As AI becomes more common in our lives, people are finding more and more problems with it. From the realistic deepfakes to consuming thousands of gallons of water, there has been one issue that has been prevalent from the start: AI’s influence on art. People have used AI to create content which they use as their art. Although some think AI content is art, many people have determined that AI content is not art because of the process it uses to create the content, and the lack of intention behind the creations.

Companies are using AI to create social media posts and to create books and images, and some are selling the AI content they make.

Required skill:

The problem is that creating AI content takes no skill. While artists are practicing and honing their skills to create amazing art, AI is taking images off of the Internet and rendering something with no artistic skill behind it. If AI-created content can be considered art, AI will be used in place of the talented artist who cares about the art they create.

In 2021, OpenAI announced DALL-E, an image generator using GPT-3. Later in 2022, Midjourney, an AI image and video generator was released. The generators then led to a boom in AI images across the internet. More focused AI generators also popped up, focusing on storytelling, music, voices, videos and more.

From these generators, people were able to create content by inputting a prompt into the AI. People then used the generators to create art. This is when artists began to worry about job security. If everyone can make art by only using prompts, artists may not be needed anymore.

Because of this, artists started pushing back on AI creations, with many of them feeling that the creations do not count as art.

“I don’t feel like it’s art at all. It’s not man made. It doesn’t have any emotion or feelings towards it,” junior Sylis Lux said.

The process AI uses to create images stems from predicting what should go next in a sequence as a response. For images, it guesses what color pixel should go next based on other images with subjects that are the same as the request.

For writing, AI guesses what word should go next based on other texts with the same subjects as the request. These are the reasons why AI content is not considered art, because nothing about the creation has human elements.

Ownership of creations:

Not only are AI creations not considered art, there is no actual creator of the content. In OpenAI’s Terms of Service, they give the user ownership of the output of their services. This allows you to do whatever you want to do with the output, but this does not mean that the user is the creator of the output.

Technically, the AI interpreting and producing the content is creating that instance, but it generates them by using copyrighted materials. AI uses its training data to determine the output – directly taken from the data which contains copyrighted material. This poses the question, is AI actually creating anything or is it just stealing?

“There’s no actual creator as the person didn’t do any work. They just put in a prompt and AI takes sources from all over the internet and anything that it can find as a source. So it could take things from like 20 different sources, combine it into one to where, then everything gets mashed up,” Lux said.

Something else connected to the creation of AI content is copyright protection. Copyright is used to protect the creator’s works, so they can choose how their work is used. Because there is no clear creator of the content, figuring out if the content could be copyrighted becomes a challenge.

The US Copyright Office and Congress have gone through discussions and cases to determine if AI-generated content could be protected by copyright. In a report from the Copyright Office, it is stated that protection for creations must reflect sufficient human contribution to warrant copyright protection.

In the report, at the end it states, “As described above, in many circumstances these outputs will be copyrightable in whole or in part—where AI is used as a tool, and where a human has been able to determine the expressive elements they contain. Prompts alone, however, at this stage are unlikely to satisfy those requirements.”

This means that creations made solely by AI can not be protected by copyright, and even use of AI as a tool to create the works may not get protection for the parts created by AI.

An Artistic Medium:

Even though these problems exist, some people still claim that AI content is art. Those in support claim that AI content is a new medium for artists to express themselves. Artists can still instruct and change the creations to fit what they want and are able to express their creativity.

The introduction of AI as art could be compared to the introduction of the photograph. When the photograph was introduced to the art space, the artist’s initial reaction was that it was not art. In a Brush and Pencil article published in 1901, “There is some imitation in art, but perfect exactness is not art. Art is sometimes purposely inexact. Michel Angelo’s figures would not express such strength and power if they were mere copies from nature.”

When the photograph was introduced, it was hated by many artists and could take the meaning of some art away. The photograph was later accepted as an art form, but was only able to by enduring the hate critics gave them. In the same way, AI art could be going through the same challenges photography did.

Both the camera and AI are mechanical devices which use a non-human process to create their outputs. Both have their limitations and problems, but still are able to allow artists to express their creativity.

In the same way a photographer can frame and change the camera’s settings, a user can tell the AI to change the theme, subject and everything else about the created content. In both photography and AI, skill is needed to create something good.

Even with those comparisons, there are problems with that way of thinking. A photo captures moments in time. With AI, it is using human creations to estimate what the output should look like. Photos taken have intention behind the output, while AI is filling a simple request.

Conclusion:

AI content is not art. The art created can not be considered art because of the processes it uses to generate its content and the lack of human elements.

Since there is no actual creator of the artworks, it makes it difficult to gain copyright protection for the content generated. AI takes opportunities away for artists, leaving them with fewer chances to get the jobs they want.

AI is continuing to grow, it is going to get better and better at creating the content people are using for art. If we let AI-content be art, artists will be left stranded and forgotten.