This isn’t really a hot take in regards to the use of AI in art fields or anything, just more of my opinions about it after 4 years of having to live with it. The reason why I haven’t written anything about AI, in general, is because I felt like I wasn’t informed enough to give a definitive opinion about the subject. The last time I posted anything close to the topic, was about Chatbots plaguing fandom in 2023, I was still echoing someone’s points in their video and I was missing the bigger picture. It really wasn’t a deep dive that was worth anything, nor do I recommend reading now. I’ve grown up since then and have finally formed my own opinions. Consider this my “official statement about Generative AI” if that means anything.
I’m gonna be frank, I really wanted to come to a place of good faith and be able to agree-disagree about the use of AI. I didn’t want to be the type of person to outright dismiss a new technology, just because I don’t understand it. Innovation has given us many things and has allowed us to do so much that we haven’t before. Whether that’s a good or bad thing, is up to interpretation. I like technology, sometimes a new way of doing the same things you did but better is helpful and dare I say it, really cool. Unlike NFTs and Cryptocurrency, AI itself isn’t completely useless. If used in the right fields, it could provide a safer work environment by offloading tasks that may be too dangerous for a human person to do. It could also do tasks that can assist other people to do their job faster
But there are some programs that I fail to understand what its actual use is. Generative AI is something I don’t see having a future, yet Silicon Valley keeps peddling it like it’s somehow going to be an upgrade. I’m probably not the only one who is completely tired with every single thing on the internet/media landscape being surrounded in mediocre slop with its sole purpose of existing to make money, but Generative AI exacerbates the problem ten-fold. You cannot go on the internet without seeing that shit everywhere, you’ll have to be on the lookout all the time if you want to avoid it. You can find yourself supporting work that wasn’t made by a human person if you’re not paying attention! Generative AI has evolved to the point that it could genuinely fool a person that isn’t familiar with art/actively avoiding it 24/7.
The worst part about these programs is that they're trained off the backs of other people's copyrighted works WITHOUT their consent. It wasn’t disclosed to the general public until after people started realizing after the fact. AI “art” looks decent as it is BECAUSE of those works. I f you were to feed the program its own terrible crap, it’ll keep generating that crap until it gets worse and worse. It is completely reliant on other people’s work, it is a machine of plagiarism from here.
You could make the argument that Generative AI is just another tool for artists, much like Photoshop. I personally disagree for a few reasons;
Generative AI was not conceived as a way to help artists, but as something to replace them all together. If the companies creating these programs genuinely cared about them, then why are copyrighted works being used as training data without permission? Public domain was ripe for the taking, the copyright holders have long since given up their rights to their work there. I don’t understand why large corporations feel like they’re entitled to a person’s work just because they’ve decided to share it for public viewing. If they can’t even be bothered to ask for permission (even if it has the possibility of being rejected), they've demonstrated a lack of respect towards artists. They might as well have robbed an art museum, hung up the stolen artwork, c hanged the description to credit themselves for making it.
Generative AI is not useful in creating artworks faster. I’ve been making art for as long as I can remember, and I can confidently say that AI has not helped me at all.
It’s terrible at creating references. The details often meld together in an indecipherable mess, making it impossible to study the form or how to render certain materials of the environment/figure. Sometimes the AI programs defy the laws of physics, with details that would be impossible in real life (e.i. Random flowers/grass growing in a clean kitchen). You’re better off looking through magazines, books and even your own pictures to use as a guide.
It’s terrible at making concepts. The images are generic and have no thought process behind its decisions. Not one single thing about it is intentional, nor consistent enough to use as inspiration for high quality work. Depending on the model, it adds or takes away things that weren’t in the original prompt. You’ll have to be very specific in order to get it to work. You could argue that it would be the same with human artists, but the difference is they have enough clarity to understand when a certain element isn’t something a client wants and can change a specific thing WITHOUT having to mess with everything else.
It’s a terrible learning tool for artists. An important part of art is the process of creating it. There is a reason why Behind The Scenes footage, Artist’s notes, Work in Progress posts and Update logs exist; it’s to highlight the decisions creatives have made during the creation of the art. Something that is incredibly valuable when trying to understand what works, what doesn’t, and why. The final result is the only thing considered by the AI, which causes it to repeat the same mistakes time and time again without recognizing what to improve on. It does not teach you the fundamentals, how to apply them, and how to create the right message/symbolism. They’ve also been discovered to make shit up when it comes to information, so how much can you really trust any of their references/guides?
