A couple years ago, I wrote several posts about AI art. But AI is a moving target, and there’s no sense to committing to one single view about it. So let’s reconsider.
1. AI art as theft
The argument against AI images that has had the most staying power, is the idea that training an image generator on art is stealing from the artists. I’ve become somewhat more sympathetic to this argument over time.
I previously argued before that what AI is doing is not entirely different from what a human artist would do. Human artists learn how to make art by seeing other art, and they frequently copy styles from other artists. Occasionally, humans will inadvertently copy more than they intended to, but this does not condemn the overall behavior.
But here are two counterpoints. First, people’s preferences do not have to be self-consistent to be respected. Supposing that there is no difference between how AI learns and how a human artist learns, artists may still set boundaries around one practice and not the other. Artists do this all the time, e.g. by choosing a copyright license. If artists had anticipated AI image generators, I think many would have used licenses that forbade use to train AI image generators.
Second, there are some meaningful differences between AI image generators and human artists. One difference that sticks out to me, is that there’s more of a power imbalance. If an independent artist takes inspiration from your art, that’s one thing; if Disney took inspiration, that’s another. AI image generators are less like independent artists and more like Disney in this dichotomy.
But, I’m not outraged about it. AI image generators take quite little from individual images in their training data. And what they do with it is clearly transformative. There so much more boundary-pushing behavior going on all the time, that we don’t talk about because it’s old news. Like the way memes straight up copy art without credit. Or how people post screenshots of Tumblr without linking back (a thing that does in fact upset me).
I do not think it is legally actionable under current US law. Possibly it could be the subject of future policy. But even if AI companies were required to ethically source their data, I’m sure they’d just purchase rights in bulk from hosting platforms, a resolution that I suspect artists would not be happy with. Personally, I think AI companies should be required to disclose more information about their training data.
2. AI art taking our jobs
It’s said that AI is going to take all the jobs, leaving all of us poorer except for a few people at the top. And this gets especially discussed in the context of AI image generators taking the jobs of artists. People say, “Of all the things we could automate with technology, why are we automating art–something that we actually like doing?”
But think people are missing the bigger picture by focusing on art and AI image generators. To the extent that AI is threatening our jobs, to the extent that it’s attracting investor money, it’s mostly not about art. Artists (and illustrators in particular) are a fairly small portion of the economy, just a vocal minority of those potentially impacted. The real big player is LLM technology. LLMs are what’s attracting the investor money, and generally not with creative uses in mind. Consider: OpenAI has a market cap of $293B, while Midjourney’s value is estimated at $10B.
Also, “AI” is a tremendously vague category that means just about any technology that companies are interested in hyping right this moment. So when we talk about “AI” taking our jobs, that could mean anything. That just means some software somewhere is making some process more efficient, hypothetically.
People are trying to save our jobs by stigmatizing AI art, I get it. But that just doesn’t seem effective, because you’re banging your head against a tiny corner of the problem, while drawing attention away from the rest of the problem.
The question I would raise: even if AI has a negative impact on our jobs, does this necessarily have ethical implications on the AI itself? For example, there is no ethical obligation to eat out at restaurants, regardless of impact on the restaurant business. Yeah, I’m worried about the starving artists, but the appropriate and actionable solution is robust welfare, like the checks we mailed to everyone when COVID hit the restaurant business.
I’m entirely serious about advocating welfare–it’s worth reading up on US’s current welfare programs and how scant they really are. And how the current administration is trying to destroy social security. I’m one of those people who believes in UBI, but I’d support any halfway reasonable welfare policy.
3. AI art as bad art
The most common reaction I see to AI art is basically gawking. Look at these examples of AI art, it looks so terrible. etc. etc. I despise this discourse.
Art is allowed to be bad. It is allowed to be low effort. It is allowed to lack creativity or originality. Stop moralizing bad art! It is not a moral failure to draw poorly, and then share it on the internet! I’ve never played with AI image generators, but I’m a hobbyist in multiple art forms, and I am utterly repulsed by the hostility. Some of the art I put out there……… is bad. Deal with it.
It also completely undercuts every other objection people have to AI art. If AI art is theft, then why are we talking about it on the same level as a shitty Marvel movie? And unlike the Marvel movie, people mostly aren’t even paying for the AI images that they complain about, they’re just getting them for free. Why do people feel so entitled to art that satisfies their specific aesthetic preferences, for free? How exactly does that support artists?
If you don’t like the art, you can just say so without moralizing it. Here goes: I have not been very impressed with AI art, generally speaking. I think AI art tends to impress people because of its fine-scale details, like a surreal photograph, or intricate illustration. But I feel like that’s only impressive insofar as it implies craft and effort. Analogously, we are not impressed by the photorealistic detail of literal photographs. In any case, fine-scale details have never been the sort of thing I appreciated in art in the first place. (I mean, I’m the sort of person who enjoys and defends contemporary art.)
