On AI and Art

I can't get away from AI! It's trying to write this post for me! Help!

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a hot-button topic for several years now, and its bubble continues to expand. Every large company seems to be shoehorning in their own AI chatbot to "help" users before thorough testing to make sure the AI can even live up to its claims. Apple introduced "Apple Intelligence" in October 2024. I immediately disabled it.

I have never been an AI enthusiast; in fact, I have actively avoided engaging with AI as much as possible. Only this year have I conceded enough to employ AI for cover letter writing (I am a terrible hype person for myself). Even then, I refuse to engage with AI as if it were human, or give it any personal data. I don't trust any of the parent companies with my data and I firmly believe "artificial intelligence" itself is a misnomer. AI is not intelligent; it is just really good at consolidating and regurgitating information (up to a point). 

The plethora of concerns surrounding AI are not new. AI is known to "hallucinate" and add blatantly false claims within its summaries; for example, Google's AI told people to add glue to pizza and gasoline to spaghetti. Because AI is human-built, it retains the biases of its coders; despite the framing of objectivity, AI has racial biases and there is a history of encoded sexism, especially when it comes to digital assistants, which has real-world implications. Furthermore, the anthropomorphism of AI, digital assistants, and chatbots is concerning. There are energy concerns. Despite all the hype and claims that AI will soon take over jobs, the "first AI software engineer" did not perform well, yet at the same time companies are actively stealing from artists to create generative AI training models. In fact, a judge recently dismissed a case against Meta's usage of copyrighted works for AI training. As for therapy, AI use can be concerning there too, which is especially alarming considering the target population is quite vulnerable.

However: I will admit my opinions have become more nuanced. Earlier this year I attended EntertainAI, a small conference specifically concerning the use of AI within the entertainment industry. After years of hearing from the pure tech world about AI's revolutionary potential while at the same time pirating millions of books and stealing art, I went in feeling skeptical. Perhaps I was about to encounter more technologists with loose morals trying to convince me that using AI to generate children's books is good, actually. Instead, I was met with a group of people who considered themselves artists first and technologists second.

Rather than seeing AI as a replacement for creativity and a way to offload artistic expression, it was treated like an artistic medium. Furthermore, instead of using the large, proprietary AI models with the aforementioned stolen training data, many of these artists used tools like ComfyUI, an open source generative AI tool which allows the user to run it locally and create their own training database. Other artists also employed AI coding tools such as Cursor to help realize tech-based ideas without having to learn how to code themselves. While I would not recommend these tools for non-artistic applications — the code they produce is not well-constructed and contains significant vulnerabilities — I like that they can lower the barrier of entry to integrating technology within art.

Ultimately, I remain healthily skeptical of AI and the tech world's gung-ho attitude towards it; however, hearing the perspectives of artists who use AI has given me hope that big tech will not take over the world with its amoral, power-hungry (in both senses!) ChatGPT clones so easily. There is no technological replacement for human taste-making, and no amount of AI slop will prevent humans from creating art. It will just take a bit more wading through the muck to find it.

– Linnea