AI’s growth has drastically evolved in the past years. Nowadays, with the help of AI tools, anyone can achieve things that were unimaginable a few years ago such as creating digital art images. Thanks to image-generating tools such as Midjourney, DELL-E, Canva, etc., anyone can create digital art. Through a simple prompt text such as “Painting of nowadays technology”, these platforms generate images based on the description they are given (see image 1) (Nolan, 2022). Text-to-image tools can generate any type of content, even images based on other artists’ styles. For instance, by rewriting the exact same prompt as for image 1 but adding “Salvador Dali style”, the AI tool will recreate the image but with that painter’s style (see image 2).
Being able to create digital art with other artist styles is awesome for us – users of image-generating platforms – but how does this affect the original artists? Is using another artist’s style seen as plagiarism or stolen art? There is a lot of controversy and scepticism in the arts industry concerning AI-generated images. To what extent is ethical to sell AI-generated images with other artist’s names on them? Artists see this as “harsh and aggressive” as their names and painting styles are used without their consent/permission (Nolan, 2022).
A rising question rooted in AI-generated images is whether these can be called ‘art’. Technology can create images resembling to paintings, but what makes a piece of art is the emotional component the painter leaves behind (Mineo, 2023). AI cannot reflect emotion behind its illustrations. From a painter’s perspective, these AI-generated images cannot really be considered art. However, from a developer’s perspective, creating images from algorithms, and machine learning can be considered art. Therefore, I think the definition of art is subjective and depending on the viewpoint, AI-generated images could be seen as art.
Sources:
Nolan, B. (2022). Artists say AI image generators are copying their style to make thousands of new images — and it’s completely out of their control. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-image-generators-artists-copying-style-thousands-images-2022-10?international=true&r=US&IR=T
Mineo, L. (2023). Is art generated by artificial intelligence real art? Harvard Gazette. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/08/is-art-generated-by-artificial-intelligence-real-art/#:~:text=The%20emergence%20of%20AI%2Dimage,and%20creators%20out%20of%20work.
Hi, I think your post is really interesting as I was just thinking about this very topic a few days ago. I particularly like that you take the perspective of the artist and describe what makes art be ‘art’ from that side. However, I wondering, what do you think about the quality of the art on the viewer side? The images are clearly artistic but do you think, without the emotion and novelty from an artist, that we as viewers can have an emotional response to AI works like we might have with great artworks made by humans?
Additionally, might we view AI art similarly to forgeries of ‘previously undiscovered Van Gogh’ works for example, or is it something different, better or worse?