a cultural reference. Had this episode been produced by artificial intelligence, however, the question would have been moot, because artificial intelligence does not have intent and can therefore not make use of literary topoi beyond what it copies and cannibalises from other cultural products. 

Screenshot from Batfink, episode 09, Nuts of the Round Table

A final example to be mentioned here is period-specific references. These are elements that only make sense because the intended audiences are familiar with them from their own contemporary frame of reference. Once such case is found in episode 11, Fatman Strikes Again (another pun which points to the very franchise that Batfink lampoons). The plot concerns a man in a fat suit who robs the safes of fat men clubs. Such clubs were once a well-known, if perhaps not widely common, feature of American social life, where fatness could be connected to status and wealth. In the twenty-first century, this reference is antiquated as such clubs are no longer a prominent part of the contemporary discourse - I do not even know if any such clubs still exist. Such period-specific references only carry meaning because there is an intent in them, they are meant for the audiences to recognise. 

Screenshot from Batfink, episode 11, Fatman Strikes Again

These examples are not many, but hopefully enough to illustrate my main point, namely that even art that is mass-produced, cheaply made, and that has rather limited entertainment value has more depth than anything produced through generative artificial intelligence, simply because the human-made art in question has intent, is deliberately bad, and contains elements that are included on purpose, and not because the elements in question just happened to be part of the trove which was plundered for parts when assembling a product through generative artificial intellgience. TV series such as Batfink might be bad art, but the badness is playful, subversive, deliberate, parodic, and there is entertainment to be had in this. This intent is what makes the series art, however bad it might be deemed to be. If the series had been created through generative artificial intelligence, however, it would not be art, but a simulacrum of art, and it would be bad because of was just that, a simulacrum without any depth, meaning or intent whatsoever.