Generative AI has existed long enough for the world to see what it is capable of, and it’s increasingly clear that using this technology to mimic art was a mistake.
Here’s why:
Generative AI Is Impractical
Large Language Models such as ChatGPT, and image generators like Midjourney and Dall-E, have introduced a new copyright conundrum, and inspired multiple lawsuits alleging copyright infringement.
It’s true that no artist was asked if their work could be used to train these models. But even if the courts rule in favor of the machines, the practical application of the technology doesn’t seem worth the cost.
Generative AI is incredibly energy-intensive, surprisingly labor-intensive, and requires constant input — annotation — from human workers to keep it functional, lest it spiral into hallucinogenic nonsense.
Even with all this human effort to keep the technology anchored in reality, AI is predicted to damage itself when it inevitably starts consuming its own output, like a species inbred to extinction.
In the future, children will learn about our era of climate catastrophe, and struggle to understand why we burned energy with such reckless abandon; billionaire space tourism, celebrity private jets, NFT minting, and now, generative AI.
What’s it all for?
What’s The Point of AI Art?
Generative AI has given the public the means to instantly create an image, or piece of writing, that looks as though it took time and effort. Art can now be manifested via the touch of a button, a prompt or two, as effortless as ordering fast food.
The technology is a solution to a problem that never existed; artists, as much as they like to complain about the struggle of the creative process, enjoy making things. Artists never asked for a tool that could imitate their work.
Few practicing artists out there are excited by generative AI. Why would they be? They are watching the skills that they have spent their life sharpening being devalued before their eyes.
Worse, their work was absorbed into the dataset without their knowledge or consent; they have been used to train their own replacement, and no one asked for permission.
Generative AI threatens the livelihood of artists, pitting their labor against the cheap slop produced by dead machines. The technology only benefits those who wish to produce content as quickly and cheaply as possible, by removing artists from the creative process.
If you think pop culture has become too bland and algorithmic nowadays, just wait until the content is being produced by actual algorithms — in hindsight, we probably shouldn’t have let the word “content” catch on.
AI-generated media will likely not result in thoughtful, imaginative, and groundbreaking stories; the concern is that the hype cycle will last long enough to damage the career prospects of working creatives.
AI-Generated Art Is Not Learning Like A Human
Many AI enthusiasts argue that machine learning is analogous to human learning, that stealing the work of artists to fill datasets is the same as humans taking artistic inspiration from others.
Generative AI, however, is not conscious. It’s not even close.
There’s a widely held belief among AI enthusiasts that the technology will only grow more intelligent as the years pass. Some have even been possessed with a kind of evangelical zeal, under the impression that AI will eventually evolve into a fully conscious being, AGI, that will lead humanity to the singularity.
Noam Chomsky and his co-authors argued against this reductive worldview in a NYTimes Op-Ed, writing:
“The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data … it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.”
Credulous billionaire Elon Musk is a good example of a high-profile figure who firmly believes the AI hype. Musk spends much of his time repeating the wildest predictions of science fiction authors — that is, when he’s not endorsing the Great Replacement theory on “X,” the bot-riddled website formally known as Twitter.
Ironically, the decline of “X” shows the corrosive effects of generative AI; the technology has created an ocean of spam that clogs every post, turning replies into mindless mush. LLMs have given bots the ability to imitate human speech, but not to make interesting human conversation.
They never say anything worth listening to. How can they, when they have no ability to understand context, no perspective from which to view the world?
This lack of understanding results in boring output.
AI Art Is Boring
Have you ever seen generative AI create anything even remotely interesting, beyond grotesquely amusing memes? That might just be the best use for them; the uncanny, plastic sheen of AI imagery is perfect for the weird world of memes.
The most intriguing element of AI art is surely the mistakes — crowds with melted faces, hands with withered fingers, extra digits, and limbs sprouting from places they simply shouldn’t.
Zooming into AI images often reveals unsettling elements, evidence that the image was created by a dead machine, with none of the intent, perspective or experience of a human creator.
When we immerse ourselves in art, we experience a touch of the unique perspective that an artist brings to their work, the smeared fingerprints, the individuality.
It is telling that AI can be used to write a bland essay, but never a good story; it has no perspective to speak from, no odd fixations, perversions or eccentricities that a person injects into their art. It’s just a bland amalgamation of what has come before.
AI could perhaps write a forgettable, formulaic superhero movie, but it could never surprise us with a fresh spin on a familiar genre — the dead machine can only reconstruct art from tattered pieces it has already eaten.
AI will not surprise us, or produce work that inspires a range of imitators; it will never mimic the insight of The Sopranos, the boundless imagination of One Piece, or even the lighthearted political commentary of Barbie — it certainly could never create something as wonderfully enigmatic as Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron.
In fact, when Miyazaki first encountered AI-generated art, he reacted with visceral disgust. A now-famous clip shows the legendary animator watching a presentation on Artificial Intelligence in animation, and being told that the intent is to create a machine that can “draw like a human.”
Miyazaki didn’t mince his words, and replied:
“I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”
