Podcast Title: Between the Lines

Episode Title: The Art Divide

Date: March, 13th, 2025

Keywords: AI, Art, Music, Copyright, Ethics

In this episode of Between the Lines, Eithan and Zhiv discuss the growing prevalence of AI-generated art and how it may affect the future and careers of artists all over the world. Using Aristotle’s framework of ethos, pathos, and logos; they will be examining how visual art and music made by humans is different from that created by generative AI models. Appealing to logos, they provide concise explanations of how generative AI functions, including how it gathers data which it utilizes in creating images or music. They appeal to their individual ethoses as artists in their two distinct fields of art: music and visual art, to analyze how content generated by artificial intelligence differs from man-made art, and commenting on different methods in which someone may be able to tell that a piece of media has been generated by AI. Additionally, they appeal to the pathos of the listeners, asking them to imagine how they would feel if a generative AI model plagiarized their art without their consent or approval. Furthermore, they touch on the ethics of producing AI art, and whether copyright laws can even apply to a piece of media created by a machine, providing an example of a large corporation utilizing AI-generated content instead of hiring real artists to produce the desired media. 

• (0:53) Visual artist’s thoughts on AI-generated visual art – Zhiv, who is a visual artist and amateur graphic designer, talks about artifacts within AI-generated images that make it obvious that a piece of visual media is not made by a human. These artifacts include: unnatural lighting or an unclear light source, or distorted human figures which the AI could not quite get right. 

• (1:11) Guitarist’s thoughts on AI-generated music – Eithan, who is a guitarist, talks about how AI-generated music sounds different from human-made music, describing how AI cannot really capture the emotion that is conveyed by human-made music.

• (1:59) What if AI plagiarized YOUR art? – Zhiv questions the ethics of AI art by asking the audience to imagine how they would feel if an AI training model used their hard work without their knowledge or permission, plagiarizing their art and using data from it to generate new images that incorporate similar features. 

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• Zhiv: Hello, and welcome to the first episode of our podcast. My name is Zhiv and I am a visual artist.

• Eithan: And my name is Eithan and I am a guitarist. How do you think that AI-generated content can change the landscape for artists like yourself?

• Zhiv: So, basically, AI-generated “art” takes out the human element from creating different works of art, be they music, or visual art, or any other kind of art. So why is AI art different from human art?

• Eithan: Typically, AI art is made from complex algorithms that basically put pieces together and bits of data to create images based on what something should kind of look like, but it’s not really starting from scratch like a human would. So it doesn’t really put as much effort or emotion.

• Zhiv: Exactly. Its quality is also often vastly different from what a human would actually produce. For example, when it comes to visual art generated by AI, it usually looks fine at a glance, but the closer you look at it, you can notice some distinct imperfections. For example, the light source may be strange. Sometimes if there are human figures, they may be distorted in some way. 

• Eithan: And I think AI-generated music often sounds a bit generic and lifeless. Almost like following a formula without really understanding what makes music feel real. It lacks emotional depth and creativity that comes from a human artist. There’s no real personal connection or deeper message that it has behind it, or what gives art the actual power in the first place. And who actually owns AI art, and how do copyright laws even apply to something made by a machine?

• Zhiv: Well, the legality and copyright of AI art is already fairly ambiguous since it is trained on pre-existing art, including copyrighted art. While a human would look at something that is copyrighted and take inspiration from it without copying the thing directly, AI art takes direct details from the original work and essentially plagiarizes them into its training program. Imagine if you had created a work of art that you spent so long on and you were very proud of it, only for an AI training model to take it and use it as part of its system without your permission. So now, if someone asks the AI to generate something that is similar to what you have created, it will most likely be taking aspects of your work and feeding it to the prompter without your knowledge or permission. Recently, people have began selling AI-generated art for large sums of money. Do you think that this devalues human-made art in any way?

• Eithan: Yeah, I mean AI art is, like, everywhere now, and some people even sell it without saying that it’s AI-made. And so the problem is AI can pump out art in seconds, making it cheaper than human-made art, and this makes it harder for real artists to compete and earn a living. it risks lowering the value of all art by turning creativity into something that is quick and disposable.

• Zhiv: So, sometime last year, around the holiday season, Coca Cola released a commercial that was made entirely with AI-generated video. And this caused quite a lot of controversy because instead of paying actual artists, filmmakers, to create the commercial for them, they just asked an AI, and it instantly created something for them without them having to spend much money or any money. Anyway, that was the first and probably last episode of our podcast.

• Eithan: Thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you in the next one.