Generative AI tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E have gained widespread attention, with many people using them to create “AI art” — but is that really what it is?
Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is inexorable. The far-flung future that science fiction writers envisioned isn’t as far as we thought it would be, with AI tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, DALL-E, and Gemini already in full swing. No matter what I, or others who share my opinion on the technology, feel about the matter, it will proliferate and become more ubiquitous. This process has already started.
Before I move further into this article, I want to make its main point clear: I don’t believe in or personally condone the use of generative AI—which IBM defines as “deep-learning models that can generate high-quality text, images, and other content based on the data they were trained on”—in the “creation” of art.
That said, I’m also not entirely against AI. Like any tool, it may hold the key to improving people’s quality of life. Take the AI model built by Indian engineering student Priyanjali Gupta, which translates American Sign Language to English text; or the model that can identify whether breast cancer in its early stages will become invasive through advanced imaging.
READ ALSO: The Anti-Fashion: How John Galliano Honored Femininity
But First, a Disclaimer
I’m aware that there are many nuances to this topic that I cannot possibly cover exhaustively, and I don’t intend to for the sake of preventing this article from losing its point or becoming unruly. What I am here to say is that people should be wary about tools and the way they can warp our perceptions of the world, preventing us from meaningfully interacting with it and others (including ourselves). In this case, I’m referring to the use of AI to generate different forms of art—like writing, digital art, music, fashion, photography, and animation.
I’m not pointing fingers or calling out anyone who does this. At the end of the day, you have full control over your choices and what tools you use. My opinion doesn’t make me “good” or “bad” on the moral scale: it’s just a result of following the topic of generative AI for a while now. It’s also something I’ve been meaning to express as a writer, artist, and overall appreciator of the arts (which, I must reiterate, I don’t consider myself an expert on).
As to the scope and limitations of this piece, there are plenty: I’ll mostly be discussing generative AI in the fields of visual art and writing, as these are the disciplines that I’m most familiar with. My only hope for this piece is that it gives readers a fresh outlook and newfound appreciation for art—and maybe by extension, life—as well as the chance to reassess and challenge their existing notions on what it means to create.
The Bears of Chauvet Cave
When I think about the discourse on AI art, my mind drifts to the bears of Chauvet cave in the Ardèche valley of southern France, which dates back to around 30,000 B.C. The expansive structure contains an assemblage of animal paintings on its walls, from lions to rhinoceroses, and yes, even cave bears—an early ancestor of today’s bears. Many of the bears (including one in particular that remains popular in online communities) are rendered in a red, terracotta-like color.
Even thousands of years ago, someone out there, in a time when modernity was not even a concept, had seen cave bears—observed them often enough to remember their forms and paint them onto the cave, creating stylized portraits that depicted the bears’ silhouettes through line weight. If you look closely, you may even see the curve of a cute little smile on their muzzles. The Bradshaw Foundation states that the individual likely used a technique called “stump-drawing,” emphasizing parts of the figure in thicker strokes using their fingers or a piece of hide. The foundation goes as far as saying that this may be a form of perspective—and if so, one of the earliest.
There were certainly no known art universities at the time, or even what we call professional artists. There were just people who felt the impulse to create, and if we dig deeper, to express and record their experiences through their own ideas, decision-making, and skills. These, to me, are what lie at the heart of creating art.
The Process
Those in favor of generative AI have argued that it will democratize art. Now, anyone with the right prompts and some patience can use the tools to instantaneously create a somewhat polished piece of work. Anyone can be an artist—but as the Chauvet cave bear paintings prove, that has always been the case.
No one has ever been barred from expressing themselves or creating, even during the most harrowing periods of history.
So maybe the argument is: now anyone can make stunning, “professional-level” art. Anyone can create a complete piece, have an AI tool bring it into being without all the extra work usually involved in the process. But is creating a finished product with a few clicks and words really the whole purpose of art?
I’m not going to lie, there are days when writing and drawing take a lot from me. I sometimes feel exhausted or frustrated trying to compose the right sentence, or repeatedly erasing lines to get what I’m envisioning in my head. Contrary to what others might think, even with digital tools at our disposal, art is still a lot of work. Yet I wouldn’t trade the entire process for anything: not even the promise that what I imagine (and more) will be generated automatically. As tiring as it can be to create, there’s something rewarding about the journey, more than the finished product, cliché as it sounds.
