Artificial Intelligence (AI) art has surged in popularity, with rather intriguing and sometimes even pretty works of art being generated and shared online. Technology relentlessly pushes ahead, and its intersection with the art world is no exception — except that AI art faces the incredible ethical dilemma that it is a caricature of preexisting art, deriving its creations from the hard work of real artists with basically no credit.
AI art is, in many ways, shallow art that is meant to look nice but lacks the depth and meaning that we tend to find in art created by actual artists as opposed to what a program can generate. It is art that rings hollow, and this discomfort is only further compounded by the fact that so many artists are being ripped off. Just as there has been a surge in the popularity of AI art, there has been a surge of artists complaining that they just found out their art has been fed to AI to recreate their style and even specific art pieces.
This doesn’t even stop at living artists, either. Within days of Korean artist Kim Jung Gi passing away in October of 2022, his art was fed into an AI model to ‘honor his memory,’ people responsible argued. Indeed the AI-generated eerily similar art to Kim Jung Gi’s distinctive, familiar style, save for the characteristic AI failures and distortions, but it felt like blatant theft. Did he not deserve respect? Were his legacy and his art of simultaneously such little value that they did not care about ripping off his art through AI, but of such high value that they obviously had no choice but to pay homage by using AI to continue pumping out art in his style?
But with AI art using other artists’ art to generate something dubiously new, it just feels like yet another move that devalues artists’ hard work and seeks to commodify art instead.
The whole ordeal feels like a cheap imitation of real art created by real people, hoping to replicate the styles of the living and the dead at a fraction of the necessary work.
Undoubtedly, artists can likely use AI to either help or outright create incredibly cool pieces themselves and use it in a way that is, at its core, artistic. But the most common method of use tends to be ripping off other artists’ art styles and abilities, using their art to generate what they want. It is an art based on blatant theft in the name of further commodification, and as consumers, we should turn a critical eye to the promotion and creation of AI art and who exactly we are platforming.