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.
There are some nice people here who are definitely not defending "AI" "art" while putting it forth that it is art by the person using the algorithm. Art is a set of decisions with intent and meaning, which is obviously not possible for a stochastic algorithm. If we then question whether the decisions and intents of the person running the algorithm count for art, I think a comparison is useful.
Consider an artist making a comissioned work, and that the patron has some participation in the process. For the first example, let the patron have an active participation in the process, questioning the purpose behind this brushstroke, that note, making suggestions and even gets the suggessions made if the artist finds them well reasoned or simply feels they're right. I have no doubt this reads unrealistic, it's only meant to be an absolute edge case. In this example, the patron clearly has some part in the process and though not a partner, they've definitely contributed to the work, to the art of it. In the second example, the patron comissions a work, is presented something they have "corrections" to, and they're satisfied with the revised version. For the sake of argument, let's clarify that the requested revisions weren't artistic in nature, the portrait needed to be more flattering, the concerto needed more oomph, that sort of thing. Clearly, this opposite edge case, no doubt more likely, has no artistic contribution by the patron and thus singularly belongs to the artist.
I presented this as a spectrum and now I can't get out of it, where's the line that separates the patron making artistic contribution and not? Perhaps as with all spectra, there isn't one. If we agree that the line has to be somewhere inbetween, then the artistic contribution is in the meaning and the discussion. For our purposes, this is sufficient to refute running an algorithm as art: whatever intent the runner has loses meaning in the stochastic strokes of the algoruthm and any discussion is absent for obvious reasons. Any argument that it's a "tool" doesn't apply here; the brush, the violin, the software are all tools, yet applying them randomly until it resembles something doesn't suffice in making something art.
There may be an argument to be made that my previous assertion is incorrect and that a patron who merely has the artist redo the work still has some contribution. If there is, I can't see it. To me, this case has no more artistry than picking the right wrench or an item of food from a menu. I believe here taste is involved, but not any artistic expression, but if there's someone to make the argument earnestly I'll be sure to read it.