Art and Artificial Intelligence: A Smart Idea or Not?
Editorial by Merk
Merk no AI involved
Being a freelance artist is a hustle. I work really hard to do what I do, working long hours, balancing a lot of different skills and projects, wearing a lot of different hats. So, to me, seeing AI art popping up in my feed, in books, in film, in company logos, in memes, in my hometown and everywhere…is disheartening. In the arts community, a number of arguments against AI art are regular chat around the old water lilies cooler:
AI art has no soul or originality
It’s developed on the backs of artists who spend their lives honing their craft
Millions of artists’ work is scraped from the internet and other areas without their knowledge, expressed permission, or compensation
It’s not just another tool for artists—it’s an agent created by corporations to take others’ art, utilize its properties, and create something else as a product for that corporation. It’s a business model of theft, remixing, and reselling
There is inherent bias built into the system that gets amplified by the system
All those concerns can be found online in much more depth than I could explore in a short editorial.
For me, I find AI art falls mainly into three camps. First is the weird, highly rendered, poorly conceived art done by non-artists asking for whatever with a click of a button. It’s pretty forgettable. Second is art made by the artist who uses AI but doesn’t make that clear to the public, deceiving the viewer in how it was made. Third is art made by the artist who uses AI regularly and is generally a dick about it, always seeming to be on the attack regarding it. All of these devalue and degrade art in one way or another.
Art is supposed to do a lot of things: inspire, uplift, question, confront, challenge, agitate, provoke, touch, explore, and immortalize (among so much more). All of these things are rooted in the human soul, not an algorithmic collection of styles and techniques. For a long time now, the value of art in our society has been slowly slipping through our collective fingers, whether it’s getting purposefully dialed back in schools or disparaged through the common phrase many artists hear: “When are you getting a real job?” A general lack of understanding of the power of art, its value, and the effect it has in our society is more common than images of the Sleeping Giant at a Thunder Bay craft show.
For example, imagine someone inquires about a piece of art I have for sale and I say $300—a moderate price for an original piece of art. If I’ve spent 20 hours on that piece, that’s only $15/hr, which is less than minimum wage, not even including the fact that it’s decades of learning and practicing to be able to conceive of it, design it, and create it. It’s very common for people to balk at the cost or try to negotiate the price down. That happens in very few other industries with such frequency. Now that person can just use AI to enter a description and click—instant gratification.
It was already hard to do this job, and now a robot wants it. And he doesn’t even do it well.
AI has its place, and there are definitely benefits in many fields, but AI in art (visual, art, film, music, etc.) feels like a wakeup call. Technology isn’t a linear path of good. Each step “forward” is not necessarily the best path for the future. Sometimes you have to stop and look around at what’s going on. Sometimes you need to ask a question or two before things get too far, before you end up in a place you don’t want to be. I think we’re approaching that point.
Where’s Sarah Connor and a hydraulic press when you need one?