In recent years, AI usage has increased dramatically, with 46% of Americans reporting interacting with AI at least several times a day. In addition to using artificial intelligence for gathering information, it is now being used to generate images as well. An estimated 15 billion AI-generated images have been created since 2022. Despite the convenience of using artificial intelligence to create visual pieces, doing so raises various moral and ethical questions.
Artificial intelligence is trained on real artwork created by human artists. Because human art is used as training data, oftentimes an artist’s style and work are plagiarized and copied without their consent. Professional artists, as well as any artist who shares their work online, now face the risk of their work being taken without their consent. Because AI has learned from billions of artworks, it is hard to trace which artists’ works have been used as data.
“It’s really hard to tell whether this will change the whole industry to the point where human artists will be obsolete. I think my work and future are under a huge question mark,” digital artist Greg Rutkowski tells BBC in response to his work being prompted to AI more than 400,000 times without his consent.
Students in the Good Counsel art department share similar sentiments about the use of AI for image generation. Haley Hutchcroft “26, a senior in IB Art II and AP Art, felt that without the artist’s consent, uploading their work to AI is just another form of theft.
”I think AI is being used in the wrong way, […] it could help people create art, but instead people just use it to steal jobs from artists.” She stated her opinion on AI-generated images.
Arguments have been made that AI models are trained only on publicly available internet materials and thus should be considered fair use. Lawsuits have been filed against Microsoft and OpenAI for copyright infringement. These lawsuits have raised questions about the intersection of copyright law and artificial intelligence. However, some believe that art created by AI, especially when modeled after the work of existing human artists, isn’t art at all.
IB Art II senior student Olivia Marinucci stated, “I do not consider AI art to be real art because while it may have the ability to generate a cool or beautiful image, it will never be a totally original piece, and AI cannot possibly convey emotion through art the way humans do.”
Art has long been seen as a proof of humanity, made from human creativity, the desire to express emotions, and the intangible. Work created by a robot intelligence without a human mind behind it does not reflect the same emotion or humanity that has appeared in art for centuries.”
She also believed that AI art has begun to negatively impact artists because of its accessibility, which attracts people who value speed over human talent.
“It allows people with little to no artistic talent or practice to create their ‘own’ art without all the hard work and studying that real artists go through to reach a high level of skill.” – Olivia Marinucci “26
The use of artificial intelligence to create art is even prevalent in the Good Counsel community. Various flyers and posters hung up around the school feature AI-generated images of our very own Vic. Good Counsel has a large community of talented artists at its disposal, which begs the question: why did it choose to use AI rather than human labor? Indeed, even some teachers within the school community have begun assigning work that requires students to create AI-generated images.
Regardless of individual opinions on the matter, the fact remains that artificial intelligence presents a real threat to all manner of human artists, as the convenience and availability of AI art becomes more widespread, decreasing the need to commission human artists. The future of art as we know it remains uncertain, as creative labor increasingly detaches itself from the human experience.
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