Before we start, let's just get the basics out of the way - yes, stealing the work of hundreds of thousands if not millions of private artists without their knowledge or consent and using it to drive them out of business is wrong. Capitalism, as it turns out, is bad. Shocking news to all of you liberals, I'm sure, but it's easy to call foul now because everything is wrong at once - the artists are losing their jobs, the slop being used to muscle them out is soulless and ugly, and the money is going to lazy, talentless hacks instead. With the recent implosion of the NFT space, we're still actively witnessing the swan song of the previous art-adjacent grift, so it's easy to be looking for problems (and there are many problems). But what if things were different?
Just to put my cards on the table, I've been pretty firmly against generative AI for a while, but I'm certainly not opposed to using AI or Machine Learning on any fundamental level. For many menial tasks like Optical Character Recognition and audio transcription, AI algorithms have become indispensable! Tasks like these are grunt work, and by no means is humanity worse off for finding ways to automate them. We can talk about the economic consequences or the quality of the results, sure, but there's no fundamental reason this kind of work can't be performed with Machine Learning.
AI art feels... different. Even ignoring where companies like OpenAI get their training data, there are a lot of reasons AI art makes people like me uneasy. Some of them are admittedly superficial, like the strange proportions or extra fingers, but there's more to it than that.
The problem for me is baked into the very premise - making an AI to do our art only makes sense if art is just another task, just work that needs to be done. If sourcing images is just a matter of finding more grist for the mill, AI is a dream come true! That may sound a little harsh, and it is, but it's true. Generative AI isn't really art - art is supposed to express something, or mean something, or do something, and Generative AI is fundamentally incapable of functioning on this wavelength. All the AI works with is images - there's no understanding of ideas like time, culture, or emotion. The entirety of the human experience is fundamentally inaccessible to generative AI simply because experience itself is inaccessible to it. An AI model can never go on a walk, or mow a lawn, or taste an apple, it's just an image generator. Nothing it draws for us can ever really mean anything to us, because it isn't one of us. Often times, I hear people talk about this kind of stuff almost like it's just a technical issue, as if once they're done rooting out the racial bias or blocking off the deepfake porn, then they'll finally have some time to patch in a soul. When artist Jens Haaning mailed in 2 blank canvases titled "Take the Money and Run" to the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, it was a divisive commentary on human greed, the nature of labor, and the nonsequitir pricing endemic to modern art. The knowledge that a real person at that museum opened the box, saw a big blank sheet, and had to stick it up on the wall, the fact that there was a real person on the other side of that transaction who did what they did and got away with it, the story around its creation, that is the art. If StableDiffusion gave someone a blank output, it'd be reported as a bug and patched within the week.
All that said, is AI image generation fundamentally wrong? Sure, the people trying to make money off of it are definitely skeevy, but is there some moral problem with creating a bunch of dumb, meaningless junk images for fun? Do we get to cancel Neil Cicierega because he wanted to know how Talking Heads frontman David Byrne might look directing traffic in his oversized suit?
Maybe just a teensy bit, at least under the current circumstances.
I'll probably end up writing a part 2 about my thoughts on stuff like data harvesting and stuff, not sure yet. I feel especially strongly about the whole "AI is just another tool" discourse when people are talking about using these big models, so don't even get me started on that.
It's something I've been grappiling with. I think part of the issue is reality butting up against what I think society and money and IP and art should ideally look like. AI art for a meme or personal use? Who cares. AI art for profit just to churn out garbage? Sure that's bad, but that's not the fault of the technology or the individuals, that's just an incentive of capitalism to make money and fuck the consequences. Hell, plenty of real artists make garbage they have no passion for because that's what makes money, the only difference is how quick they can churn it out vs a computer. And while I think being obsessed with your own intellectual property is lame, would you want your passion projects to be turned into slop by a machine? Would you want art that comes from your heart that you release for free to just become sludge that a robot eats to shit out content for grifters to sell? Or should I care if other people want to eat slop and pay for the privilege? If I don't care about IP laws then thems the breaks. Maybe that's something artists have always had to deal with; people not respecting their art in the way they want them to and AI really is nothing new. Or what if that AI then gets used to generate propaganda or used to spread misinformation and your art contributed to its ability to effectivelydo so? Is that even something random artists should reasonably be worried about or does that only effect relatively well off people in the first world? Should that matter or affect my opinion? Hell if I know!
I think this false start with "AI" has actually brought up a far more interesting question, one that people seem to not even have the language for and are incapable of naming it even through they can feel it now more than ever. What's the problem with AI art? That it turns human passion into slop and content and roboshit that appeals to the lowest common denominator? We've had aggressively anti-human, profit motivated art for a while now already. What else is new? This is just one more pimple on capitalism's ass.
At least before now, there was always some human as part of the creative process. Someone could find a way to take their boring, conformist TV show or movie or whatever and at least try to push it at least a little in the direction of being truer to their own personal experiences or more meaningful in at least little ways. Even with the meddling suits, at least something could be done. The idea of AI art is to cut out all those pesky "creatives" and let the business guys finally decide for themselves exactly what they want, and that just sounds bleak.