Sorry, Generating AI Art Does Not Make You an Artist

Prompt: Man pretending to be an artist hunched over a computer with a dystopian art gallery in the background. Not exactly. Made via Night Café

DISCLAIMER: This is not about putting down AI Art or those who make it, though some may mistake it as the old guy complaining about these whippersnappers who need to “get off my lawn.” It’s about questioning and understanding the artistic mind (what makes an artist) and the consequences of unleashing AI upon the world, as cool as it is (and not just in art). It’s about being honest on how AI Art is even possible, literally by ingesting billions of finished works of art made by real artists, good, bad and brilliant. Training the silicon machines with what us carbon machines have created over centuries. It’s also about humility. Finally, it’s about ethics and dangers that we all must confront with a clear mind. It’s only meant as a provocative discussion starter, not some sort of grand thesis. I’m a generative art programmer myself.

I’m not sure most of the hordes out there typing in clever prompts into Midjourney and all the other amazing Text-to-Art generators know how AI and Machine Learning work. Even the creators of machine learning software don’t always know how it does what it does. It’s a whole is greater than the parts type of thing. A black box of sorts. But I do know this—all you are seeing is a seamless mashup of billions of existing art and photos. I don’t mean mashup in a literal sense but in an abstract sense, borrowing image information from the gigantic Training Set used for the Machine Learning phase of AI. In a way it’s merely a clever way to plagiarize and steal intellectual property, one little byte at a time instead wholesale. After all, who’s going to give credit to the actual myriad artists borrowed from when you typed in the most unusual and creative prompt? To be perfectly honest, artists borrow from other artists all the time, as they should, because this is how art evolves. It’s a conversation. However, AI Art allows us to borrow from millions of works of art we’ve never even seen so it’s quite a bit more amplified and meta.

First of all, every prompt you type in is being stored somewhere. I guarantee it so you don’t own that either. The software creators can then take your prompts, combine them with others or change parameters to make even more variations forever. Which leads to art glut deflation. Each new AI art generated reduces the value of ALL AI art to the point where it’s…