Using AI would, to a certain extent, rob me of creative autonomy and decisions that I can call my own. Seeing my writing and art evolve, even improve, through years of study and practice is part of what makes it, well, fun. The process behind art is a part of its appeal and value.
Ted Chiang, who stands as one of the finest science fiction writers today, recently released a compelling article for The New Yorker entitled “Why A.I. Isn’t Going To Make Art.” In it, he defines art as “something that results from making a lot of choices.”
“When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type; to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices,” Chiang explains.
The same goes for photography and visual art. While photography’s status as an art form was initially met with skepticism in its early years (because it “lacked something beyond mere mechanism at the bottom of it”), we now know there’s a lot of decision-making involved in using a camera—from deciding on the amount of exposure one wants in a picture to the kinds of angles present in it.
“An artist—whether working digitally or with paint—implicitly makes far more decisions during the process of making a painting than would fit into a text prompt of a few hundred words,” Chiang continues.
Generative AI involves none of the decision-making that these mediums require, though it’s possible to use it that way. Chiang mentions film director Bennett Miller, who refined his text prompts often over the course of many sessions to create images exactly the way he wanted them to be. Still, cases like these are the exception, rather than the norm. As Chiang says, in the world of technology, AI isn’t made for tedious processes: it’s made to be a product that works fast and generates a lot with little effort.
But we need to ask ourselves if generating “polished” work instantaneously is really what makes art valuable, meaningful, and even beautiful?
To Make Art Is to Be Human
AI doesn’t know what it’s like to stub your toe, to feel the ache of missing someone. It can approximate based on data, but it can never know, and therefore whatever it puts out ends up being eerily “perfect” (though that’s also arguable), hollow, and oftentimes derivative (because it is, though we’ll get to that later).
Humans, on the other hand, are nothing but flesh, nerves, and feelings. We perceive, experience, and process the world through complex thoughts and emotions—and for as long as we’ve been able to, we’ve felt compelled to express these things through art.
Art doesn’t have to be groundbreaking, deep, or even technically brilliant to be considered art. It just has to be human.
What does that mean? I’ll give a few examples in the form of anecdotes.
My mother has kept all my old drawings from when I was a child. They’re nothing but scribbles, one a Mother’s Day card that I haphazardly stuck a red ribbon on, forming the shape of a heart. I get a bit flustered when I see my old pieces, but still, she hangs them in frames, displays them beneath glass table covers.
Many children come into this world wanting to express themselves through art, but somewhere along the way, they begin demanding more from themselves than just the simple and delightful act of creation.
I remember a schoolmate of mine who liked drawing “blobs.” Little round characters that she and her older brother thought of together. They had silly little hairstyles and charming (albeit quintessentially early 2000s) clothes. I remember her drawing them on our notebooks, post-its, everywhere she could reach. She always dreamt of being creative, and eventually went on to become a filmmaker before passing away too soon. I still remember those blobs, probably more than some pieces I’ve seen at big museums.
When a team presented Studio Ghibli founder and artist, Hayao Miyazaki, with a clip of CGI humans moving from an AI model, the animation behemoth was distressed, to say the least. In the clip, one can see a figure that just vaguely resembles a human, crawling on the floor in a way that I can only describe as grotesque.
“This is an example of fast movement that we had the model learn. […] It doesn’t feel any pain and has no concept of protecting its head. It uses its head like a leg. This movement is so creepy, and could be applied to zombie video games. Artificial intelligence could present us with grotesque movements which we humans can’t imagine,” they tell him.
“Every morning, not in recent days, but I see my friend who has a disability. It’s so hard for him to just do a high five, his arm with stiff muscle reaching out to my hand,” Miyazaki replies. “Now, thinking of him, I can’t watch this stuff and find it interesting. Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is or whatsoever.”
Tilly Losch, a dancer and wife to British poet Edward James, once climbed up the carpeted stairs of their West Sussex home from the bathroom to bedroom, leaving wet footprints in her wake. James was so smitten with the prints that he had them woven onto the carpet, immortalizing the marks.
One of the most famous pieces of modern art is Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.).” Currently in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), it’s made up of a pile of candies, each one in colorful wrappers, usually stacked against the corner of a wall. The pile always weighs around 175 pounds—the weight of Torres’ late partner Ross Laycock when he died of AIDS complications in 1991. “As visitors take candy, the configuration changes, linking the participatory action with loss—even though the work holds the potential for endless replenishment,” the AIC writes in a statement on the piece.
