TL;DR AI is a tool that allows a different paradigm of creation to exist. It does take real work to get good results and shouldn’t be directly compared to other forms of media. The hate towards AI is generally misplaced at the AI itself when it’s really corporations that are using it in an exploitative way. Be mad at companies and be mad at liars
Since the AI revolution has been taking over the world the last two years, there has been a vocal group that wants to put a stop to it. I tend to think about the development of modern AI tools in two buckets with language models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) being on one side and AI image generators being on the other end (Midjourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion). Both buckets have their own share of haters and critics. In this note I want to specifically discuss the latter bucket.
I work primarily with language models in my day to day, but when you’re deep in the AI community, either online or in person, it’s impossible to not be exposed to the other areas of the community.
I find myself in a weird position here because I have friends and colleages deeply excited about AI art, but I also grew up consuming content from more traditional artists, with a lot of the YouTube content I see coming from members of the flash animation and cartoon communities. With that placement I see arguments for both sides of the spectrum quite often. I want to try to distill what I’ve seen and my thoughts here.
Art vs Products
Before I get really into it I want to make a clear distinction between art for the sake of art and “assets” made for the sake of pushing a product.
There’s never anything stopping you from making art for yourself. You can continue to hone your craft in whatever medium you desire and if you put in the time you’ll get better. Malcolm Gladwell’s whole 10,000 Hour Rule
However, if you are trying to make a living off your art and be a part of the “entertainment industry” there will be many other factors that impact your success. Ultimately the industry will try to make as much money as possible by whatever means are the cheapest. I’m not saying this is good, or leads to the best quality products or anything like that. I’m just saying that seems to be the reality we live in.
AI as a Tool
So towards that end companies are going to expect us to employ the tools that can lead to the quickest and best results.
I think the notion that AI will completely replace humans is a bit exaggerated. Even if it can perform many actions by itself without the intervention of humans, there still needs to be someone at some point who can set the intention of the AI. Whether it’s what kind of text to generate or the what characteristics of an image should be present there will be some traceable human desire that led to the AI acting.
A better analogy is that AI is a tool that hopes to augment the capability of everyone and increase their capacity for creating. Whether we want it or not I think this will just mean that expectations for individuals will be greater. There will be a higher expectation to produce more quality content.
I’ve seen a lot of this sentiment in the tech industry already with companies expecting “more with less” amid the mass layoffs occurring at large tech conglomerates. Similar arguments occur there with many older titans making arguments that tools like GitHub Co-Pilot produces worse quality code. Yet I’ve also seen first hand that these tools do speed up many engineers workflows and let them do more.
Supremacy of different art mediums
I think in any field where there’s a certain “artistry” there’s going to be classes of elitism. In programming you see that with the kind of Cultlike following certain technologies will get.
Many developers will argue that frontend developers are not real programmers and the only real programmers are backend devs. But then this will just keep going deeper and deeper.
- Frontend isn’t real only backend
- Backend API development isn’t real only systems level programming is real
- Systems level programming isn’t real only kernel level programming in raw C is real
- C programming isn’t enough only OS develoment is a real programmer
You can keep going down and down the stack and you’ll always have cases of the bottom levels of the stack having a sense elitism over the higher abstractions even though there will be plenty skills unique to those abstractions that the lower level of the stack will not have.
But we were talking about artists
Right sorry. So I’ll admit I’m not as deeply embedded with mechanics of artists and their internal debates, but I could see the same kind of elitism occurring.
- Physical ink artists thinking digital art is not real
- Portrait painters claiming photography is not real art
Warning
If this isn’t the case someone DM me let me know. I may just be too used to the toxicity in the tech community and am assuming other communities have similar issues.
And that brings us to
- Digital artists saying that AI art isn’t real art
My ultimate point is that you can have an elitism about your preferred medium to someone else’s and say it’s better, but it’s ultimately completely subjective. The skills in one medium could help but it’s not being a digital artist automatically means you’ll be a fantastic AI artist.
They are fundamentally different tasks. The challenges you face in one medium are going to be different than the challenges you face in another. To say one just doesn’t take real work I think is just a toxic mindset to have.
