Artificial Intelligence: AI: AI and the Artist

AI Is Blurring the Definition of Artist

• If artificial intelligence is used to create images, can the final product really be thought of as art? Should there be a threshold of influence over the final product that an artist needs to wield?
• We found that people couldn’t tell the difference: Seventy-five percent of the time, they thought the AICAN-generated images had been produced by a human artist.

• Of course, just because machines can almost autonomously produce art, it doesn’t mean they will replace artists. It simply means that artists will have an additional creative tool at their disposal, one they could even collaborate with.

  I often compare AI art to photography. When photography was first invented in the early 19th century, it wasn’t considered art—after all, a machine was doing much of the work. The tastemakers resisted, but eventually relented: A century later, photography became an established fine art genre. Today, photographs are exhibited in museums and auctioned off at astronomical prices.

  I have no doubt that art produced by artificial intelligence will go down the same path. (American Scientist, 2019)

When AI can make art – what does it mean for creativity?

• This class of technology is known as generative AI . . .  Essentially, huge datasets are scraped together to train the AI, and through a technical process the AI is able to devise new content that resembles the training data but isn’t identical. Once it has seen millions of pictures of dogs tagged with the word “dog”, it is able to lay down pixels in the shape of an entirely novel pup that resembles the dataset closely enough that we would have no issue labelling it a dog. 

• [Are] these tools put an entire class of creatives at risk? . . . But Palmer argues that artwork such as illustration for articles, books or album covers may soon face competition from AI, undermining a thriving area of commercial art.

• The owners of AI image generators tend to argue that on the contrary, these tools democratise art...But if everyone can harness AI to create technically masterful images, what does it say about the essence of creativity?

• Emerging applications right now are more prosaic including moodboards for design consulting, storyboards for films, and mock-ups for interior design (The Guardian, Nov 2022)

‘It’s the opposite of art’: why illustrators are furious about AI

• AI art generators may provide five minutes of fun for most users, but the blurring of creative and ethical boundaries is leaving many artists raging against the machine
• The increasing use of AI, says Adeola, will also lead to a devaluing of the work of artists. “For me,” he says, “there’s already a negative bias towards the creative industry. Something like this reinforces an argument that what we do is easy and we shouldn’t be able to earn the money we command.” Biddulph goes further. “There’s no question that AI-generated art devalues illustration,” he says.
• What’s more, illustrators firmly believe their most honest critics and biggest fans – children and young people – won’t be convinced by AI art. “Children’s books are highly complex, multimodal forms of communication,” says Woodgate. “The kids who read them expect a great deal, not only from the stories and illustrations, but from the people who make them.” (The Guardian, January 2023)

The Complex World of Style, Copyright, and Generative AI

Several months ago, an MIT Technology Review article wrote that Greg Rutkowski’s name was used at least 93,000 times to produce images using Stable Diffusion. Greg Rutkowski is an artist from Poland who is known for producing epic fantasy scenes, having created illustrations for things like Dungeons and Dragons and Magic the Gathering. If Stable Diffusion can create Rutkowski-like works by being instructed to “produce an epic fantasy scene with a fire breathing dragon fighting a noble warrior in the style of Greg Rutkowski,” why would anyone hire Rutkowski for his art any more? This AI generated content could be produced much more quickly and at a lower cost than commissioning Rutkowski for a custom piece. And, of course, this could apply to any artist and any style.
(Creative Commons, March 2023)