hear me out
on a personal level it seems to be a blessing because it will give creative power to people who aren’t gifted artistically. for example, i used ai to come up with some images based on a story plot i had which i could have never made myself because i simply dont possess that ability. now obviously, one would argue, i could outsource that work to artists and pay them, but the bottom line is this is just a side project i think about from time to time and would not want to hire someone specially for this. the fact that i do have such a tool on my disposal lets me actively engage with such ideas and take them to another level. now, these images are very evidently ai generated, so for the time being it seems ai art and human art can be distinguished, but the exponential rate at which technological is growing, ai art will soon be indiscernible from human art.
in a scenario where that does happen, which isn’t far away, i think of ai art just being another form of art. one could argue using prompt to generate specific ai images is a talent too, albeit one of a different kind. but as for human art, it won’t particularly lose it’s value just because an easier counterpart has been developed, but its audience may become smaller and more niche, concentrated in certain communities.- for example, vinyl is celebrated and believed to be the best way to listen to music even in the age of streaming, but only people with certain monetary liberty can purchase vinyl. i fear the same may happen to human art.
there’s a generic rhetoric of ai art not having ‘soul’, however in a recent study more than 75% of people were not able to discern between an abstract painting made by ai and one made by a human.iIf ‘soul’ did truly exist, this number should be a lot lower, ideally zero. we think of ‘soul’ of a painting because we know its human art, but if an unknown work is presented and appears to be human art without us actually knowing whether it is or not, we wont be able to tell the difference, ie the appeal to origin fallacy. however, i do also acknowledge, that the story behind an artwork and the artist is what gives the artwork meaning, not the literal colours or patterns used. which is why I believe that ai art should clearly be labelled as ai art, and that ai art ethics committees should oversee the use of ai art. many other concerns come to mind when I think about the ethical implications of ai art- should the artists whose works are being used to train ai systems be compensated, should there be restrictions or guidelines for ai images of historically sensitive subjects, and who has proprietorship over the ai image?
tying back into my first example of my individual experience with human art, it is very clearly on a personal level. the main concern is the role of ai art in public spaces. corporations, ad agencies, publishers, etc will definitely use ai art as a means to save money by not hiring human artists, and that’s fair because they care about volume and aesthetics, not about the context of an artwork (which I think we apply based on our convenience, ill elaborate in a moment). it sure means some artists losing out on money and jobs, but the use of ai will also create more jobs of supervising the ai and training it to output the desired images. It’s essentially just learning new skills which seems like a tangible first for artists because their value is now directly being challenged for the first time in history. it’s happened in almost every industry before, even before the creation of ai. the general public will eat it up, because multinational capitalistic corporations will shove it down our throats, but the people that do care about emotion and context behind real human art won’t let it die. the human art circle will become smaller, but art has always only to a certain section of the population, however for generations to come which grow up surrounded by ai art, the situation seems dire.
i think the future of art isn’t human vs ai—it’s whether we still know how to care about who’s speaking, not just what’s being said
