As an artist, seeing more and more AI art flood my for you page is disheartening. It seems that the general public would rather ask a computer to make a painting than to commission a human artist. While AI image generating programs like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are less expensive and far less time consuming to use than human art, it ultimately harms real artists.
One of the biggest problems with AI art is that these engines need to be trained to be able to generate images. They are trained by inputting millions of images of online art, and classics, without giving credit to their creators. Because the quality of the inputs equates to the quality of the outputs, the more art that the machine is fed, the better it is able to replicate something that may look like human art. This has forced a lot of artists to put their content behind paywalls or not post it at all, which Steven Zapata talks about in his 2023 TED Talk. Copyright laws were not created with AI in mind so it’s hard to regulate the training of these systems on human artwork. AI will only continue to get better at replicating art, and at a rate that is unexpected to say the least.
The joy in art is not the product, it’s the process. When I play my instruments, I am happy learning and playing, not when the song is over. When I draw and paint, the finished product is cool, but the act of creating is fun. So while I do worry for the future of art, I hope that people will find pleasure in the process if the product is so easily available. You could buy a necklace, but making one with your own hands is more rewarding.
