why I'm not afraid of ai as an artist
Don't get me wrong, I abhor "AI" on principle. But I don't especially care if it steals my writing. I care more about it replacing artists in society. So here's why "AI" deserves the quotes.
When we are talking are machines that make art of any kind (writing, images, music, etc.), we aren't really talking about artificial intelligence. If we were, we'd have bigger issues than plagiarism to be frank. What we're actually talking about is closer to an algorithm. It's a machine making choices based on data points, just like your For You page on tiktok. This is, in very simple terms, how these generative AIs work. This is why "AI" companies need to steal art. Their machines need data to function.
I cannot, in all honesty, take something like that seriously as a threat to art. Why? Because something that relies on human art to function cannot be a threat to human art. The threat of theft has never completely stopped the creation of art, and neither has financial oppression, or cultural erasure, or anything else anyone has ever tried. It has certainly discouraged artists, kept individuals from creating, but someone somewhere has always said "I'm going to make something, fuck the consequences". Humans make things. This is true, it has always been true, and it will (most likely) always be true.
Will it suck ass? Yes. Will it be depressing and horrible and shameful? Yes. But GenAI can't make something like "Fountain (1917)" until a human does it first. That, to me, means we just have to be better at keeping track of and naming our artists. Find who did it first. It won't be a bot.
There is, of course, the worry that while GenAI won't do it first, it may do it better. This is a hilarious take. Because no, it won't. Why would you even think that?
Think about the companies that are making these machines. What is their goal in making them? You probably don't even have to think about it; it's money. Pure profit. Stonks, babyyyy. And you don't make money by making something good. You make money by making something popular.
Think about how we talk about GenAI stealing art. Nowhere you post art online is safe. GenAI can and will use anything it can find as data. But what exactly do you think an average of all available human media is? It's fucking mediocre, that's what. It's all the same plots and pictures. It's the cliches, the tropes, the deep-set biases. Like imagine if a person who had never had an original thought was asked to write a novel or make a painting. That shit would be ass, and we all know it. That's what GenAI is. That's what it does.
If you ask GenAI to make an image of a black person, they will give you a picture of the most light-skinned lightskin to ever fucking lightskin. I know this because my ex-girlfriend used to do it all the time and she still had to go in after and edit the images so they'd actually look BLACK. That, right there, told me all I needed to know.
Now if these companies had been very choosy with their data, only picking the most beautiful and impactful art, hiring talented artists specifically for that purpose? Then I'd be worried. But that isn't the case nor will it be. That simply wouldn't be enough data to train these machines on.
People who actually make art, who dedicate themselves to it, can spot a GenAI "artist" from miles away. They might not be able to tell all human art from GenAI "art", but like why would they be able to tell the intricacies of one piece of trash from another? It's trash. It's not worth deep evaluation to begin with. It is, however, incredibly obvious when someone uses GenAI to make their "art" and calls it their own. This is because art isn't just the end product, it's all the choice you make while creating it.
A genuine artist, whether they are a master or a beginner, will ask questions about an art piece. They want to know about the thought process behind the composition, the plot, the beat, why you put this here, why you didn't use that there. These are all questions a GenAI "artist" cannot answer because they didn't make those decisions. A machine did. And the machine didn't make those decisions based on something so nebulous like expression or theming or message. No, the machine made that choice because a human once put that word here, and a human once used this color, and a human once used this time signature. There's no true thought behind it at all.
So why is it everywhere? Why is everybody using it? Why is it so popular? Because everyone isn't an artist. And everyone isn't an artist in every medium. GenAI wasn't made for the highly informed, it was made for the layman. This is like asking why the Marvel Cinematic Universe is popular. Not everyone needs amazing and never before seen storytelling to enjoy a movie. Hell, I don't need that, and I'm a writer. Something doesn't need to be good to be fun. This has always been true for human art. We have been complaining about human slop in popular media for decades already, much longer than you probably realize. How is machine-generated slop all that different?
The problem I have with GenAI (and automation in general) is not that it exists and people are using it and it steals art. These are only problems in the subjective sense. If you are good at what you do, someone will copy you. Frankly, on a subjective scale, a bot that uses your work as a data point to make something completely different and worse is a simpler and less malicious problem than a human that copies it wholesale and passes it off as their own. No, the problem I have with it is the same problem I have with everything else.
Robots will one day replace every human in every industry. This is inevitable. We will not work because there will not be work to do. This should be a wonderful thing, but it's not. It's disastrous. How will we buy food? How will we pay rent? How will we afford to live? As it is now, our societies are not answering these questions, and they need to be. That's my problem with GenAI. What do I care about the new dumb show's overdone plot? Why should I be moved that Big Company has put out another piece of trash? What does it matter that another random online did something boring and not worth a second glance? I'm not looking there for good art to begin with and you shouldn't be either. I'm looking for people with passion who are making passionate things. They are the ones that will set the mood in their industry for the next twenty years, if not more. The person everyone will be copying, machine or not. But where will all the people with passion be if no one can feed themselves?
Automation and mass production don't kill art. It's not like fashion stopped existing just because we started mass-producing clothes. We will find a way to coexist, I am certain. No, what kills art is the killing of artists and that's exactly where we're headed: a world where art is devalued and so artists starve. That's why I want us to recognize our artists. To put more weight on knowing who made something. To analyze the work that pioneered and revolutionized. To celebrate more art done beautifully and masterfully.
Stop letting a robot tell you what to look at and listen to. It is not what will help you accomplish this. Find a human and ask them about their favorite thing. I guarantee you they will tell you who made it, analyze and interpret the fuck out of it, and celebrate it prodigiously. That, to me, is the answer to the "AI" problem. Let the bad art machine make its bad art as it has always done and go put in the effort to find someone who knows what's good. You'll live a more inspired life, I swear it.