AI vs. Art

By Elizeth Francisco

Tuesday, March 10, 2016

Recently, the Deering Staff has started to use generative AI art for the school's daily morning announcements. This has brought some attention to a few students at Deering, who don’t seem to like this change, but why? What exactly is the problem?

For a while, many artists have had problems with generative AI. But why? Shouldn’t a tool that makes art with only a simple prompt incredibly useful for artists? What a lot of people confuse for “natural talent” is actually the willingness to spend many years and hours practicing and honing a craft. Artists spend hours upon hours improving their work and style for many years to make a product they're happy with. So it doesn't help that, especially early on, the general reaction to AI art was that it looked bad. Even as it's improved throughout the years, one close inspection reveals weird and uncanny visuals, like hands being drawn with too many fingers.

However, some of the main gripes artists have with AI are the constant worry that it will eventually replace artists. Working for years on a craft only to get replaced by a robot seems pretty disheartening. But all of this pales in comparison to the real reason why artists appear to have such disdain for AI.

AI art is described as a great piece of technology that can make artworks out of nothing, but the truth is a lot harsher than that. These AI models are only capable of doing what they're doing by committing mass theft. Training an AI model requires an enormous amount of data, mostly scraped from the internet. These data scraps also include massive amounts of art created by artists, none of which were taken with permission.

For millions of artists, the fact that their life’s work is being taken without permission to create a machine to replace them is reason enough for artists to feel an immediate animosity towards generative AI.

But is it really that deep? Should artists be as hostile towards AI as they’ve been? Or is everything being blown out of proportion? I talked to a few members of Deering to get their opinion.

A staff member at Deering High School says she has seldom seen any problems with students using AI in their work. That, of course, doesn’t mean it doesn't happen. There are times when a disappointed teacher comes to her about a student they believe has used AI. Teachers tend to be upset when their students use AI, especially when they had full confidence that they could have completed it all on their own.

This staff member didn’t see much of an issue with AI. She stated that they think AI is a useful tool. She even thought it would be a good idea to implement a chapter in schools to teach students to learn how to use AI while still maintaining a sense of self.

“I don’t think AI’s leaving anytime soon, we gotta figure out how to work with it," she said.

She even enjoys AI art. In fact, she makes AI art on her own. She describes it as having its own style or genre. “It’s more kind of like, I would say, lyrical poetry, because you have to give parameters and descriptions when using AI." However, she isn’t opposed to student art. In fact, she said she would love it if a student volunteered to do the art for the announcements, and believes that a person's individual voice should be encouraged.

Ms. Carlisle, an Art Teacher at Deering, has thoughts on AI that are mostly neutral

Ms. Carlisle is not as enthusiastic about AI. Her feelings towards AI in general are skeptical to say the least. “I have not used it. I know other teachers have embraced it, but I personally don’t know how I would use it if I were writing a letter or essay.” She stated that she doesn’t know if she would use AI herself, “but I’m not closed off to it, I know there's a value to it.”

She does not see a use of AI in schools. “I don’t accept that for my students. I want something authentic.”

When asked about AI art, she said she didn’t know how to feel. Though she doesn’t know much about it, she believes it could be a fun tool to research. She wouldn’t consider it art, being made from computers and not human hands, but she's entirely opposed to it.

What she does know is her opinion on the growing conflict between AI artists and AI art. She stated how awful it is that people are starting to harass artists for being artists. People have begun to take artists' work through AI without permission, purely because they didn’t use AI to make their art. “I don’t think AI should replace anybody. I like the discussion around it, that's probably the only thing I like.” Her class is currently learning about different artstyles. She believes that it’s good not to copy styles, but to learn how to make our own individual styles. AI could be a valuable research method or tool to help students identify their individual styles. But using AI art as an end-all, be-all doesn’t particularly sit well with her.

According to Exxon:

Exxon, an Artist at Deering, said that he doesn’t think AI is bad when used as a tool. It really depends on how you use it. For example, he said he sometimes uses AI to help him study for classwork, but he never uses it to cheat. He also believes that making it seem like you're better than everyone else for using it is, in and of itself, a bad usage of AI.

He believes AI could be used as a reference to better one's own art. His issues come from those who claim themselves as the owner of the “art,” when in actuality, they haven’t done anything. “ I don’t really feel too good about that. I’ve seen people generate AI and claim that they drew it. I’m not too worried about it now, but in the future, I might be.”

Being an artist himself, he enjoys art. He unfortunately doesn’t have enough time to draw as much as he wants. Nonetheless, drawing is an activity that he actively enjoys to help him relax. He’s also very unsure about the possibility of AI being taught in classrooms. “It’s kind of a so-so thing. If more people use AI, they might start to cheat. But people who don’t get tempted easily would probably use it to study.” He believes using AI to better your skills is a great way to get better at a lot of things. He himself uses it to get better at coding.

According to Presley:

When asked about her thoughts on the subject, Presley told me she thought AI has the potential to be both good and bad. She thinks that it should be restricted from the general public a lot more, believing it to be too open. But she does believe that it could be used in a good way.

Being an artist as well, she loves art. It makes her happy, and she says it brings her joy to make art. Her thoughts on AI art, however, are a lot more negative. She stated that her main issue with AI art is the fact that to make images, it has to first take art from the internet and use that data to create the art. She discussed that the issue with this is that a lot of the art that is being used for this data was stolen from artist who did not give their consent to have their art taken to be used for AI.

Her stance in art v. AI is that making art with either pencil and paper or on a tablet takes a lot more effort and gives a lot more respect to the many artists before us who gave current artists inspiration. She describes trying to draw like other artists as learning to understand the real effort and struggle to draw in the same way they do. With AI, however, her stance is that when you take the material through that data, you're not really understanding the work it took to create the product. She shared that it's difficult to have the same sense of appreciation for art if you just generate it immediately.

She’s also stated that she personally doesn't like AI being encouraged in schools. She questions the need for something like a class to learn about AI art, when there are already many artists who would be willing to teach art. “I personally think that if you can avoid using AI art, then you should.”

Though not many people may be able to see the benefits or problems with AI and especially AI art, one thing is clear. A lot of the Artists at Deering are unsure of AI art. There are many talented students at Deering, and many of them are artists. Students have even painted murals in the Deering halls. A little appreciation and support for the artists at Deering would be plenty beneficial. Many would be able to interact and start a community together. Some may even find some extra time they previously didn’t have to draw. Some artists have already started clubs for this exact reason. Students and artists should feel like they have a voice and should be able to express their passions and talents when they want.