I’ve thought about this quite a lot and mentioned it before. What most people consider AI art is basically modern day photography with a little plagiarism. Photography in the 19th century enabled people with little talent for drawing to become artists and accurately reproduce what they saw. This soon developed into an art form in its own right with many photographers using the medium to express more than what lay before them. I am thinking here of Ansell Adams, Dora maar, Lee Miller etc.
Plagiarism is an interesting one though. The saying good artists copy great artists steal has been a truism down the centuries but the great artists always add their own voice to the mix. However if I were to prompt an AI with “Mickey Mouse as a member of the Avengers” I am sure Disney and Marvel would have something expensive to say about it. (Interesting I can think of two instances where the Marvel legal department came down on a (comic) creator. Dave Sim who ran three issues of Cerbus with a parody of Wolverine on the cover and the wrangling with Dark Horse(?) over Marvel man/Miracle man (Marvel man, a revived hero from the 1950’s, predated the Marvel comic by at least a decade but Marvel still won).
The problem with AI art in most cases is that it is like me going through my childhood comics and trying to replicate the style of Jack Kirby by tracing over the picture, for instance but with no feeling for what is being created. Returning to photography, Ansell Adams took amazing pictures of Yosemite, he probably copied techniques he had learned form other photographers and added some of his own. If I went to Yosemite and took a photo of the same location, in the same manner, I might closely approximate his photo but it would be my own. If I went on line and down loaded his photo it wouldn’t be mine, however I could cut it up and add it to a collage that was mine. It’s equivalent to whether sampling a song by David Bowie and using it to create a beat is stealing or doing something new? The argument rages on.
In other areas artists are using AI to create some astounding works as the sample from MOMA shows
In the end the art is in the intent. Currently at least AI has no intent to create art. DALL.E2 could sit there for years and would never come up with something that was its own invention without a human prompt. Even the art in MOMA needs that human in put.
When photography came in it didn’t kill art as was predicted it changed art and opened the door to the impressionists (though Turner got there first), the Dadaists, surrealists, and abstract art of the 20th century. Art will adapt to AI and find ways to use it no AI could imagine.
Plagiarism is an interesting one though. The saying good artists copy great artists steal has been a truism down the centuries but the great artists always add their own voice to the mix. However if I were to prompt an AI with “Mickey Mouse as a member of the Avengers” I am sure Disney and Marvel would have something expensive to say about it. (Interesting I can think of two instances where the Marvel legal department came down on a (comic) creator. Dave Sim who ran three issues of Cerbus with a parody of Wolverine on the cover and the wrangling with Dark Horse(?) over Marvel man/Miracle man (Marvel man, a revived hero from the 1950’s, predated the Marvel comic by at least a decade but Marvel still won).
The problem with AI art in most cases is that it is like me going through my childhood comics and trying to replicate the style of Jack Kirby by tracing over the picture, for instance but with no feeling for what is being created. Returning to photography, Ansell Adams took amazing pictures of Yosemite, he probably copied techniques he had learned form other photographers and added some of his own. If I went to Yosemite and took a photo of the same location, in the same manner, I might closely approximate his photo but it would be my own. If I went on line and down loaded his photo it wouldn’t be mine, however I could cut it up and add it to a collage that was mine. It’s equivalent to whether sampling a song by David Bowie and using it to create a beat is stealing or doing something new? The argument rages on.
In other areas artists are using AI to create some astounding works as the sample from MOMA shows
In the end the art is in the intent. Currently at least AI has no intent to create art. DALL.E2 could sit there for years and would never come up with something that was its own invention without a human prompt. Even the art in MOMA needs that human in put.
When photography came in it didn’t kill art as was predicted it changed art and opened the door to the impressionists (though Turner got there first), the Dadaists, surrealists, and abstract art of the 20th century. Art will adapt to AI and find ways to use it no AI could imagine.
