Well, that didn’t take very long.
About a year ago, I wrote this opinion piece on art generated by artificial intelligence (AI). While the algorithms were popping out images that were aesthetically very impressive, my primary argument for why creatives should not feel threatened was based on the overwhelming amount of incoherence I observed in the output.
“Yeah, this character portrait of an armored sorcerer is cool, but why does he have, like, two-and-a-half heads and twenty fingers on one hand?”
I was secure in my belief that it would be quite a while before generative AI came out with anything coherent enough to challenge human skill.
I was wrong, I’ll admit as I help myself to a nice serving of crow.
Holy guacamole, the stuff that AI is generating but a year later is absolutely astonishing, and whether or not this is the deathblow to certain creative jobs may depend upon your perspective.
Rage Against the Machines
An illustrator and writer I’m a fan of is Wayne Barlowe. I recently saw a post from him on Instagram admonishing the advent of generative AI, along with a “just say no” sort of image to go along with his tirade against the algorithmic impostore.
You can read it embedded here:
When he says, “with a simple keystroke AI ‘art’ creation wipes away the years it takes for a true artist to evolve …,” he is standing in the epicenter of the disruption caused by AI art. As much as this technical leap in AI is impressive from a scientific (i.e. nerd) standpoint, I can’t say I disagree with Wayne one bit.
While not a professional artist, I’ve worked piecemeal on developing my chops in art and design for many, many years. I have a minor in Art & Design in addition to my Bachelor of Science, and have taken enough courses and put in enough hours in front of the canvas to understand that human-generated art takes a tremendous amount of patience, dedication, and theory.
An artist will only reach the heights of greatness by amassing a colossal heap of fuckups, flops, and fertilizer beneath them. Devoting countless hours practicing, honing, and iteratively adjusting the smallest of details only to step back from the canvas and want to tear it all down is a demoralizing experience. I’ve been intimately familiar with this process and the emotional investment it demands since I was a child, and have stood staring from down in the depths of defeat at the malformed fruits of many hours of my labor.
The big difference between myself, a hobbyist, and Wayne Barlowe is that art is not my livelihood. Unlike some of the techno-crusaders commenting on his post, I won’t fault the guy for being up in arms about this soulless (albeit efficient) architecture and its very real prospect of robbing people of work.
They Took Our Jobs!
On one hand, in mere seconds AI can generate a character portrait or landscape more than worthy of adorning a book cover or advertisement. On the other, there will always need to be a designer overseeing the orchestration and integration of AI’s output into something cohesive. Even if we reach the stage where AI births fully formed and coherent book covers or perfectly tailored advertisements, human intelligence will have to sign off on it.
What does this imply?
It means your average book cover artist/illustrator with a smashing Behance portfolio may soon find clients opting to “just have the robots make the art for free” for their next novel or children’s book. Only the absolute cream of the crop or those with a difficult to replicate style will be somewhat safe, maybe.
Likewise, certain stock photographers could see the number of active licenses across their photo libraries dwindle. For the graphic designer asked to “create a brochure with images of a beautiful Mediterranean sunset”, it may be more efficient to use a generative AI that plugs right into Adobe Photoshop and pops out a royalty free, cost free, high-res image right onto the artboard.
In all these cases, however, there needs to be a designer stringing it all together. Sure, the AI spits out an awesome character portrait of a hot alien babe, one rendered flawlessly down to the pixel, but a designer would still need to select which variant of the portrait to use, adjust color balance, tweak levels, and place the image into a composition with the appropriate typesetting and visual hierarchy.
But how many people would a design agency need to hire to perform these simple tasks when the AI is doing all of the heavy lifting in a matter of seconds, and can churn out endless variations?
Yes, there will be blood. Fat will be trimmed. Casualties of computing will amass across the globe, and art school student loans will go unpaid.
Some artists and designers will have to look for new gainful employment opportunities, potentially in adjacent fields or industries as time goes on. Any artist or designer thinking that AI will have no substantial effect on their creative career, or that they are somehow safe because they embrace it, may soon be looking for ways to supplement their income.
Graphics designers, illustrators, concept artists, and photographers might all be out of the job, in time.
Generative AI could be thought of as just another piece of kit for artists and creatives. Yet to the arguments Wayne Barlowe makes, it’s already minimizing and might soon completely dissolve the role of the professional artist.
The only path forward, which is best for all aspects of AI, is responsible and ethical use. There would need to be some consensus between designers and the industries they serve that AI is prohibited from taking away the livelihoods of creatives. Perhaps even laws in place that throttle the extent of AI implemented in certain fields.
But as history has proven when people wield unprecedented levels of power and capability, there will be some sort of catastrophic overshooting before decency and strong principles snap things back into equilibrium. Not to mention, society’s best interests will always have to contend with those who lurk in tinted glass, executive suite offices willing to exploit technological advance for profit, despite any ethical barbs.
In the case of AI art, this is essentially a bunch of silly little pictures we’re talking about here, right? There aren’t lives at stake over art. No one is going to really suffer besides having to find a new line of work.
I wouldn’t hang my hat on that sentiment.
The invasion of AI into the relatively innocuous domain of art and design may seem trivial to those with no dog in this fight, but it’s no doubt a precursor to how AI will subsume and supplant many professions, pastimes, and, if movies like Terminator prove prescient, perhaps eventually our very existence.
The Meaning of Art
Let’s get philosophical, shall we?
What is art, anyway?
If art is the attempt to make the deeper movements of the soul into something tangible, to distill emotion and the qualia of one’s inner experience into light and form, rhythm and melody, then AI will never create true art as we understand it. AI might eventually develop something resembling consciousness, and could even spontaneously generate creations like a series of high-fantasy novel to rival the great Tolkien, but the feeling required for and elicited by real art will never be facsimiled within the computer.
However, generative AI already exceeds the human ability to create graphics (i.e. data). As our lives become increasingly fused to the digital substrates of the coming metaverse, where there is near instantaneous content creation and the economy is built upon the very seconds someone spends paying attention to something, a machine intellect that can produce limitless, flawless graphics at the click of a mouse will be untouchable. Not even the most skilled, efficient, caffeinated design teams or agencies working in concert could compete.
So, where does that leave art?
Decades from now, human art might only survive as artifact, as fossilized footprints of the soul. It will endure as the archaeological evidence that we were here, and that we felt, dreamed, and believed a great many different things very deeply. Or, at the very least, art will simply be relegated to some leisurely pursuit to get lost in when we’re not busy looking for work.
Have a wonderful day!
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