The Art Behind the Artificial

Creative autonomy is at stake as we advance towards the unknown future of AI.

The uncanny images of AI art have become the butt of every joke when it comes to the all too 

unrealistic and noticeable traces of the technology. The ethos of AI art is simple, it allows anyone to shortcut their way into creating any image. With a few inputs and directions, you can generate  a curated image within seconds. 

What the world has just caught onto is the blatant and glaring issue of copyright, lack of humanity and the threat AI art  poses to the creative industries. As consumers of art, we expect a narrative, a message from the artist through their work that is formed by their human experiences. Without the artist’s humanity, what are we left with? 

It is true AI cannot operate without a human-being behind the screen. Meaning creativity may not be completely lost. In 2022, The Museum of Modern Art showcased Refik Anadol’s installation piece Unsupervised. Through AI technology, Anadol engineered a “sophisticated machine-learning model,” according to the MoMA site to reimagine and interpret the available data in the museum's collection spanning 200 years. The intent was to create a futuristic vision of modern art history. The museum projected a real-time video in its lobby of these ‘machine hallucinations’ that create  mesmerizing effects on the viewer. 

The situation appears much more dire when we consider what is at stake when AI is at the hands of just about anyone and those without the intention of working within the bounds of a supervised archive of work. Copyright law and ownership of work created by AI is under ongoing debate in Canada. Canada’s Artificial Intelligence and Data Act has proposed legislation that regulates aspects of AI that relate to international and interprovincial trade and commerce. However, the proposed legislation does not address rights for commercial use of art created by AI.

With unclear regulations on the implications of use of AI art, users may be subject to copyright infringement if an artist finds their work to be replicated. With these large legal gaps , is producing AI art truly worth the risk? This emphasizes the need for clear restraints on corporate use of AI. 

A WIRED article by Kevin Kelly titled “Picture Limitless Creativity at Your Fingertips” likens the advent of AI to the invention of photography, “Just as mechanical photography did not kill human illustrations a century ago, but rather significantly expanded the places in which images appeared, so too do AI image generators open up possibilities for more art, not less,” writes Kelly. The user becomes  a co-curator rather than the artist, when experimenting with the endless possibilities of AI art. The act of inputting the best prompts and keywords to create the desired effect is the user’s creative contribution and could qualify as a form of artistry. You communicate with the AI and hone a keen eye for tweaks, or as Kelly describes it, “casting a spell,” that is later tweaked and refined.

This take positions programs like MidJourney and DALL-E as tools for creativity. Kelly goes on to compare  the influence of co-curators on the AI  to the influence human-artists have on other human artists. For example, Van Gogh, Picasso, and Da Vinci on the state of modern art today.

As the article mentions, with the pool of billions of images that the AI is pulling from, crediting each owner is highly unrealistic. This leaves many questions unanswered. Will AI art call for a radical deconstruction of traditional concepts of copyright and ownership? Is the person behind a work of AI art an artist or a co-curator? Does the expertise required to feed the AI effective prompts qualify it as an artform? 

Only time will tell if AI will become as accepted a medium as photography is now. Until then, will the art world adapt to find answers?