Over the years we have begun to neglect what the beauty of creation. To sit there for hours a day perhaps a month or years with a variety of emotions. To finally see the final product that your entire body and soul have worked on and finally see a smile on your face. That is the beauty of creation.
When you forget that to create there is a process and that every process creates personal growth. You forget the beauty of growing up and building something unimaginable. The developers of OpenAI’s (AGI) states, “Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence –AI systems that are generally smarter than humans– benefits all of humanity.”
How can their mission be to ensure something benefits all of humanity by being smarter than humans if they replace and re-use the work of a human to build and train AI models? AI creates music or art based on pre-existing content by using billions if not trillions of example videos or images from the internet. To train these machines to create what was already created with the hard work of someone else’s hand can be considered stealing. All of this creative content is copyrighted and swept from the web without consent, credit or compensation being given to the creators. This directly affects artists and their audiences.
The rise of AI has greatly damaged the art market across the world. 26% of illustrators lost their work in early 2024 and companies such as Coca-Cola, Adobe, Nike, Gucci, Hasbro, Google, Microsoft and many more are using AI generated art instead of hiring artists according to artist and writer Emma Cownie.
Many artists on social media report how it has not only affected them but their audience as well. Daria Lev, a fine arts student and digital artist on Instagram expresses how, “AI has truly changed the situation for both artists and their audience. For the general public, AI- generated works look beautiful, so people who don’t understand the nuance of real art often can’t see the difference between AI images and hand-painted artwork. This shifts attention away from original art.”
Art itself will become meaningless because the audience will no longer be able to engage and perceive the creative process of building something from scratch. Why do you think people go to museums to see paintings? It is because of the history behind it and the beauty that was able to come out of that story. The intentional brush strokes and the colorful, humane blend is what gives room for the imagination to ask questions. It makes us wonder what made this person create this work of art. What was its purpose?
Another artist on social media and indie animator, Kuiiipermoon, argues,“ I think it affected artists’ opportunities, since now most who don’t truly appreciate art (or think AI ‘art’ is not harmful) and its craft end up relying on AI to have ‘faster and better results’ than hiring artists, especially the big corporations starting to take advantage of all this. As for the audience, I think most people treat AI like something cool and nice that can take a pretty picture of their pets or something, not really understanding how much it’s damaging the art and animation industry as well as many other jobs now.”
People underestimate the hard work that is put into creating art. Many people on social media and big corporations are starting to take advantage. What this calls for is to make the audience understand the standpoint of an artist and how AI makes art. For starters, AI is the result of a machine being able to learn via algorithms and collecting data. This process begins with a set of data input, for example, photographs, paintings or drawings, which the AI uses to learn about textures, styles and compositions. Once the AI is able to recognize this and is fully trained, AI will start to generate new images autonomously or based on specific prompts, instructions or commands given to the AI system by a human according to Interaction Design Foundation.
Steven Zapata a professional designer, illustrator, and educator gave a great speech on TEDx Talk about how AI in the arts has greatly impacted the Art community and he expresses, “it’s the quality of the training data that determines the quality of the model. The better the creative inputs the better the creative output”.
Did you know that AI is being used to create music as well as visual art? It is not well known or popularized, but AI is being used in production and promotion like never before. One of the many ways AI is being used in the music industry is through AI music generators. It works similarly to generating AI art. For example, the machine uses learning algorithms to analyze existing music and create new compositions based on the given analysis according to Rollingstone.
While this may seem like a new interesting tool to start making music, many argue that it is less creative and less genuine than music being done by a human. Take, for example, a music video that has been circulating around YouTube by youtuber AI talk “Yuri-surreal.” The entire music video is AI, from visuals to voice. Some of the comments are not very pleased with the singing voice, saying that the creator just “prompts” AI and no real human work is being put in the making. Others argue the opposite and find the music video quite pleasing, yet bizarre.
AI music videos aren’t popular, but they aren’t unpopular either. While some musicians worry, some don’t because what people seek in music is the emotional connection and comprehension. From the music itself and the singer, AI music fails to build that connection because of the unnatural echoey singer, the strange lyrics that don’t resonate with the public, and the pop music in the background that doesn’t stay on beat. Is that really what people will look for and like? Something without a soul? That is why AI music isn’t as revolutionary or controversial as AI art.
AI generated art is not demonstrating to the audience what art is, but acts as an easy, purposeless way of creating something out of nothing by typing a simple prompt on the computer. Art is a process, not something you can just type and then call art. Where is the story and human progress of a brush or pencil in this process which artificial intelligence calls art? There needs to be awareness for the artist and their viewers because that viewer can become an artist by seeing the work of another artist and the story behind it.