For the past two years, it feels that AI has been all the buzz. Many have felt their attention captured by the uncanny ability of AI to create believable renderings of images in various styles, create music imitating the sounds of different artists, or write complete narratives with competent storytelling. The AI making these kinds of outputs are a specific subsection called Generative AI. Generative AI works by scouring massive amounts of data created by humans and then recognizing patterns in that data so that when prompted by a user, the generator generates something to match the request. For instance, a person could use an AI generator like Musicfy to make Taylor Swift do a cover of a Weeknd song and upload it to TikTok using a cover image created by an image-generating AI, like Midjourney or Bing Image Creator. The voice generator will have learned Taylor Swift's voice from studying audio recordings, and the image generator will have learned to replicate Taylor Swift's likeness and The Weeknd’s album cover from photos available online, so when prompted, the applications can readily give the user what they requested and the user could, like this TikTok user then upload it and garner something like 46k likes. But can generative AI do more than this example? Can it go beyond silly AI covers for TikTok and actually assist in the creation of meaningful art? Or does AI represent something more sinister?
Some are optimistic and believe AI can be a liberating tool for artists. While it's true that generators are more or less regurgitating what they’ve learned from their datasets and thus their outputs lack, with increasingly more legal precedence, “true creative originality,” proponents would still argue for its importance to artists. Charlie Sorrel, tech reporter at LifeWire, suggests that AI can be a tool for artists if we begin to see AI-generated pieces as the beginning start point in a creative process rather than the end. Oftentimes, the most difficult part of starting an artistic project is coming up with the idea. Generators can give suggestions which help artists get their brains rolling and inspired. For instance, a writer struggling with a creative block can insert a few prompts into ChatGPT, which can generate 1000s of prompts to pick from. AI image generators can help visual artists quickly create a rough composition for a piece, which they can then devote their time to fine-tuning into their final creative vision. This is similar to how Levi Walker (junior, computer science), a digital artist, explains he utilizes the AI image generator Stable Diffusion, “When I have an idea of something I want to draw, I can just load [it] up, enter a few prompts and have decent references that I can then use to help create my own work.” He feels this method truly benefits his process, “It helps me get my idea in front of me before I lose it so I can spend the time to actually create my own work without worrying that I’ll lose my inspiration.” AI, then, can be viewed as a great time saver, streamlining the artistic process, and making it more efficient.
But others hold grave concerns, like student artist Savannah Tyler (junior, speech pathology), who says AI reminds her of something out of a dystopian novel, “It totally takes away from the point of creative projects, which is for [people] to use their personal talents, passion, and experience to create something intimately human and authentic.” Skeptics like Tyler and Yoel Kim (senior, physics and math) understand that AI might, in many ways, “simplify” the artist’s work, but question whether or not that’s a good thing, as Kim expresses “I can see [a future where] artists [use] them, [but] culturally and in the scale of an entire industry, I think it’s destructive.” Yes–the hardest part of writing might be a blank page and the hardest part about painting might be a blank canvas, but that doesn’t make those difficult stages unimportant or “mundane” work that can be skipped over without detrimental effects to the artist and the art. The fact that it takes so much effort and intentionality to create something, arguably is what gives the art value. And the exercise of trying to come up with ideas and execute them yourself might be crucial to the training of a better artist. Getting rid of that hurdle might stunt the creative growth of future artists. Tyler shares her belief that the propagation of AI generators is a fulfillment of the words of educator and cultural critic Neil Postman, who writes in his book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” “People will come to adore technologies that undo their capacities to think.”
Skeptics similarly contest the merit of AI’s ability to generate prompts and inspiration for artists. PhD student D’Arcy Blaxell worries that AI dataset learning will lead to less original ideas. Because generators learn from online datasets, as AI spreads across more and more of the internet, generators will start to cannibalize as they begin to reference more and more work that they’ve created or inspired, “[widespread adoption] will lead to an internet-wide echo chamber of AI-regurgitation where chatbots compete in an endless cycle of homogenization and repetition.” Yoel Kim, a visual artist, notes that in his experience, the visual art churned out by generators already possess this recognizable bland quality, “Too much of its database seems to be dedicated to photorealism for it to make the kind of… style [that I find interesting.]” The fear is even if AI is used only for prompts or sources of inspiration, their increasing standardization output would still lead artists to create increasingly standardized art. So even if AI might make the process quicker, are productivity and streamlined-ness truly virtues of a creative process? Tyler sees it as just a step further into an Orwellian nightmare, where people are robbed of their creativity and capacity to think for themselves, as she quotes Orwell’s “1984,” “In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse-plows while books are written by machinery… The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and extinguish the possibility of independent thought.”
AI generators, like all major technological advancements, will surely shape human behavior and society. It's a possibility that critics are simply Luddites, who are creating a panic over an inevitable and ultimately neutral technological advancement. After all, when cameras were first invented, many were worried about the consequences and speculated it signaled the death of art. But of course, that’s not what happened; instead humans adjusted and art changed and photography even became its own distinct discipline. Might future generations one day view the concern over AI generators in the same way? Will they remember the critics as solitary figures standing athwart history yelling stop? Or might future generations look back, and wish they’d heeded their warnings?
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.