My opinions on AI are based on how it operates in its current state.
Discuss your personal concerns about AI in the visual arts and in visual culture in general.
AI is as much a pandoras box in the visual arts as it is across many other mediums. However, being in an infantile stage of development, there are many concerns as to its proper use and implementation as the technology evolves. In its current state, I believe consumer level engines such as Dall-e and Midjourney, while able to generate impressive displays, lack truly in-depth tools that would place more of the creativity in the users hands. In the future, I believe implementation of AI into software such as Adobe Photoshop and other creative tools would provide more opportunity for artists to have a more direct hand in creativity while AI takes a more supplemental role.Until that time, I view AI in the visual arts at a commercial level, to be mostly a novelty entertainment, where minimal prompting can produce magnificent content of which the user has but minimal control.
Another pressing concern of AI’s current implementation into the visual arts is both the legality and ethical issues of the current process of compiling databases of imagery that the programs use as reference for image generation. This could potentially lead to the commercialization of creativity that is based on the copied creativity and originality of thousands of artists, without their consent. While I have no issue with previous works being used as inspiration or foundation for the purposes of remixing, remastering, or sampling, AI in its current state does these processes mostly behind the scenes, without the users input and without the original artists consent. Imagery generated by these programs currently have no user-side way of determining what images were used as part of the AI’s creative process and thus the user has little control over what material is used and no way of truly knowing what themselves and the machine ended up taking inspiration from. Perhaps in the future, the user themselves will upload all of the material that they would like to be referenced and be able to generate imagery that is much more their own then the machines and with a much clearer path to determining the creative roots of new creations.
What can artists/creators do with AI tools to address or respond to these personal and collective concerns about machine creativity?
I believe it is vitally important for artists and creators to take an honorable and honest approach to the use of AI in their creative works and understand the creative split that currently exists within most commercial AI’s. While the technology evolves, I believe it is on all of us to explore this new frontier and strive to take as much of the creative responsibility into our own hands and view these tools as assistants rather then masters. Art in itself is the expression of human creativity by definition, and while imitation and the melding of different styles and concepts have always been integral to the evolution of art, it remains a human endeavor. Replacing this process entirely by machine or letting the machine take the majority of the creativity diminishes the power of the artist themselves and in turn, the power of their art.