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Why the growth of AI in making art won’t eliminate artists
(images.theconversation.com)
https://www.geeksaresexy.net/2023/09/04/why-the-growth-of-ai-in-making-art-wont-eliminate-artists/
Will AI replace artists? On one hand, the answer to whether AI will replace artists is no.
Generative AI is a powerful tool that can expand the possibilities of art making and will still require the guiding hand of a human artist. As with any new technology, some creative processes will become both easier and less time-consuming with AI.
I would say photography is absolutely art, but the art of what? It's the art of physically capturing and at times manipulating light. It involves elements of composition, contrast, timing, and a deep understanding of how these elements comes together to create or capture a desired effect.
I understand the parallel you're making, but I think AI art is substantially less skilled medium than drawing, painting or photography. And over time, the amount of skill required will be even less still. What unique skills does it require? I'm not saying it requires no skill at all, but it's strange to speak of a visual medium where you don't really need to understand artistic fundamentals because it's largely taken care of by the algorithm.
I certainly believe that a trained artist could achieve better results more quickly with AI, but the difference between an expert and a total amateur will narrow over time. Whatever coaxing is required now will get simpler. You could ever make a similar argument with photography. Someone with a modern phone can take much better pictures with much lower effort than in the past. What if you were to combine that with an ai which suggested ideal compositions based on a dataset of high quality photography? That would be cool tech, it may even be an interesting training tool, but would it mean that the people using it were skilled photographers in their own right? It's similar with AI generated art.
So you would say that the tool devalues the artist?
I know it's not so simple as that, but in essence the argument that you're making is that as technology improves the baseline technique available to beginners, the gap narrows and devalues the work of an experienced artist.
In my opinion, that's backwards. Art is subjective by its very nature. People using ai to generate art without a background or technical expertise in that art aren't artists in the same sense that a person building a house in the Sims isn't an architect. Does the Sims allowing a player to design a house devalue the job of an architect, whose purpose is to create something actually valuable? I think a architect would laugh at that notion.
In the same way, an artist creates value in a way that a non-artist cannot, even with ai generation being a factor.
I wouldn't make that specific statement, no, but I do have sentiments that might be considered adjacent to that.
Suppose you have a watercolor artist who has spent years understanding their medium and mastering it. Then you have an ai artist who gives a prompt (simplifying here) of "watercolor painting of X in the style of X" and gets a result that looks even 80% of the way there. In the eyes of average people, the ease of achieving that result does affect in some fashion how they look at the work of the trained artist and how they value it.
We have examples from one of the key Dungeons & Dragons artists for instance where he has said in no uncertain terms that ai art has absolutely diluted the value of his work. People create ai works in his style and people can no longer tell what's his and what's ai. Then poor artistry in the ai works gets attributed to him.
The speed with which people can create ai work means that we will increasingly be buried under a glut of mere content and most creative work will be trivialized and devalued except for those who themselves have the skill to recognize what goes into skilled art.
I understand what you're getting at, but that doesn't mean that that artist's work is any less valuable. In your example, the artist in question is still being paid to create genuine art. I suppose there is an argument there that with ai available to create similar art, he may otherwise lose commissions to lesser quality substitutes. But on the other side of the coin, it's possible that many people emulating his work would accept a much lower quality substitute for convenience and wouldn't have paid him to create anyway, particularly given that d&d art is often used for conception and token purposes and not quality.
On the topic of ai art affecting that artist's reputation, I can see how it might become a problem that certain ai pieces are incorrectly attributed to an artist. That problem seems largely unavoidable though to people unwilling to differentiate or inquire as to who the artist is in the first place. That might also be something subjected to copyright law in the near future, like an ai water mark being required on any ai generator.
I still don't think that creative work is even going to come close to being trivialized. Ai art is free to the public, and yet I still know several artists who live off of commissions, one of which is my wife, because ai can't yet produce what people actually want to see with the refined quality that they can get from a real, human artist.