I Should Hate AI Art More Then I Do
I'm trying to be consistent
Introduction
As Trump, Elon Musk and several other people are fighting over AI and how to move forward utilizing AI, the talks about the moral implication of using AI in the arts are going to increase even more especially after DeepSek has an opensource image generator that is better than Midjourney, Janus pro.
And like you imagine creatives fucking hate AI, the writers strike is a good example of that issue, the writers in Hollywood went on strike for 148 days which is the second longest writer’s strike in history to fight against the threat of AI. The writers won and got a deal that strongly protects their job from AI.
On substack as well you can see various notes and articles about why AI is evil, and how it damages the creative spirit of humanity as a whole. As someone who illustrates and writes on my free time, aka all the time, I should hate AI, but for some reason I just can’t muster the same amount of hatred for AI as everybody else, I find it mildly annoying at minimum to irritating at most.
The reason why creatives hate AI can boil down into four basic reasons:
AI can only create by stealing from other people’s work.
AI can completely replicate another’s style.
It will replace real human workers in fields that are already hard to break into.
People are calling themselves artists for making AI art.
I’m going to tackle each of these points and discussing them throughout the post.
AI Steals
AI steals the work of other people, but if you are like me and not that into technology you have no clue what that means exactly, every time it was explained to me it sounds eerily similar to how I work. When AI creates an image it can’t create something out of thin air so it requires data from other sources and this is why artists are mad. The data that AI uses are basically everything on the internet, that means an infinite number of copyrighted works from online artists. I would say that the biggest online artist that was affected the most that I know of would be samdoesart, the artist who creates the digital drawings of cute big eyed girls being cute.
I think you should follow him on instagram, his artstation seems dry.
If you search samdoesart on google one of the early results are AI image generators that can replicate samdoesart’s art style almost one to one. It might be a little off but it is scary how close it is (where’s the lighting from? Her right shoulder is confusing me, is the light piercing her hair, why isn’t her trap also as bright then, is her shoulder forward, I’m confused lol).
It means that the database must be full of pieces from samdoesart without his consent that it uses as references so other people can post work similar to him.
I can understand why samdoesart or any artist would be livid, the thing is that all artist learn through references, everybody takes art from other artists as references for learning.
I used to have several folders of artists that I wanted to learn from, it contains everything from illustrations to manga panels to promo art.
I’m even taking art courses on Coloso to learn how to illustrate from other artists, seeing how they work. To me, AI is just doing what I do and what I believe that most artist do at a faster rate and a much greater scale. People will argue that AI doesn’t have the right to use other people’s work in their database, but do I?
Is the only difference is that I’m sentient, and the software isn’t?
Is the issue that the AI keeps the references in a database, but does that apply to me and my folders as well?
Am I stealing? Why the fuck didn’t I know?
I don’t think that is enough of a reason to describe what AI does as morally reprehensible, if the people who uses AI aren’t reposting the references then I won’t call it bad, it just feels worse knowing that a machine is taking the artist's work to learn from in comparison to a person doing the same thing. I believe that artists are ok with another person doing so because there is an innate understanding of how difficult the art learning process is, learning that a machine is skipping the process with a few lines of code destroys the initial understanding and honestly feels like shit.
I think the bigger issue that annoy artists the most is how AI can replicate any artist’s style.
AI Can Copy You
AI databases can’t forget data once it is inputted, so you can find several AI image generators that have only been fed works from a single artist in order to basically copy another person’s work. As I mentioned earlier, samdoesart is probably the biggest victim of this that I’ve seen, but Sam also has a lot of art studies of his work done by inspiring artists. Unlike the random inspiring artist slaving away for hours just to understand Sam’s work, AI can almost perfectly copy Sam’s work to the very last detail, of course it would be a new piece of art but it would be possible to pass it off as one of his works.
That is something that is highly looked down upon amongst artists, tracing is already looked down for any artist that isn’t working in a studio, but forgery is something that all artist would figuratively kill somebody over for. A person could theoretically copy another person’s art style, but it is so improbable that nobody treats it as a serious possibility. An art work is a culmination of the artist’s life experiences, habits, conscious decisions, subconscious decisions, tools, environment and mood, so imagining that another person can copy an art style perfectly enough to pass it over as a forgery isn’t likely.
This does bring up the idea though that if, hypothetically, someone can copy another person’s art style would it be unethical for that person to post that art online or use that art to earn money. I don’t think so as long as that person clearly states that it is their work and not the other person’s work, but if that standard is made then I have to apply it to anybody who uses AI to achieve the same thing.
AI is a tool, but that seems to be another problem hidden within the fact that AI can copy you, art is communication at the core. Art is subconsciously or consciously a form of expression of the artist, so fellow artists can look at an artwork and wonder why that color went there, or why is the line so thick in comparison to everything else. If the viewer isn’t thinking about the technical aspects, they still feel emotions while looking at the art piece.
Every time I look at my favourite artist I think about why he does what and how he does it and how to master his technical skill.
I might never reach his skill especially since me and him are still learning and growing, but since he is paid for projects he must be working under greater pressure causing better results, that could be why, I don’t worry about job replacements.
AI Will Steal Your Job
This is a real threat, as time goes on AI will get better and better and soulless corporations will give you up once AI cost less and the technology gets better. Right now AI has insane energy cost and the datasets of AI models use AI created images creating more and more twisted images.
Once the technology gets better jobs will be lost unless artists have a union like the writer’s union then it will be inevitable. There might be a union like that but I’ve never heard of it.
As someone who isn’t in the field yet, but desires to enter once my skills are sharpened, you would think that I would be hateful, but personally after experiencing how shitty the job market is in general with my bachelor’s, I’m resolved by this point. Also as a student of Sungmoo Heo’s Coloso course, I kinda mentally put in my head that if anybody hired me, they would just hire Sungmoo Heo instead since he is so much better as an artist.
Also I’m delusional so I’m expecting life to work out eventually. No matter how long it takes to become a digital artist, my delusion causes me to believe it will happen no matter what.
These contradictory feelings cause me to act like everything’s fine.
Of course I don’t believe that anybody who uses AI to create art would be called an artist.
What Is An Artist
People who create AI art call themselves artists, however; I don’t agree with that classification.
I would never call someone who puts together Ikea furniture a carpenter, it is the same logic when it comes to AI artists and artists. If you ever seen any AI artist creating an art piece then you would realize that that they work more like a photo editor instead of an artist. They would write a bunch of prompts, create an AI image, edit it to look more clean, professional, realistic, or just to their preferences then run that cleaned up AI image through the AI model again repeating the process over and over again until they get an image they find suitable.
I would never call that person an artist in the same way I would call an illustrator an artist.
In Conclusion
AI art in general is just kinda cringe, it’s lame, lazy and rude, but I wouldn’t call it morally reprehensible. I don’t think I could relate to AI Artists though, grueling away at the WACOM for the hours just seeing 1% improvement is surprisingly addicting.
I don’t believe that AI artists could possibly understand that feeling or at least not to the same extent.