AI Art is Anti Human

I’ve been having a lot of conversations lately about AI and how it’s affecting the art industry. I’ve heard a lot of different perspectives, many of them very strong ones. I’ve heard that AI will be the death of the human artist, that it’s nothing more than a creative tool, that it will make art more accessible to the average person.

However, my biggest takeaway from conversations about AI and art has been this:

We want stories, and we want to know who made them.

Ai art is made by scraping together large datasets of images of human made art, usually from artists who have not consented to their work being used. That dataset is then used against text prompts that spew out an average of whatever the machine learning algorithm thinks is most representative of that prompt. 

The process to make AI art inherently dodges the question of a maker. 

Is the person inputting the text the creator of the art? If it was, then the end product would be the text prompt, not the image. The text prompter hasn’t made any choices about the visual quality of the output except for the subject and occasionally a brief style prompt. “Cute”, “Realistic”, “Blue”. Every other choice is made by an algorithm metabolizing art that was never intended to be chopped up and spit back out. 

So then, is the maker the artists who have been used within the dataset? Kind of, in that their work comprises the entire visual composition of the new image. Except these artists are usually unaware that their work is even being used within these datasets. So there is no intention from these artists to make the final image that the AI generates. 

What we are left with is an anonymous image with no understanding of the maker who created it. No interview could be had asking the artist about the choices they made, why they chose the colors they did, why have this element on the left and that on the right. 

I think for many people, including myself, that feels hollow. 

Compelling stories have a strong presence behind them. It’s why celebrities exist, it’s why we end up adoring certain pieces of media. There is a feeling of presence beyond the pixels on your screen or the words on the page. You can feel the heartbeat of the person behind the art. 

AI art has many technical limitations and issues as it stands, but many of those will be resolved over time. It will learn to depict hands properly. It will learn to show words on t-shirts and signs. It will learn cast shadows. These things are not the ultimate issue of AI art.

Rather, it is one more way to keep us distant from each other. We have enough of those already. The one thing we should never have to worry about is the presence of artists bidding for connection through storytelling. 

I make a solemn promise to you, the reader, to keep AI out of my art. Nothing you see on this website will be AI generated. Not my illustrations or my blog posts. I commit to writing words that only I could, and to create images that only I could compose. 

You’ve met this maker, and I hope you continue to meet others.