Once, during a photo contest when only AI-generated photos were allowed to be submitted, a man named Miles Astray submitted his photo of a flamingo with seemingly no head and claimed it as AI-generated to make a point that AI can never recreate emotion and human quality within images. Astray won third place and the People’s Vote award, outperforming AI-created photos.
Generative AI has been around since as early as the 1950s, and it is no surprise that it evolved into a powerful tool capable of mimicking human creations. But mimicry is all it is: meaningless imitations of art that lack the empathy and effort artists put into their creations.
AI should be used only as a tool for improving how we accomplish day to day tasks, because otherwise, it disrespects the labor artists put into their work and devalues creativity. In fact, generative AI is the opposite of creativity, as it simply combines artists’ digital works of art into one giant amalgamation of essentially stolen art.
To clarify, the way generative AI functions is by inputting images into the AI’s database, the AI picks apart elements of the image and stores them away as data to be used. A massive step in our technological advancements, yes, but a step taken by trampling over the labor of others without so much as crediting them.
One way to think about it is like cheating on a test. Imagine you and your peers studied very hard for a test, and are all confident in your ability to succeed. On test day, instead of abiding by the student code of conduct, one of your classmates copies the answers off of you. Unfair and illogical, right? Well, by taking art from sources, the AI is doing precisely that— “cheating.”
In the past, artists who published their works online were typically allowed a hidden button in settings to disable having their art be used to train AI. However, for apps such as X and Instagram, artists no longer have the option to opt out of AI training.
These new policies are essentially forcing artists into training AI to create art that does not hold any significance or value. There is no actual thought process behind these pieces of “art,” AI is simply taking snippets of other artist’s work and slapping it onto a canvas.
I have met people who believe that AI art is superior to human-made art due to the speed at which the art is produced. While AI does have the advantage of speed, artists hold something greater that I firmly believe nothing can compare to human creativity and care.
To quote the famous playwright William Shakespeare, “the eyes are the windows to the soul.” When I see an AI-generated picture of a human and look into its eyes to see if there is anything more profound under that realistic portrait, I see nothing but empty, soulless eyes. That is what AI-generated art truly is: a compilation of stolen artwork that has had the passion, the creativity, and the care sucked out of it.
I understand the opposing viewpoint that generating an image is faster and cheaper than getting an artist to do the same thing. Efficiency is crucial in most lines of work, and sometimes, human made art cannot produce the necessary speed or even be as good as AI art. People also have tasks and responsibilities to complete, leaving little to no time to create such art in the first place.
AI art is also easily accessible and takes no effort to use. Apps and websites such as X and Canva have features that make images based on simple sentences that users input and prompts, which can be a game changer for some professions or people who may not be familiar with making art.
Even I cannot deny that AI art has the potential to be incredibly useful as the technology for generative AI improves at rapid speeds. However, the crux of my dislike for AI art is that artists have no choice but to train it with their hard work. If AI art will be used, it should be used with consent from the artists it samples from.
That love and dedication each artist pours into their work is a treasure that AI cannot replicate, no matter how advanced it grows to be. Art is not about how realistic or pretty a piece looks, but about the story behind it—the countless hours a person spent drawing, writing, and reworking every detail, carefully weaving a hidden story of creation that makes the piece human and beautiful.
As X user and author Joanna Maciejewska wrote in a post on X, “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”