AI Art: What it is and why it's controversial

AI Art has been taking the internet by storm, but not everyone is a fan of it. I'll be talking about what exactly AI Art is, the controversy around it and my opinion on what the future of it looks like.

As always a brief questionnaire will be below. Submit you answers at a chance to win a FREE COFFEE at Tandem Bagel!

Which of these above is real digital art, made by an artist with a tablet and a program like photoshop, and which were made by an AI generator?

If you guessed the elf was AI generated art, you'd be correct. You'd also be correct if you guessed the landscape scene and the avatar character. AI Art is a new and revolutionary take on art, and how we define what art is. For hundreds of years we as a species have debated the most subjective topic in the world; what is art? So the saying goes, it's in the eye of the beholder. Some people will argue that a poorly drawn sketch of an airplane is not art. Some will argue that the seemingly random, broad brushstrokes on a canvas dotted with a chaotic panoply of shapes and colors isn't art. So many factors go into what one person considers what is, or isn't art. But the debate of AI Art is taking this discussion to a whole different level.

What is AI Art?

As the acronym implies AI art is art generated by an artificial intelligence. Now, we can go down a deep rabbit hole of what is and isn't AI but for the sake of argument what we see in fictional media as AI is what science would call an ASI or Artificial Super Intelligence which only exists in theory, at the moment. Regular old artificial intelligence is all over the place and in varying degrees of complexity. Siri and Google Assistant are AI's. All the various social media algorithms are AI. And now, we have a variety of artificial intelligence art generators. Just to get an idea of how many there are, check out this Google Sheet that comes from the AI-Art subreddit on Reddit.com

As you can see, there's a ton and they all function slightly different and offer different results. The idea is you find a generator you want to use, put in a prompt like "Viking Warrior preparing for battle" and you MIGHT get something like the image to the right.

The more specific and the more detailed the prompt the more accurate image to what you're looking for comes back. It takes time and practice knowing exactly what kinds of words or prompts to use and even then one can "evolve" their AI generated art by submitting that as the basis along with more prompts.

If you feel like challenging yourself, try out this test to see if you can tell which is AI generated and which is not.

The Controversy

Journey of a Samurai

By Raja Nanadepu

Asian Autumn

By me, using NightCafe

The Philosophical Debate

The controversy with AI Art can be approached at different angles. The first deals with is AI Art even real? Is it art? Many people would consider anything that someone wants to call art as being art, with the understanding that said person made it. It came from their mind and they turned that thought or feeling or image into a song, a painting, a sculpture, anything. The point is, THEY made it. Asian Autumn didn't exist in the world until I put a series of words together to from a prompt, so did I make that? Is it art?

Is the entrance to being an artist to have skill? Or, that you need to exert some manner of physicality or manual dexterity in creating it? Can it be art, can it be real, if it only comes from your hands holding a pen, a brush or clay? Is there a line to be drawn (no pun intended) between a pencil in hand versus fingertips on a keyboard? Two artists have an idea or feeling that needs to be expressed. One takes that to paper or a tablet with a utensil in hand, the other inputs a series of specific words, usually over and over, on a computer. The end result is what's above. So is the digital painting more art then my generated one, why?

Now this has all been a lot of questions made to make you think about what YOU consider art, and why. But understand too that this all exists on a spectrum. The image I made above took me about six tries with slight changes to my prompt each time. But there are people who are creating amazing pieces of AI generated art that are spending many, many, many hours in not just editing prompts and image evolutions, but will then take that final result and bring it into a program like Photoshop where they will manually edit the image to it's very final version. So in those instance, with those people, are they more artist than I was? Is what they make more worthy of being called art because that manual, personal touch occurred when they edited it in Photoshop?

And this is the more philosophical debate. One that was spearheaded when a piece of AI generated art won an art competition back early in 2022. This NYT Article covers the story and it's a great read, I suggest you give it your time.

The Legal Debate

Regardless of where you stand on whether or not AI generated art is in fact art, or not, the legal debate is far more complex and where the real fire comes from.

See, when someone goes into ANY art generator, whether it's DALLE-2, Stable Diffusion, or DeepAI they all do the same thing; generate imagery from the internet. They do this through different sets of algorithms "that set up specific rules through which machines analyze thousands of images to comprehend a particular creation process, like a specific style or aesthetic." The thousands of images are made up of datasets. Some AI Generators like MidJourney and DALLE-2 have not made public where they get their datasets, however CompVi the creators of the Stable Diffusion generator, have.

“We did not go through the Internet and find the images ourselves. That is something that others have already done,” said Professor Björn Ommer, who heads the Computer Vision and Learning Group at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. "There are now big data sets which have been scraped from the Internet, publicly available. And these we used, mainly the LAION datasets, which are out there, consisting of billions of images that we can train upon," LAION is a non-profit organization that collects image-text pairs on the Internet.

Enter, Lensa, which uses some of the Stable Diffusion algorithm.

The Lensa app on Android and Apple blew up the last few months of 2022 when millions of people used the app to upload their selfies to generate a handful of different AI art made versions of themselves. The problem, however, is that a lot of artists started noticing bits of their art and their art styles, being replicated in these generated images.

So if these AI-Art generators scour the internet for images, copyrighted or not, how do the artists of these pieces that get sampled get compensated? How do we regulate AI Art? Can and should it be? Time and I am sure plenty of litigation will tell.

The future of AI Art

We've covered what AI Art is and the two major debate points that exist in the zeitgeist. So, where does it go from here? Well, this is what your IT guy thinks.

I think AI Art is not going anywhere, for good or ill. The can of worms of user friendly and obtainable AI has been opened. Not only that but AI is going to continue to advance and as it does it will also continue to automate. In terms of art and artists, AI generated art is eventually going to be art that will exist in its own category. When we talk art we can talk about art done in the style of noire, sketches, oil on canvas, digital art, etc. AI Art will be the latest in these art categories and another tool for artists to use. I foresee in a not so distant future artists using AI Art generators as another tool in their toolset along with their paints, Wacom tablet and paper. Because the fact is, it's here to stay and over time it will evolve. Like all the major changes in human history, they were met with skepticism and pushback. The printing press, human flight, the internet... texting. Hell I'm just old enough to remember those conversations of how texting will never catch on!

Artificial Intelligence generated art is just starting. Where there is money to be made off of it, it will. Where artists have reservations or just a general dislike for it, they will learn to use it or simply live with it. And our ideas as a society on what is art and who is an artist will change. They already are.

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