The concept of art and AI has plagued the discourse of the intersection since 2022, before even ChatGPT was released. If you remember, in Colorado, a state competition was won by an artist who used generative AI to create their photo. Once published and revealed, the entire artistic community raised their pitchforks (shall I say canvases) and protested against this abomination. It got many people thinking along philosophical lines, for once. They were grappling with the idea that machines can produce art.
The initial answer the world came to was a resounding no. Generated on other artists’ blood, sweat, and tears, the mere notion that AI could produce art was fanciful at best. Yet with the recent rise and staying power of more chatbots such as Claude, Gemini, LlaMa, and others, the line between art produced by a human and something akin to art but generated by a machine has been significantly blurred.
If a human produces something magical, it’s art. They put time, energy, money, creativity, and some suffering into producing that piece. Our culture is refined by artists that stay in our minds, like Picasso or Shakespeare. Different outlets, same artistic genius; no machines.
If an AI produces an image, let’s say in the style of Picasso, things get interesting. No human produced it, but it was produced because of a human and humans. What I mean is that a human prompted a machine to generate the image, and the image was generated on thousands or even millions of pictures resembling or created by Picasso, the humans. Thus, it is Picasso, but not really. We can liken this to a natural versus an artificial diamond. The natural diamond speaks for itself. The artificial diamond, on the other hand, is tacky and not even a diamond but cubic zirconium. Even if it looks like a diamond, tests can confirm the validity and authenticity of the rock.
Here’s a question: what if a human produced some piece of art, for instance, a gorgeous short story, but consulted with AI to ideate. Going to the AI and using specific prompts in specific ways, the human came up with far richer and deeper stories, layers, and characters with the help of a machine. On their own, their story would have been lost to the noise of the internet, the 402 million terabytes of information produced per day. With AI, they achieved megastardom and riches. But the glorious question here is: Is it really art?
Could it be art if the heavy lifting was done by a machine? An analogy that might make sense is that of a pilot. No pilot would take the credit for flying all by themselves. Of course, their expertise and wits are necessary and important. But the heavy lifting, literally and metaphorically, was done by a gigantic machine. Is this similar in thinking to the prospect of using AI and creating art? Or should the analogy be that of a master barista, who knows exactly the ins and outs of their espresso machine, but to say the coffee was produced by the machine would be an insult; grinding the beans, measuring the cup, and more skills are required to create that perfect cup of joe. Maybe this is more closer to the status quo of AI art, that of using the LLM as a heavy lifter but retaining the core grunt work, the core creativity and suffering, for the human portion of the work.
I am tired of seeing AI-generated books, images, music, and voices. They take away something from my time on the internet. They’re just hollow. They are devoid of meaning. Dare I say, they are hellish. But I am having less of a problem, as you can see from this blog post, with AI being used as a heavy lifter. Sure, a spectrum will indeed emerge. Some people will lean on AI, and some will use it as little as possible. A new question must be administered then, one which ends the blog post on a sweeter tone, for once: How can we use AI to perfectly enhance our creativity?