I really do think there is a certain “art” to prompting AI models and getting them to produce nice outputs. Especially with certain models it can be pretty hard to actually get them to produce something usable. This is the case with language models and imagegen models.
Note
When I say “art” here I mean it in the sense that it’s not an exact science, similar to how you can say there’s an art to negotiating or an art to teaching.
I’ve seen the text case with things like YouSim and Terminals of Truth. You have to really massage these models to get them to act in ways you want them too and do some pretty counterintuitive stuff to broaden their capabilities.
In the imagegen case I really do have an appreciate for people’s ability to get models to generate things they want. I know I struggle to ever get midjourney or DALL-E to actually generate an image that matches my vision for it.
We can say AI art doesn’t have the same mechanical difficulty and require the same amount of physical labor, but I think it’s unfair to say it doesn’t require individuals to put in the time and work to get something usable.
Authenticity and Transparency
Now all that being said I do think there are plenty of valid concerns around AI art. Mainly around attribution and transparency.
I like the discussion around AI in this podcast a lot: Brain Leak and I think it summarizes a lot of valid criticisms about AI really well.
There are a lot of people trying to do a “gotcha” with AI art where they trick you by telling you after the fact that something was generated using AI. The dishonesty here really irks me. A big part about the appreciate of art is understanding the process and labor that went into making it. Like I said in the previous section the labor of making AI art is real, but when you try to lie about the work it only takes away from your art.
It’s like trying to claim a photograph was hand painted. There’s plenty of work that goes into getting a good shot, so why can’t you lean into that? I’ve personally been at an art gallery where a large canvas was on the wall next to a bunch of other hand painted art, but there were clear signs in the image that it was AI generated (messy fingers, weird faces, etc.). If the piece wasn’t trying to lie to me and present itself as a painting I think I would have been way less harsh on it.
So all of this is to say I think AI art is fine and great, but be transparent about how it was made. I think a good concept from the podcast clip I linked is the idea that it’s ok to just like that a thing was made by a human or have an appreciation for that fact.
Art is also the context in which it was made.
Now on the flip side if someone is being transparent that what they are putting out is AI generated I don’t think they deserve excessive hate. I’ve seen many accounts of social media that are transparent about posting AI art getting tons of death threas and just the most vile comments. That behavior is reprehensible. If you don’t like their art because it’s AI generated just don’t interact.
Copyright and Stealing
Another concern apart from transparency that I have ample sympathy for is the training process of these models. I totally get artists getting angry that their content is being used without permission to train models that essentially copy their work.
I don’t think that behavior is excusable in any way and think we need rules and regulations to ensure proper attribution and compensation occurs when these models are trained.
On that same vein rules around adding metadata and fingerprinting that make it clear that content was AI generated is incredibly important, especially with the exceissive amount of deepfake content that is being made.
Misplaced Fear of AI
As with all of AI there is a real fear that AI is going to replace humans in every facet of life. This is a fear in regular desk jobs with language models and in creative fields. It is also a very real and valid fear, the effects of which are already being seen.
- Earlier this year we saw the AI debate being a big part of the SAG Writer’s Strikes
- The Game’s industry is being hit with ton’s of layoffs already
My only point here is that we shouldn’t direct our hate towards the AI. It’s ultimately people and corporations that are making these decisions. The company is deciding that they can accept lower quality content, that they can layoff artists and knowledge workers and put higher expectations on those who remain. As long as their incentives are just to increase their bottom line they’ll continue to make these decisions.
Conclusions
So this was long winded, but I hope there were some good takeaways you the reader were able to have.
- Making stuff with AI does take work and shouldn’t be compared with 1:1 with
other ways of making media.
- I think it’s very similar to saying photographers don’t have skill
- There will always be elitism in creative fields and it’s mostly noise
However
- We should not excuse grifters who lie about how they make their work
- We should not excuse stealing from traditional artists
- If we’re worried about AI replacing us it’s because a corporation is making that decision. AI isn’t coming for us because it wants too, it’s because some corporate executive wants it too.