In a series of 50 etching and drypoint works called The War, Otto Dix drew the horrors that he saw in the trenches of World War I in graphic detail. Through his works, war was not a glorious or heroic pursuit, but something sinister and ultimately futile. The Museum of Modern Art writes in its description of the collection: “For Dix, these prints were like an exorcism.”
The list goes on and on, encompassing a variety of individual perspectives, disciplines, genres, and periods of history. Maybe I’m being a bit sentimental. Perhaps generative AI will become something else entirely in the future. But it’s just not human. I don’t think it has the ability to be a good conduit for art and self-expression, because it will never understand life from where we’re standing.
Legal and Ethical Issues
The argument that often defends generative AI art is that it should be seen as a tool as well; nothing different from the painting software, traditional materials, and other things an artist might use to create art. Yet the fact of the matter is that generative AI stays true to its name: it just generates, rather than creates.
Perhaps there is an idea in the form of text prompts that one feeds it, but ultimately, the decision-making and perspective of the artist isn’t present. Instead, the tool regurgitates something based on the materials or “data” that trained them, and this is where things get complicated.
People have already been submitting AI art to competitions (and winning), or publishing them under their names, claiming they’re original works. Yet as many news outlets have covered, most of what AI tools generate are not only derivative (pulling elements from hundreds, if not thousands, of existing works), but also incapable of transforming and transcending the materials they pull from. This results in art that is “just a mechanized ‘blending together’ [of the source material],” as attorney Matthew Butterick explains in The New Yorker.
Worse, AI companies seem to be scraping data or elements from works without consent and proper compensation for their creators. This applies to other AI-generated outputs as well, including writing and music. On August 26, 2023, renowned writer Margaret Atwood came forward with a piece for The Atlantic on how even her works have been subjected to AI meddling.
“To add insult to injury, the bot is being trained on pirated copies of my books. Now, really! How cheap is that?” she writes. “Would it kill these companies to shell out the measly price of 33 books? They intend to make a lot of money off the entities they have reared and fattened on my words, so they could at least buy me a coffee.”
It’s quite unfair to think that artists, writers, and other creators are being entitled when they try to protect what they made with their own efforts. It makes me wonder how anyone in good conscience could use generative AI to lay claim over art that was built on the backs of people who’ve spent their entire lives honing their crafts.
To me, it’s one thing to take inspiration from someone else, and another to use a tool that mashes works together in a way that feels disingenuous. Even inspiration comes with work: there’s a purposeful process that goes into choosing techniques from your favorite writer or artist, then applying them in your own way, to your own works.
This doesn’t begin to cover the other pressing ethical and environmental concerns that AI has brought to the table, including the exploitation of workers in countries like Africa and the Philippines, as well as rising water and energy usage.
What It Means to Create
While my publishing career is far from long, I’ve met a number of local artists through exhibitions and shows, each of them with a story to tell—experiences that inform the work they make. Whether it was scrounging up enough funds to purchase art supplies during the pandemic or simply reminiscing about someone they lost, their works are an amalgamation of what it means to live in our messy, glorious world. When I think about their art, I’m always going to feel some level of admiration, regardless of my own preferences as a viewer.
Behind every word, stroke, sound, and what have you, are sleepless nights, broken hearts, loving gestures, painful rejections, daring experimentation, and triumphant accomplishments that can’t be summed up inside a text box. There’s a lot of vulnerability involved in creating art, whether someone is a professional or just a casual practitioner. It’s cathartic and healing, which is why art therapy exists. It’s painful and ugly, but these things give life meaning too.
As filmmaker Guillermo del Toro expresses in a recent interview with BFI: “The value of art is not how much it costs and how little effort it requires, it’s how much would you risk to be in its presence.”
When I see AI art, I feel nothing; or maybe the emptiness in my chest is something as I stare into a distorted interpretation of the things that make life—and human creativity—so rich and vibrant.
I’ll end this article with a quote from Ted Chiang, from his aforementioned The New Yorker piece: “We are all products of what has come before us, but it’s by living our lives in interaction with others that we bring meaning into the world. That is something that an auto-complete algorithm can never do, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
Banner photo “Peepster” from the Art AI Gallery website.
.jpg){kind=link}