By Moses Cirulis
Presented by Modest Metamodernist
In these essays, I hope to put forth a modest synthesis of AI art and writing. To keep it short, I believe that AI Art is an unfortunate trend but not without precedent.
Read on…
Is AI Art Theft?
This is the central claim from most of my fellow artists-the idea is that AI art programs steal images from other artists and essentially bashes them together in order to make its imagery.
Technically, though, this is incorrect-though it’s difficult to explain exactly why without sounding like a techbro AI supporter. My reasoning though is based on what an Art AI actually does-at least, based on my experience.
Given my experience with Midjourney, what the AI actually does is use the imagery it’s trained on purely for reference purposes. In addition to that art trained network, Art AIs use a neural language net, and in the case of iterative AIs like Midjourney, learns to make art based on the selections of its users, defining with each selection for the machine what is “art”.
I’ll put it this way-you can get a generic looking knight in a Frank Frazzetta-esque pose using Midjourney, but you can’t get a Frazzetta piece. Reference, not tracing.
If referencing images randomly gleaned from the internet in order to learn how to paint a certain thing counts as stealing now, then a massive number of human artists are in trouble for doing basically the same thing to AI is doing. There’s even a book out there called “Steal Like an Artist”.
So we need to sober up a bit. There are better arguments for why AI art makes human artists’ lives harder (my own included, for the record).
A Bakery Analogy
Above is a cartoon that I saw going around that likens AI art to the baking of instant cake by taking slices from multiple other cakes. This isn’t how AI works according to anyone who actually works with AI, but I digress-the end of the cartoon shows the crowd being wowed by the “instant cake”, leaving the bakers in the dust.
Reality, once again, is a bit more complicated, but a better analogy already exists-big grocery store sheet cake vs. a good bakery cake.
Sheet cakes made in an industrial kitchen can be pumped out at a ludicrous pace-not quite so fast as to render them instant, but ridiculously fast compared to a dedicated bakery. And the recipes for these sheet cakes are in fact gleaned from other bakeries’ cakes, adapted to produce a rapid result, at least compared to the painstaking process of a traditional bakery.
It’s a slab of cake product with some icing product on top. That’s it.
If you’re North American like me, chances are you’ve had sheet cake at least once, at some large gathering. Is it better than a good quality bakery cake? Assuming you share my embodied experience, no.
So it is with AI art and writing, compared to their human counterparts. Sure they can quickly pump out words and images, but it takes a human’s embodied experience to make sense of physical space, concepts like freedom and enslavement, even basic things like hands. All of that takes embodied experience that these AIs simply don’t have.
Let’s be honest here-would an AI have the embodied experience necessary to write the above sheet cake analogy?
When I was working with Midjourney, the program could make a convincing and dynamic sitting pose, but it couldn’t grok that said pose shouldn’t go right through the table. AI Art is simply riddled with errors, and cannot replace dedicated human writers and artists.
Much like how sheet cake can’t replace bakers.
AI Arts vs. the Human Pursuit of Meaning
AI was used to produce the winner of an art fair this year. It was also used, in part, to write this article on Metamodern individuality [1]-and likely countless other articles. But, if we are to believe what automation was promised to offer us, art and writing wasn’t supposed to be what the robots took over.
I’m a bit young to have taken utopian futurism too seriously, but even when I was a kid, I remember that robots and automation were supposed to take over the menial labour tasks, leaving us humans to do the conceptual heavy lifting of real contemplation and aesthetic production.
Instead, we have Roombas that bump into walls, while serious robotics replace our highest human endeavours. Humans are doing more menial labour than ever, it seems-and more of the monotonous sort of labour at that. This isn’t what we signed up for.
The reason why so many human artists are putting up no AI banners to replace their Artstation portfolios is a bit more fundamental than questions of art theft and consent, as important as these things are. It’s a question of who and what gets to create human meaning itself.
For those of you who think that AI art is a way out of our meaning crisis-I’m sorry to say to you, it isn’t. It will lead, probably, only to a more disenchanted, hypermodern world. [2]
On AI and Art Plagiarism
There have been numerous art plagiarists throughout history. Most, thankfully, have been forgotten.
But there is one that, to this day, is celebrated. The one artist I truly despise. Roy Lichtenstein.
He has a rather famous painting, called “Whaam!”-just a reproduction of a couple of panels drawn by working class comic artists Irv Novick and Russ Heath. Lichtenstein’s piece sold to the Tate Art Gallery for millions of dollars. To my knowledge, neither Novick nor Heath still have been credited or compensated for this. Heath still lives on a relative pittance. [3]
Anyone who’s outraged about AI art and not plagiarism this flagrant is a hypocrite. I’ll also add that they don’t know what they’re talking about, because art history has examples of theft far worse even than this. AIs don’t even copyright their work, thankfully, and yet people are spending all their time yelling about them rather than worse plagiarists?
It’s the Lichtensteins of the world that I despise. I can’t muster the same amount of hate for a mindless machine.
Art Accessibility
Another point that anti-AI Art folks tend to lose in the mix is that for the most part, it’s aimed at regular people who can’t make art. It removes a barrier for them, allowing them to quickly imagine something that they’ve dreamed of for a long time. Artists often don’t understand that this represents a barrier and source of frustration for the average person that they can’t express themselves artistically.
Basically, any non-artist can go to an AI, punch in a prompt, and get a perfectly generic image of something that they couldn’t otherwise make. Many of these folks can’t otherwise afford to commission art at all-at least not at the rate that artists need.
If they can afford an artist, then they can still take their image as a reference to an artist who can, in turn, make them a much more expressive and unique piece.
Should I mourn that? I don’t know.
Do bakers mourn people who eat sheet cake?
Footnotes:
[1] The final article only partially uses AI-the deeper, meaningful work is all done here by Germane Marvel, who talks here about Hypermodernism, Metamodernism, and the individual: https://medium.com/@germanemarvel/metamodern-individualism-901a519079ba
[2] Brent Cooper on the Hypermodern Highway to Hell-just the opening paragraph alone is highly apt: https://medium.com/the-abs-tract-organization/the-hypermodern-highway-to-hell-1d3a6441b540
[3] Russ Heath’s comic on the success of Roy Lictenstien’s appropriation and his own relative poverty, archived by Wikipedia: https://web.archive.org/web/20200918042826/https://comicsalliance.com/russ-heaths-comic-about-being-ripped-off-by-roy-lichtenstein-will-give-you-a-new-appreciation-for-the-hero-initiative/