Ten Things You’ve Heard About AI Art That Are Dead Wrong
Separating the Fact from the FUD
Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt always accompany the introduction of new technologies. It seems like only yesterday photographers were bitterly complaining about Photoshop, certain that their arduous discipline in the darkroom was going to be replaced with a con and a rip-off.
What happened? These days Adobe Photoshop is the entrenched tool, the established way to do photographic touch ups, and most graphics artists and professionals wouldn’t leave home without it. And photography goes on.
In this article we’ll talk about the FUD surrounding AI Art and the new tools to make it. Before we get going, you might want to look at some of my AI Art that has been turned into products people can buy:
OK. So now, the FUD.
FUD #1: AI Art Isn’t Art.
“AI-generated artwork is the same as a gallery of rock faces. It is pareidolia, an illusion of art, and if culture falls for that illusion we will lose something irreplaceable. We will lose art as an act of communication, and with it, the special place of consciousness in the production of the beautiful.” -Erik Hoel, The Intrinsic Perspective
I wonder if the owners of smart phones and laptops believe their “acts of communication” have been diminished by the processing of algorithms. In my case, my spelling has certainly improved due to spell checkers. And Grammarly certainly can help with my sentence structure. But no one is up in arms about that.
What about the claim that AI Art is an illusion, that it is essentially “rocks that look like faces” just by chance? That’s simply not correct. What comes out of the big AI content generators is somewhat like a cake, where you ask for that cake by writing out a list of ingredients. But the cake is still usually a cake, it has been baked, and very few people who eat it would say otherwise.
I submit Figure 1 as my bona fides. Looks like art to me.
FUD #2: Nothing Created by a Computer Can Possibly Be “Art”
“…the products of artificial intelligence cannot truly be considered art. Art aims to invoke emotions, convey a message, or portray a concept through creativity and imagination. Hence, we cannot regard AI-generated images as art, despite their visual impressiveness. These programs use references as we do, but without the independence of a real artist. AI “art” is, at best, an extension of the human intellect in its responses to our prompts and, at worst, elaborate plagiarism.” — Andrew Shu, Scott Scoop
AI Art Generators are tools constructed by computer programmers, and assisted by the Hardware technology from NVIDIA. AI Art Generators do not spontaneously start outputting pictures without human intervention — they aren’t autonomous. No, we’re not there yet. So it’s unfair to say the computer is generating the art — actually, the programmer who wrote the code is always the fair target of praise (or blame) for the program’s outputs, and the AI Art Generators are a triumph of practical programming in that sense.
All that being said, the generators are still just tools. And, further, they are tools that largely give back what effort is put into them. In other words, computer programmers don’t know much about art and do not necessarily have any idea how the algorithm will eventually be used for purposes of expression by an artist. You may be sceptical, but it’s true. Something similar happened in music back in the 1970s. The people who designed, built, and sold turntables never intended them to be used for scratching (that distinctive sound found in Rap and Hip Hop music). But they were used that way.
You can watch a video about the invention of scratching here:
Artists don’t tamely consume the world they find; they challenge it, change it, and overcome it.
FUD #3: AI Art is Neither Interesting Nor Creative
AI Art models as seen in the big generation systems are trained on millions of images — far more art than most of us have seen in our entire lifetimes, and certainly far richer in variety and content than we ever could see. DALL-E is said to have been trained on 12 million curated images. Having been trained on so much content that was made by humans who are “invoking emotions, conveying a message, or portraying a concept through creativity and imagination,” these systems cannot easily fail to provide some of the same.
Secondly, it is in the nature of neural networks to be pattern recognizers. What makes AI Art generators so impressive is that this recognition has been inverted: instead of pattern recognition of something input, the diffuser algorithm seamlessly renders from patterns it has previously recognized, on demand. This is not just like what “real” artists do, it is pretty much exactly how they create — by recalling and recreating and mixing together evocative memories, retelling stories they have heard and digested.
FUD #4: AI Artists Are Not Actual Artists
“…We are already seeing “Artists” claiming that they are making art, and not just anybody can put in the right prompts, it takes talent. They are complaining that “their art” is being removed from art boards for being AI generated. They are advising each other to lie and say that “their art” is not AI generated, because why does it matter what tools you use, it’s still your art. The amount of self-deception is astounding.” — Concerned_Human999, Reddit r/ArtistLounge
It’s conceited to think we know who the “real artists” are, out there in the wide world. I don’t recommend trying to determine that. Picasso was asked who the greatest artist in the world was, and he asked, “on what day?” Years later Jimi Hendrix was asked a similar question, “who is the greatest guitar player in the world,” and he gave essentially the same answer — “on what day?”
There is also a misunderstanding here about the nature of prompting (more on that below).
