The first artificial intelligence, also known as AI, was used in 1956 in the Dartmouth conference, its main starting point. Since then, it has been rapidly growing, becoming more mainstream from 2020 onwards. That was when the things we know today, like ChatGPT and other public AI programs, started to gain more traction.
By all means, AI isn’t horrible, but using it to take people’s jobs, let alone jobs people spend their lives cultivating, is a very sad and true reality we live in today. One of the biggest examples is art. Many people use AI to create art and claim it as their “own”, or use other people’s art and put it under AI commands to alter it.
Art Thieves
Many artists are very pleased when others take pictures and admire their beautiful works, but some people use those pictures for other reasons. Some people are using it for putting it in an AI Prompt to alter it; sometimes it isn’t altered that much, and instead is used to train the AI to make art using pieces that are fed into its code in order to replicate a certain style.
Many artists have had to resort to using what are called AI Disturbance Overlays, which are a filter that disrupts the AI’s function when a piece using that filter is given to it. It causes the AI to become confused and generate nonsense. However, the rapid evolution of AI has made it almost impossible for man-made disturbances to keep up.
It’s worth noting that AI art is most likely only a temporarily stable thing; already, we’ve seen that so much AI art is generated that it is fed back into the machine, generating more and more of what is called AI “slop”. This generates inaccuracies and brings down the quality of the AI’s output.
AI Animations
AI is also a huge threat to the animation community, and recently, it has been improving its animations to make them smoother. Being able to copy various art styles without a sweat, some of the biggest being Disney, Pixar, and different anime.
A prime example: one of the newest “funny” bits you will see on platforms, like TikTok or Instagram, is fake Disney-esque trailers that are usually used to promote very profane or crude material. Due to how these algorithms work, these things usually get spread to children.
Not only that, but also other very important, horrible events that have happened around the world have been depicted a lot less violently to bypass the filters of TikTok and or Instagram, effectively sugar-coating global history to appeal to the masses. AI can also facilitate abuse against others, including generating sexual or otherwise mature content, which make up attacks on a more individual level in the form of art or animation.
Impact on Artists
The art industry today has become increasingly commercialized, at times pushing artists into strict boxes that they have to conform to. Behind every corporate movie is an artist who drew the same rock over and over; behind every work of art is someone who barely gets paid minimum wage… or doesn’t get paid at all. Commissions, or the process of paying an artist to create something for you, is a core part of this community that keeps the practice alive. By using AI, someone is taking away a potential sale, something that might have been the difference between whether or not another person can afford groceries that week.
It’s so easy to ask, “If it’s so hard, then why do it?” The truth is, the point of life has never been, and never should be, to make things as easy as possible. The point is to make the little time you have fulfilling. And without artists, there would be nothing left for anyone to train their AI on in the first place.
The next time you ask AI to generate an image for you, stop and think for a moment. You could most likely find an identical or similar picture simply by browsing the internet with the correct key words. Or, if you have the resources, you could talk to an artist and see if they can help you.
After all, art hasn’t become a network for nothing.
