I love art. I love poetry, paintings, sculptures, ceramics, music, architecture, film, and especially anything that shows you a little bit of the soul of the artist that created it. I love to be able to look at a piece and know that every single detail is intentional. That every brushstroke, every chord, every stanza was crafted by a person in order to express something. Since the first etching on a cave wall, people have been making art. Art is the most human thing that exists. The urge man has to create is, in my opinion, the single greatest feature of the human race. We have always felt the need to express ourselves. Before the first verbal language was even a flicker in the mind, we communicated through art. Art is the only language that every human knows. It is an essential part of what makes us human in the first place. It is ours. It is ours and it is being stolen from us by Artificial Intelligence.
The rise in popularity of Artificial Intelligence is irrefutably changing society tremendously. It’s impossible to use the internet today and not come across some form of it. Google, as well as most other browsers have AI summaries of any question you try to search, companies use image generation to advertise their products or services, and people cannot stop using shitty chat bots like ChatGPT or Character AI. Artificial Intelligence is the hot new thing, everybody has to have it. I can admit that some aspects of Artificial intelligence have made life for people much easier by doing the things people don’t want to do, so we can make time for the things we do. AI has improved cybersecurity and navigation a bunch. On the other hand, we all know that those aren’t the only things people use AI for. A survey conducted by the Digital Education Council found that 86% of students use AI for their schoolwork. Your future heart surgeon could be asking a robot to do their work for them right now. Companies are using AI to create images of events that didn’t happen and to generate images and text for fake testimonials or reviews to promote services that may or may not be remotely similar to what was advertised. Engineers are using AI to write their code for them. And now, people are typing prompts into AI image generators to get a regurgitation of what a soulless computer classifies as “art”.
Oxford Languages defines art as, “The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.” Artificial Intelligence is mathematical. It is written in computer code, and the only thing that makes it any more useful than a calculator is that it is good at spotting patterns, correlations, in data. AI is incapable of imagination. Despite its title, it isn’t intelligent. Not like a human, or even any other conscious living thing. It does not have a conscience. It does not know the power of thought, of emotions, because it has never and will never experience them. Art is emotionally charged. Artificial intelligence will never be able to replicate it, no matter how many pieces it is trained off of. It will always lack every single thing that makes one’s art matter.
Imagine you have spent your life carving the most beautiful sculpture you can imagine. Every day for years, you work tirelessly to etch your soul into this stone, refusing to call it finished until you are entirely sure that this piece is exactly what you want to show the world. This piece is an illustration of your life. You have dedicated every second of your time to this sculpture and now it is exactly what you envisioned. After all this time, your immeasurable effort has finally, finally, paid off. It expresses everything that you have felt. All the happiness, grief, desire, melancholy, anger, everything you know is manifested into this gorgeous creation. You made this. This is you. You show it to your family, your friends, neighbors, you show it to everyone you want to see it. Someone takes a picture of it. Alright, they must really like it! The next day, you awake, and something feels off. You try to shake the feeling, but it sits in your stomach, like a stone. Eventually, you check your phone. Then you see it. Somebody posted a picture of your sculpture with a few filters on it, claiming to have made it themself. What are you thinking? How are you feeling? Cheated? Robbed? You didn’t tell this person they could take credit for your life’s work. But, is it really yours? They altered it, upped the contrast, lowered the exposure, they made their mark. Surely that’s enough to make it theirs, right? No? Then why is it okay for generative AI models to be trained off non-consenting artists’ work? The concept is the same. An artist sharing their art with the world is not an artist saying they are alright with a robot being fed their work, along with hundreds of thousands of other non-consensually taken works, in order for it to spit up an amalgamation of them for somebody who just doesn’t want to make an effort to create anything their self. Generative AI is trained off of stolen art. What it produces is just as well.
The only way to stop the epidemic of AI “art” is to create. Don’t type a prompt into an image generator. Look up a drawing tutorial on youtube. Even if you are the worst artist in the world, anything you make with your hands, with your brain, with your soul, is so much more valuable than anything a robot could create, because you made it. You put effort into it, which is rare these days. You had a thought. You took that thought and you did something to make it real. Don’t let a computer live your life. Write. Draw. paint. Sing. act. Sew. anything you can do to leave something behind on this earth, something you made, something you are proud of, do it. Don’t let a robot live your life. Create. It’s what makes you human.
