My personal concerns with AI in the visual arts and visual culture in general revolve primarily around theft and misinformation. In the essay that we read this week, photography was compared to art forms like painting and drawing. It was specifically accused of stealing jobs from draftsmen as well. While I believe all of that to be true, I don’t think that it’s entirely fair to compare this situation to the one that we are currently in with AI in the visual arts. The primary difference in my eyes between these two situations is the fact that artificial intelligence tools are being trained with people’s artworks without their explicit permission. One might then argue, don’t all artists derive their works from somewhere? Don’t they most often do so without explicit permission? The answer to these two questions is yes, but where I think it differs from AI is that an artist still has to be able to physically create an artwork with their hands and know how to replicate another artist’s style. With AI, you don’t have to be artistic in that sense at all and can just replicate a person’s style or work without their permission and without having the skill that is typically required to do so. I feel like it’s more respectable if you’ve trained yourself and not just your eye or your “prompts” to copy someone else’s work or if you’ve “remixed” different artists’ styles in a way to create something that is your own.
An AI and visual arts concern that I think many agree with is the threat of misinformation. Artificial intelligence can now create images so realistic that they look almost indistinguishable from actual photographs. This has led to people creating pornographic images of others without their consent—images that can be used to sway political elections or ones that can be used to spread health or scientific misinformation with potential consequences for a large chunk of the population. We saw the real-life effects of misinformation take shape with the election of Donald Trump as our president, and I hope that AI will not be a successful avenue to push these further in the future.
As artists and creators, the duty to uphold the integrity of the artistic world is in our hands, and we have to take action now before it’s too late. While I believe that artificial intelligence has been and will continue to be a neat tool for creativity, I also think that we collectively need to speak up about our concerns and help come up with solutions to remedy them. Coming up with an effective solution won’t be easy, and even governments all over the world have had their own difficulties deciding what to do about AI. I don’t have a perfect solution in mind either, but I hope that someone with more intelligence on and experience with this subject is able to step up to the plate for all of us and make changes that are considerate to all parties.