CONTEXT: Last year, the art community was in an uproar when an AI-generated art piece won 1st prize in a statewide contest. Is it cheating, or is a new way of creating art?

Over the course of 2022, artificial intelligence trends have seen a surge in popularity, one of which being AI art. When it’s as simple as typing a prompt, the average person may fiddle around with an AI art generator to spawn images of puppies playing banjos, their favorite band as anime characters, or Voldemort playing basketball; the possibilities are endless. Literally. It seems harmless, sure, but the problem arises when AI is used in place of real, human artists.

Artificial intelligence is an undeniably massive factor of current and future technology for its outstanding convenience. I mean, this is the equivalent of those flying cars and robots that our grandparents were dreaming of decades ago. 

What exactly is AI? As the name suggests, AI is a simulation of human intelligence that makes it possible for machines to perceive, learn, and adapt, as we do. This technology can be seen in anything from video game NPCs to self-driving cars. 

However, there is a line that must be drawn when it comes to convenience, and that is when it interferes with human talent.

AI art generators get their “talent” from somewhere. For instance, if you were to input the prompt, “girl with purple hair standing on a mountain,” the AI would scour the internet for pre-existing artwork of girls, with purple hair, standing on mountains, and process all of them to create one cohesive result. Within minutes, you’ve generated a digital illustration for your new album cover without paying a dime, while simultaneously putting another artist out of a job.

In short, artificial intelligence thrives off the backs of real artists that never consented to having their artwork in an AI database. 

You better believe that clients have wasted no time jumping to AI for free artwork, as dozens of unsuspecting artists have already found themselves in this situation. Being a digital artist myself I find it incredibly demeaning that my own medium has been turned against me. A skill that I spent my entire life building, in some people’s eyes, is now worthless.

Artist communities all across the internet have been protesting the use of AI art with the #SupportHumanArtists movement. In response, the popular text-to-image model Stable Diffusion has announced that artists are now able to remove their work from Stability AI’s database.

From here, it is a question of morals: would you hire a human artist who puts pride and passion into every nuance of their work, or would you opt to get the job quickly done with lifeless “artwork” generated by artificial intelligence?

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