It’s a crutch that rewards instant gratification. This point is an expansion to the previous one. AI is the equivalent of tracing on top of someone else’s work and claiming it as your own. Not only did you rob the original work, but you also robbed yourself of the opportunity to get better. Skills do not come overnight, they are meant to be honed for years and with tons of failures behind that journey. Mistakes are a part of learning, but AI presents a unique type of problem where it doesn’t allow the person to fail at all. It’s conditioning a user to be satisfied with the bare minimum, rather than finding genuine pride in something they worked hard for. You’re not making anything when you use AI, you’re just typing a bunch of words and hoping that it’ll give you something you like enough.
Art Programs like Photoshop, Clip Studio Paint, Krita, etc. don’t give you a fully rendered image right from the get-go, the same way generative AI does. If it really was an art program, it would probably let you play around with it like a sandbox. But no it doesn’t. Editing it doesn’t count. I’m talking about being fully reliant on the program without having to use anything else. You’re expected to just type in words and let it do its thing. It’s the same thing as telling someone to do something for you, hoping that the invested time (and sometimes money) was worth it. It’s faster, but what are you even going to get out of it? More images that you’ll tire of a few days later? It’s more consumerism from here.
Who are these Generative AI programs really for? I don’t exactly see any practical use out of them at all. I don’t quite understand what some people find appealing about its output, other than that it looks okay for 5 seconds, before you realize the nonsensical details/inconsistency, or that it's funny bad. It adds very little meaning to its decisions (because it’s a machine) and there isn’t even any technical skill involved to justify praise, beyond the words “good enough”.
Honestly, most of this issue stems from the fact that society doesn’t value Art as a subject. Everyone thinks they can create great artwork right from the get-go, but miss the fact that it takes a lot of dedication and skill to do, as much as everything else. Whenever you are paying for an artist’s work, you are paying for their time and labour like any other trade. Well-crafted art is more than the sum of their parts, the labour and decisions that go into the final result are the reason that all this work EXISTS in the first place. Art didn’t just instantly poof into existence, it was created the same way the things you use were. It was designed with thought and effort put into it. No matter how much you can half-ass product, people still made an effort to make it exist. For every great thing that’s made, there’s a thousand more drafts that never made the cut and get discarded. It’s easy to critique art and think about making it, but doing it yourself and releasing it for the general public to see is a whole other can of worms.
You may be thinking what is even the point of this? Why are you so mad about work that doesn’t hold any value? If you currently hold this opinion, I highly encourage you to ask yourself; ‘If it really wasn’t that valuable in the first place, then why did a company steal it?’
It doesn’t matter if you don’t consider my work valuable, I want my fucking work back. You do not have the right to take something I poured countless hours on for fun, only to use it so you can peddle more consumerism by promoting some machine that creates more slop. I have the right to be mad when someone steals my stuff to use and waves it around my face like they can somehow do “better” because they typed a few words in a machine. These programs have no real common sense to understand which work is copyrighted or not, they’ll just take the data that is being given to them by the people running the machine. Using AI as your shield against potential consequences, is the same as reuploading a pre-existing youtube video with the description that reads “No copyright infringement intended. All rights reserved to their original creators” with no links to the artists themselves.
No corporation, especially a tech company, should be the arbitrator of whether or not a personal work or small business’s portfolio should be taken for their databases. If I fucking wanted to get my artwork scraped, I would have opted in with my own volition. I didn’t go into a platform expecting my stuff (no matter how terrible the quality is) to be used for a technology that is made for the purpose of replacing my labour. I should be able to decide whether or not my work is valuable enough to be scraped to be put into a machine. This wasn’t a fucking problem 3 or 4 years ago! The general public didn’t expect ANY of the work they’ve put out over the years to be funneled into AI slop! Even if you were to say that you should have read the fine print, it’s not only filled with legal jargon for the purpose of making the third party give up in reading the Terms and Conditions, but it most likely didn’t have any direct laws/policies regarding the use of AI back then!
And how could it? Even if we were speculating about AI, we still weren’t sure what the present would be when technology eventually updated once again. The lack of transparency has made using AI in creative fields a complete non-starter. People behind these programs have made it very difficult to know what the machine is being trained on exactly, so we can only speculate from the outputs that are suspiciously similar to some artists’ works. I don’t think blaming artists for not being prepared for the future at all is a reasonable ask. I HIGHLY doubt any person would have or liked to have foreseen a future; where they have to be paranoid about their work being eventually funneled into a machine to perpetuate a broken capitalistic system. I don’t want to live that life. Nor do I want that for others who genuinely care about their work too.
Art is not just algorithms and datasets, it involves human psychology and culture. Something that is a lot more complicated to track than mere statistics. As it stands, Generative AI has no place in Art. I don’t see it happening any time soon. If its whole purpose is another way to allow more plagiarism and consumerism, then I have no reason to support its use in any creative field.