Artificial intelligence is making a lot of people angry. In December 2022, things apparently came to a head: Community members on the popular artist platform art station they were staging protests against the art of AI, and the technology’s biggest supporters wasted no time in pushing back the wave of outrage. Heck even Beeple intervened with a fantastic visual born from the whole debacle.
Today this craze continues and is just the symptomatic culmination of months of technological development and widespread diffusion of AI-assisted artistic tools. The pressure has been building and has now broken the surface. The resulting avalanche of noise that has dominated online spaces has revealed, if nothing else, the true nature of the arguments of those who see AI art as a wanton attack on “real” artists and even humanity itself. The only problem is that those arguments don’t stand up to scrutiny. Instead, they reveal a much deeper and more philosophical concern.
The case against the art of AI
Two main criticisms of AI art tools come up when you examine all the static on social media. The first is the easiest to dismiss, as it claims that AI art programs mix or stitch together existing images to create something new. That’s just not how technology works. These AI models “learn” to create in ways that are not entirely dissimilar to how the brain learns. The process that AI art programs use to create images is much more akin to construction than collage.
At first, the second statement seems to imply a much more serious and essential concern. AI art programs train on billions of images pulled from the internet. MidJourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion do not discriminate in data collection. The images used to train these models include artists’ creations and copyrighted works. The ethical violation, critics claim, is that this was done without the consent or knowledge of these artists. There is some validity to that criticism, and this could be a circumstance where technology is simply outpacing our ability to use it ethically.
But there is also a much deeper and more emotional concern that goes into the nature of art. The idea that programs can now do what only humans could do before – take massive amounts of data in the form of artistic influences, images and traditions and turn it into a result – strikes the most sensitive existential nerves. From their arguments, it is possible that AI art critics’ concern about a violation of ethics could be influenced emotionally, altering deeper and more intellectual debates. It is factually shocking that a machine could partake in this seemingly sacred and uniquely human ability alongside us. It could be said that it has always felt that way for many.
That’s not to belittle anyone who feels this way. Such existential fear is completely understandable, and it is doubtful that anyone is completely immune to it. Even the world’s greatest AI advocates, researchers, and technological philosophers have sometimes felt a heartbreaking tug at the idea of machines matching and surpassing human capability. At no time is this feeling more poignant than when technology touches what some call the sacred realm of the soul. Even the non-religious are quick to argue that there is something ineffable in us, some spark or spirit that no algorithm, no matter how highly skilled, could ever invade.
AI art is no different from human art
But arguing that AI art programs are unethical because they are based on the work of artists around the world reveals a misunderstanding and denial of human nature and creative endeavors. An illustrator or a painter who creates an image does so based on countless influences, including images he has seen throughout his life. They may have found those images and traditions in a museum, in a book, at university, or online. As technology increasingly dominates our lives, artists are even more likely to be inspired by other people’s work they find online.
Who would say that they need the consent of those artists to create? Plagiarism, shout the detractors of AI art tools, as if it were a demolishing argument against the technology. Yes, if someone builds and trains an AI art model specifically on an artist’s work, that’s plagiarism. But such behavior was a problem long before anyone even conceived of building these tools. Claiming that AI art programs encourage plagiarism is no different than claiming that buying a guitar inspires people to rip off existing musical works.
There are several other pernicious suggestions underlying the anti-AI art claims proliferating online recently. Some of the most shameful involve the people using these programs being somehow unworthy of owning a tool that allows them to create. The subtle but misleading claim boils down to little more than this: only those who have dedicated their careers and lives to art are worthy of creatively experimenting with said technology.
These statements are half concessions to so-called “legitimate” uses of artificial intelligence in creative endeavors, only to pull the rug out from under anyone they deem unworthy of the “artist” title. True artists who use AI as a tool in their work, they say, are fundamentally different (and, of course, less morally egregious) than the average commoner who dares to use prompt-based AI programs to explore and create something. new.
To many non-artists, that argument may seem weak and even insulting. The question of artistic authority and authorship has been under discussion for a long time: many novels, like William Gaddis’s. the acknowledgments — directly confronting the problem of “frauds, forgeries and forgeries” in art, and often the conclusion about originality had an unequivocal theme of inevitability. And speaking from an economic point of view, it would be difficult to convince willing buyers of altruistic ideas about the irreducibility of human subjectivity. Suffice to say that to most in space, a defense of human-only art will seem arrogant. Worse still, the art world has often practiced a kind of barrier that hinders genuine artistic talent despite the opposition of several generations.
In short, the abundance of human artists who gleefully take a negative stance on AI art is discouraging for those involved in AI-generated art. But the debate is live.
“Creation is our best weapon,” he said. a Twitter post of the December 2022 outbreak with a hand drawn soldier in the style of a Spartan warrior. The soldier’s shield has been drawn to mimic the now popular anti-AI symbol circulating on social media. The post has more than 33,000 likes. It’s a shame that so many people see the dynamics of the AI-art tool as a literal struggle. You may feel that way now, but gloating and mythologizing your position is probably not the best tact for you, right or wrong.
The future does not go away
AI art tools are helping to democratize art. Instead of isolating themselves as a sacred class of citizens who are the sole guardians of the truth, beauty, and meaning of artistic expression, artists could benefit from welcoming and encouraging it. Imagine the entire art community supporting, engaging, and promoting AI art.
One of the most valid and disturbing criticisms going around revolves around the idea that people will use these tools to usher in a new era of lewdness or pornographic deepfakes of anyone whose face has appeared on the Internet. This is indeed a problem. While programs like MidJourney claim to automatically block text input that is explicitly violent or bordering on “adult content”, users have already found clever ways around this, carefully crafting their prompts without setting off any moderation alarms. Spend plenty of time at MidJourney’s Discord, and you’ll see plenty of people iterating on amazingly detailed images of nearly naked, hypersexualized women and men. It is a problem, but not incomparable.
Like artistic plagiarism, this problem is not unique to AI art tools. Deepfakes have existed since the late 1990s, and plagiarism is possibly as old as humanity itself. Technological developments that make it easier for society to do or achieve amazing things inherently make it easier for us to do or achieve terrible things. That’s more a reflection of the people behind the tools than the tools themselves. This fact is also not a reason to end technological advancement altogether.
Technological advances aren’t going away anytime soon, and neither are AI art tools. The ethical concerns raised by so many of their detractors have their place in a larger conversation about how we should move forward as a society fairly and intentionally with them. But the straw man arguments so often brought against them in bad faith have no place in that conversation.
Few people are opposed to transparency and disclosure when it comes to using these tools. Fewer still would say that there are no issues arising from these tools that are not worth serious consideration and discussion. But the fear-fueled backlash against AI art and the people who use and defend it is getting us nowhere. It is relevant that many AI art critics are also opposed to the concept of blockchain and NFTs — logically speaking, an entirely separate issue.
However, the state of the art AI debate is not overwhelmingly surprising. History is littered with new technologies disrupting established systems and subsequently facing fierce opposition. As long as humans are humans, that’s likely to be the case. But the degree and severity of that setback doesn’t always have to be the same every time. Artists are supposedly in the best position to see novelty with nuances. But the trick with that is wanting.
