AI art seems to be everywhere in media. You’ve likely seen it while scrolling through some form of short-form media or in YouTube thumbnails. AI art uses art and images taken from the internet to train the model. Baby pictures on Facebook that your parents or someone’s parents have put up there are almost 100% likely being used to train some AI image generation model thanks to user agreement and terms of service updates you likely never read in the first place. Take X (formerly Twitter) for example. According to X’s TOS, under “Your Rights and Grants of Rights in content,” anything submitted, posted, or displayed on X and any of its services, gives them world access to do anything they want with it. This also mentions it goes to training machine learning and artificial intelligence models, including generative models. We also have examples of companies using AI for advertisements/promotional art, like the Coca-Cola Company, which used AI to generate a Christmas ad this year, with many real people on the advertising team not making any money from this ad, or Rovio using AI to promote a new Angry Birds game, saying it was temporary as apart of a response to them using AI. We then have two sides of a coin with AI images, which differ from AI art. We have misinformation where people post AI-generated images of something sad on accident while thinking it’s real, and disinformation where people spread fake info on purpose, nowadays AI-generated images are typically related to politics. There is a danger to disinformation where these AI-generated images get one or both sides angry at the other, causing arguments between the two sides, seemingly over stupid stuff.
I have a strong hatred for AI-generated art. I’m an artist, and I hate seeing people play off AI art as real art or use it as if it were real art. It shouldn’t be called art when art implies it was drawn, painted, etc to make the artwork, art needs proper time and effort while AI art just needs a prompt and the AI does the rest for you. When I found out X was starting to use images uploaded to the app to train an AI image generation model, that was the final straw that got me to stop using the app. After I stopped using X, I moved to three apps; Bluesky, Tumblr, and Cara. Cara is an app for art; no AI art is allowed, and no images uploaded are going to be used to train an AI image generation model. You can think of AI art as having two cups, 1 has water that is dyed red and the other is water that is dyed yellow, put those two cups together and mix them, making orange, AI art is that but using thousands of millions of stolen images to create a “new” image.
We also have AI music, which has you put in some sort of prompt to create a song, requiring very little human input. According to Soundful, AI music generators analyze already-made music using machine-learning algorithms to help generate these songs. What these AI music generation models can generate is up to their capabilities, either just melodies or harmonies, or they can create entire songs. You can probably think of it in a similar way to how AI image generation models are trained, only using audio instead of pictures. I don’t like AI music either; there’s something uncanny about an AI making human-sounding voices and having those voices sound somewhat like a human yet somehow also doesn’t sound like a human at all.
I honestly like seeing the artistic community go after people who use AI art. Take Dave McElfatrick, the co-creator of the webcomic “Cyanide and Happiness” for example. He went after a person who used AI art after someone complained about cigarettes not being generated properly. After McElfatrick was provoked, he drew one smoking a cigarette out of its butt and added how the prompt would be blocked if you tried generating it. It’s crude, but I also find the response hilarious.
The bottom line is AI art isn’t real art. AI “art” is a concoction of stolen art and images that are called new images. The unfortunate reality of it all is that AI image generation is here to stay and is just going to keep improving as time goes on. Some people go against AI used by corporations, specifically helping animators, siding with the Animation Guild. People fighting for animation workers post the hashtag “StandWithAnimation.” AI Images, videos, and music are going to cause workers and musicians who need the money not to get paid and put them out of a job.