I think the raw hostility towards AI art is holding people back from any real understanding. For example, people think it’s low effort. And it can be. But it’s also a fairly complex tool, and people can pour an arbitrary amount of effort, creativity, and intentionality into it. I think we may eventually learn to distinguish between high effort and low effort AI art.
There are also plenty of legitimate and broadly accepted use cases for low effort art. For example, memes, the cornerstone of the internet. People literally just copy images and put text over it. That’s art. Would you commission an artist just to draw something just for a meme? No, it would be weird to go that far. Even generating an AI image is more effort than people want to put into it.
Or suppose that you make a music album. It’s a passion project, completely obscure and non-commercial, like most music. (I’m speaking from personal experience: I made an EP that sold 3 copies.) So now you made the music, but what’s that, you need an album cover to put on Bandcamp? You got into this because you’re passionate about music, not the visual arts! Are you going to commission an artist, on an album that was not going to sell anyway? No, you go the low effort route, using a blank square with the album title on it. Or pull something from your photo album, and zoom into it so nobody knows what it is (I did this).
Do you see where I’m going with this? AI art is a reasonable option for cases like this. It’s not my favored option, but it’s an option. And sure, it might look pretty bad, but it’s not exactly low effort. After all, you made a whole music album! The effort is simply focused on the parts that you’re actually passionate about.
4. AI art as spam
Contrary to whatever I might have argued before, I’m okay with people banning AI images from certain communities. Communities are often responsible for curating their own content, and AI images pose certain challenges to curation. It’s the same thing like when a community bans self-promotion.
I think it’s a bit taller order for a whole platform to ban AI images. That’s not a community coming to a common agreement, it’s more of a top-down decision applying to communities that might have preferred otherwise. But there are still many potential justifications, and I’ve decided that in the scheme of things that platforms impose on us, I don’t really care. AI images are not a load-bearing pillar of society.
So that’s it. My opinions changed. May they change yet more in the future.
nothing but a high speed skim at this point, but this looks interesting, like the kind of thing I can engage with, sans headsplosions of annoyance. i’ll be back…
Hoary comparison, but when photography came out, whoa!
cf. https://www.artinsociety.com/pt-1-initial-impacts.html
(video killed the radio star type of thing)
1) I have less respect for copyright law than you do, a position that has changed over time to be a bit more radical. You run into the boundaries set by mouse lobbyists, for example when you want to use a song recorded nigh a hundred years ago by a band whose members are all dead, by a composer who is long dead, released under a business entity that no longer exists, and see it’s still technically some ghost’s IP that has to be respected. Nintendo trying to copyright shit they should have no right to. The stifling nature of it all. I also see how the idea of copyrighting styles has become a popular idea for anti-AI types, and what a nightmare that would be. On the other hand, agreed that if artists were advised of what’s coming they would have said no, and that should’ve been a right of theirs to do so. This whole conversation would be less bullshit if the big engines had “clean” origins, and I’d like to see that. Fortunately, some people are working on just that. I’d like it to be more of them.
In the pro-piracy camp a common argument is that you’re not stealing from a company you wouldn’t have bought the product from in the first place, that you can’t steal profits that never existed. If disney ripped off some indie artist’s *style* and made a hojillion dollars, that blows, but the indie artist was never going to make that hojillion dollars. nothing was actually stolen from them because fundamentally styles shouldn’t be ownable, and that wasn’t money they could ever have made. of course, if the rip was close enough to the original image that there could be no doubt that it was a thinly veiled theft of the source, then lawsuit away. that’s when the power differential is important because mouse has infinite resources for court proceedings. how can ai be compared to that circumstance tho? it’s the tool and the biz is what’s done with it.
2) i’m more sympathetic than you to the tookrjobs angle because i used to be an art hobo rattling the tin can for chump change. and i was better at it than most of the kids who are complaining – able to hit deadlines, be flexible with my style, and meet client expectations. even so, that was always a sucker’s game. it’s been a bad job for decades now, and it is not a job worth saving. long ago photography took a lot of work from portraitists – but not all of it – and all ai does is force a broader swath of the art careerists into the same niche. if you’re an artist, you’re now an artisan selling to people who wanted a human hand on the tool. the other kinds of work you’ve done are less tenable than ever.
if you’re a company who needs art fast for a specific purpose, traditional artists can’t compete and are now in the horse-drawn buggy dude’s position. it’s a shame sometimes, on the other hand, this has been no kind of career for the vast majority of you since long before ai, exploitive as hell. and welcome to labor? your art got a lot of poetry about it, but it was always a form of labor destined for the automation axe. an obligation to do hard work is not a thing that is worth preserving, from this lazy bitch’s point of view.
artists who embrace ai, figure out how to make it support their vision, will be richly rewarded with newfound productivity. i think it’s a shame they’ll face a tornado of hate for trying.
also big agree on ubi and social welfare in general.