FUD#5: AI Art is Really Easy
“…It requires minimal effort, with the generator offering advanced AI tools to create art in minutes.” — Alex McFarland, 10 Best AI Art Generators, Unite.AI
Well. It isn’t all that easy. It’s true that our initial reaction to what’s possible can be overwhelming when the results are like those from Midjourney (See Figure 2, below). But try to do something based on an idea you have come up with — try to connect your idea to images generated through the AI, to guide the process, rather than accepting what ever it spits up — and we quickly discover there is as much craft here as with anything.
FUD#6: AI Art is Great for Generating Porn, But Not Much Else
“We are on the cusp of a new era in pornography. One where AI-generated porn is the norm.” — Jim Clyde Monge, Medium.com
There are several reasons why it’s quite difficult to generate porn with the existing tools. The most important is probably that doing so most likely violates the software license of the models, which demands that we not create harmful images as a pre-condition of use of the model. Then there is the likelihood of being banned from platforms by running afoul of the moderators of the systems who are pretty serious about keeping things in bounds.
But let’s assume we were on a mission to see naked ladies, what comes out of the tooling is, frankly, not going to erotically inspire anyone maybe other than a 10-year-old boy. With work, it’s possible to create soft, erotic imagery (I have some examples on my Shopify store that I think are pretty good). But this is hardly pornographic. The depiction of beautiful human bodies has been the stock staple of art for millennia. What about depictions of actual sex acts?
I’d say no, not easily. With considerable effort and a model trained specifically on that type of image, and a private platform to do the generation on, and a lawyer or two in case of lawsuits, it’s possible. I think it is going on. But why would we want to do that? There are plenty of actual humans who want to be photographed and do the photographing. There will be no real market for faux porn because, to be candid, there is so much real porn of everyimaginable description and fetish out there to be had.
Finally, there is the reality of the technical limitations of the tooling. It’s quite difficult to depict two human beings in — shall we say — the position of the beast with two backs. It is difficult right now to depict two human beings embracing and kissing, not to talk about doing other things. I was able to depict two women almost kissing, but not quite.
The upshot is that porn, like baking bread, is likely to remain a specifically human craft. People in the early 1900s tried to patent processes for making bread without yeast, but they never got very far, and making bread, taken as a natural process of yeast and time and warmth and dough, really hasn’t changed much since biblical times. Despite all the mechanization. Probably much the same with porn.
FUD#7: All It Takes Is a Prompt
“Do you want to become a CF Spark, Midjourney or Stable Diffusion master today? The human-friendly prompt builder will help you.” — PromptMANIA
Probably the biggest single misunderstanding about AI Art is in regards to the prompt. The way that this is explained in the popular version is that someone inputs a few words, a sentence asking for a portrait or a landscape or whatever, and out magically comes a wonderful image which looks exactly like what was requested.
Spoiler Alert: that pretty much never happens. What comes out of AI Art generators often is completely different from what we expect, at least in the beginning. It may be unbelievably beautiful or interesting, but it is rarely precisely what we expected. Here is a brief and partial list of the factors involved:
- How the model was trained (what data was in the training set).
- The precise type of algorithms used
- The options and settings used along with a prompt (often there are many of these)
- The seed.
- The dimensions of the requested image. This is much more important than it might seem to the uninitiated.
It’s true that on DALL-E things have been paired down to the point that the artist inputs very little except a prompt — but my experience is that DALL-E is one of the most random and least user-controllable of all the image generation systems.
FUD#8: AI Art All Looks the Same
It depends on who is making it. Have a look at some of the work I have done for the AI Ways of Seeing Series here on medium.com and be your own judge if that is true.
FUD #9: AI Art Is a Problem Because It Takes Work Away from Human Artists
The data models that AI Art are trained on come originally from human-made sources. So regardless of how good or advanced this technology becomes, the origin of the training data will always be, at bottom, from human artists. They will always have a place. The most likely progression I foresee is that the technology will become good enough that artists will train their own models to get their own completely unique look (or pay someone to do that). If you’re interested in a new career, start learning how to train AI models.
With respect to stock imagery, I think that particular industry is a bit like the cab companies who had locked in control of the ride business and were shocked awake by something new. Uber and ride-sharing severely impacted the cab business. In fact, “calling an Uber” is now a household word, when we used to “hail a cab.” Whatever our thoughts about that situation, there is not much to be done about it. It’s normal in business for new technologies to have impacts on existing ways and means. The purveyors of haberdashery and buggy whips are for the most part out of business. So stock image companies, wake up call.
FUD#10: AI Art is a Rip-off
It is not stealing to make something new. The issue is if the output from the AI Art Generators is actually new. Most of the time it is, it’s true that the model occasionally “memorizes” an image and output may look too close for comfort to an original in the training data set. However that is a technical defect of the training and unlikely to be a real issue. Generally, what comes out of AI engines is new. And in terms of pixels, it is definitely new. The model doesn’t have any actual pixels in it copied from source images, it doesn’t work that way. Copyright claims may happen — no doubt, of course they will — but those claims probably are not fair or valid, even if courts sometimes do side with the wrong or ignorant party.
That’s all for now! If you enjoyed this story you might like to read about my Spaceship Earth AI Project: