A visitor takes a photo with his cell phone of an image designed with artificial intelligence by … [+]
Generative AI has been around long enough for the world to see what it’s capable of, and it’s increasingly clear that using this technology to imitate art was a mistake.
Here’s why:
Generative AI is not practical
Large language models like ChatGPT and image generators like Midjourney and Dall-E have introduced a new copyright conundrum and inspired multiple copyright infringement lawsuits.
It is true that no artist was asked if their work could be used to form these models. But even if the courts rule in favor of the machines, the practical application of the technology does not appear to be worth the cost.
Generative AI is incredibly energy consumingsurprisingly intensive workand requires constant input – annotation – human workers to keep it functional, lest it degenerate into hallucinogenic nonsense.
Even with all these human efforts to keep technology grounded in reality, AI remains predicted hurting itself when it inevitably begins to consume its own production, like a species doomed to extinction.
In the future, children will learn about our time 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 the point ?
What is the point of AI art?
Generative AI has given the public the means to instantly create an image, or piece of writing, that appears to have taken time and effort. Art can now manifest with the press of a button, a prompt or two, as easily as ordering fast food.
Technology is a solution to a problem that never existed; Artists, even though they like to complain about how difficult the creative process is, like to create things. Artists have never asked for a tool that can imitate their work.
Few practicing artists are excited about generative AI. Why would they be? They see the skills they have spent their lives perfecting devalued before their eyes.
Worse still, their work was absorbed into the dataset without their knowledge or consent; they were used to train their own replacement, and no one asked for permission.
Generative AI threatens artists’ livelihoods, pitting their work against the cheap waste produced by dead machines. Technology only benefits those who want to produce content as quickly and cheaply as possible, excluding artists from the creative process.
If you think pop culture has become too bland and algorithmic these days, just wait until content is produced by actual algorithms. In hindsight, we probably shouldn’t have let the word “content” get in the way.
AI-generated media is unlikely to 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 doesn’t learn like a human
Many AI enthusiasts argue that machine learning is analogous to human learning, that stealing the work of artists to populate datasets is like taking artistic inspiration from others.
However, generative AI is not conscious. It’s not even close.
There is a widely held belief among AI enthusiasts that the technology will only get smarter as the years go by. Some have even been possessed by a kind of evangelical zeal, with the impression that AI would eventually evolve into a fully conscious being, AGI, which would lead humanity towards the singularity.
Noam Chomsky and his co-authors argued against this reductive worldview in a NYTimes opinion piecein writing:
“The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a tedious statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging itself on hundreds of terabytes of data… it does not seek to infer raw correlations between points of data but to create explanations.”
Gullible billionaire Elon Musk is a good example of a high-profile figure who firmly believes in the AI hype. Musk spends much of his time repeat the wildest predictions of science fiction authors — that is, when it is not endorsing – approve the Great Replacement theory on “X,” the bot-riddled website officially known as Twitter.
Ironically, the decline of “X” shows the corrosive effects of generative AI; technology has created an ocean of spam that clogs up every message, turning replies into mindless mush. LLMs gave robots the ability to imitate human speech, but not to have an interesting human conversation.
They never say anything worth listening to. How could they, when they have no ability to understand context, no perspective from which to view the world?
This lack of understanding results in boring results.
AI art is boring
Have you ever seen generative AI create anything even remotely interesting beyond grotesquely funny memes? This might just be the best use for them; the strange plastic sheen of AI images is perfect for the strange world of memes.
Surely the most intriguing element of AI art is the errors: crowds with melted faces, hands with withered fingers, extra digits, and limbs sprouting from places they simply shouldn’t.
Zooming in on AI images often reveals disturbing elements, evidence that the image was created by a dead machine, without any intention, perspective or experience of a human creator.
When we immerse ourselves in art, we feel a touch of the unique perspective an artist brings to their work, the smudged fingerprints, the individuality.
It’s telling that AI can be used to write a bland essay, but never a good story; he has no perspective from which to speak, no strange fixation, perversion or eccentricity that a person injects into his art. It’s just a bland amalgamation of what came before.
AI might be able to write a forgettable, classic superhero movie, but it could never surprise us with a new take on a familiar genre – the dead machine can only reconstruct art from bits and pieces in shreds that she has already eaten.
AI will not surprise us and produce works that will inspire many imitators; he will never imitate the insight of The Sopranosthe overflowing imagination of One pieceor the light political commentary of barbie – it could certainly never create something as wonderfully enigmatic as Hayao Miyazaki’s. The boy and the heron.
In fact, when Miyazaki first discovered 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 intention is to create a machine that can “draw like a human.”
Miyazaki did not mince his words and replied:
“I am convinced that this is an insult to life itself.”