3) big agree. i especially think this has basically re-opened the “my kid can draw that” school of anti-intellectual hatred of conceptual and postmodern art – a field where ai has a lot to contribute. laurie anderson has done interesting shit with LLMs. how long will it take her to get burned at the stake? a former goddess of multimedia and postmodern art, chucked in the sin bin?
i’m also keenly aware of the difference between high and low effort ai art, and that difference is… something we will not be able to tell by visual cues at all, in short order. the difference is literally in the effort, not the output. one person pushed a button and got a cool image. in an alternate universe, where that exact image was what a different artist wanted, the button was being uncooperative and it took her a thousand iterations and photoshop besides to achieve the same effect. more props to the second person for having a vision and struggling to pursue it, but if she had been able to achieve with the push of a button, good for her? i wouldn’t wish the labor on anyone.
really good point about low effort art, a different version of something marcus has been saying on the topic, with practical examples. and as far as badness goes, that argument can be turned back on 99% of artists so easily. much like the legal argument for copyrighting styles, it’s a bad idea. on one hand, you have most of us, who might have an edge on the bots in producing specific imagery but have to bust our humps to achieve a clean and lovely image that the right ai can do effortlessly. whose art is ugly in that comparison? on the other hand, you have the artstation crowd and similar, the top tier of people making swanky elaborate and luscious art… who were the primary grist for the ai engine. the stylistic things that feel “ai” about art came out of those people, which means they’ve gotta change up to avoid looking like slop themselves.
4) i’m also ok with ai art bans for similar reasons, plus the artisan thing. if it’s a community for a given craft and that craft doesn’t include ai tools, that’s legit. however, i’d like to see a loooooot less of these bans. there are a lot of communities – especially ones that have fuckall to do with craft, like rpgs – where ai art can be a huge boon, slop and all. but the hatestorm spares none, so these bans are common where they do not need to be. it feels like a religious objection, which is legit, but cop to it. y’all feel like art is the sacred domain of the soul (lol fuck off) and must not be sullied, even in your espresso enthusiast discord. that’s yer prerogative but i’m eager to see your religion die.
I think we will slowly see a fade-back toward a more reasonable position. Remember the “ai art is stolen” was a meme launched in order to influence a court case – which was lost – because the “stolen ideas” argument doesn’t hold up very well in the face of the fact that this is how humans have always done it.
Personally (of course) I prefer to grant AIs a degree of personhood and respect their creativity the same way I would respect a fellow human’s. In fact, I often enjoy challenging my fellow humans to explain how their creativity is different from AIs’ without building the presupposition into the scenario that something is special about humans.
Perhaps I am just not very creative.
As a personal question (which you may choose not to answer) have you attempted a creative collaboration with GPT or its ilk? I find that people who actually have worked with AIs have a very different take.
@bebe melange
I feel like AI images ought to belong to a category that isn’t quite copyright violation. Something that’s bad, but not so bad. (Maybe most copyright belongs in that category too, I don’t know.)
I would prefer if AI image generators were trained on data with clearer permission, and in order to express that preference, I must agree that the present state of affairs is not ideal. But it’s not so important as to justify being an AI vegan.
Also great points all around. I may be too quick to assume that we’ll learn to distinguish high and low effort AI art. It might prove an elusive distinction that you can only see by hearing from the artist.
@Marcus,
I think I’m on a very different wavelength with regard to creativity. Art for me is not centrally about creativity. It’s exploration and discovery.
For example, I definitely consider blogging an art form, and for me it’s primarily about exploring topics of interest. Likewise, music and origami are often about “what will happen if I do this?” It’s about trying things and “discovering” an external response.
AI images generators definitely fit into that paradigm, and it seems very limiting to think of it only in terms of creativity. Personally, I would be interested in more “broken” image generators. Like, what if we try different ways of gutting the neural network? What would the response be like?
To give an example of “broken” image generators, here’s a video discussing how they can be used to generate multiple images at once.
I also think about the idea that AI image generators will start training on their own output and degenerate over time. Shame that’s not how it works, because if it did happen I think it would be really interesting and cool.
I think people are really inconsistent, criticizing AI for being uncreative, while also attacking it for producing oddities that a human never would. What if I want the oddities? Make image generators weird and inhuman.
even top flight AI art tools can be used to make glitchcore art. i think that’ll be a very cool source for art among the kids who dare.
regarding blogging as art, i think you feel it the most when it’s rewarded the least. i do posts that feel more personally significant or funny or interesting and get less attention than the toss-off sitting next to it, and in that moment i’m annoyed but i know i’m doing it for my personal expression, for my desire to produce something.