Over the past three years AI has been a big topic of numerous discussions, and I think it’s finally time to address the elephant in the room.

Moving forwards with this blog post, by AI I mean exclusively generative AI, unless I explicitly say otherwise. I am by no means trying to make a point that all AI is evil and that it will take over the world or something like that.

Humans

In my opinion, AI has its applications in multiple aspects of our lives, however, I think AI shouldn’t cross the boundary of replacing creative human work. Let’s look at the bigger picture: humans desire to create, but if that is replaced by AI? What will humans even do? Not to mention how it will shake the job market and the overall economy in the modern day capitalism.

And I don’t want to start a discussion whether capitalism is bad or good right now, the problem is one of the main principles of capitalism is profit being an incentive: maximizing profit and reducing costs. If you think that AI is going to make everyone work less, then you’re gravely mistaken. In the way the world is now, it certainly will not lead to a happier future.

”… but no one stops them from making art!”

Well, sure, but with the way AI apologists are trying to cope and/or indoctrinate someone else with their beliefs that “generative AI is actually great”, it will certainly dissuade creative people from doing work.

I’m sure you’ve heard stuff like “with AI I can do what you can but in just a matter of seconds!” or “it took you N amount of time to finish this and look how much time it took me write this prompt and make this beautiful work of art” (and I’ll come back to those arguments later).

“…but look how accessible it is!”

Usually, when people talk about accessibility they mean something the quality of something to be accessible to different kinds of people: for example for people with physical complications or economical struggles. However here you’re just disregarding the skill of being and becoming an artist (a musician, a programmer, etc).

Which brings me to my other point, AI art will never be true art (until AI becomes actually sentient I guess).

AI

You must’ve heard the argument of “Generative AI is just a parrot, it repeats everything you feed it, therefore, it’s not original” and the AI bros counter-argument being that “Generative AI is much more complicated than that”. Both are true, however, it doesn’t remove the fact that current generative AI is really just copying everything you feed it.

Diffusion AI models that generate images, large language models for text & code generation, they are all just regurgitating what they were fed during training.

”…actually, AI is inspired by-”

No. No, it’s not. First of all, we don’t really know how our brains work fully right now, however, humans usually possess enough intellect to see between “inspired” and “shamelessly copied”. Second, AI doesn’t have the capability to actually get “inspired”. They don’t possess any reasoning, therefore, they can’t actually get inspired. As we see, this can be confirmed if we just feed AI image generators other generated images, which results in a deterioration in quality.

Even though it may seem pretty smart, it is actually not. It is fed an incredible amount of information during training. That is enough for it to sound like a human, however cracks start to show if you actually ask it to reason about something that is out of its reach (I’m pretty sure a lot of people have seen the “draw a full glass of wine” video by Alex O’Connor on YouTube).

What is “art”

You can’t call a random rock a work of “art”. It can surely be a nature’s wonder, however, it won’t be a work of “human” art, unless it was sculpted by an experienced sculptor. Usually, art has some meaning to it. Or the lack of meaning behind it at all, which makes up a new meaning. AI however, is not capable of giving that meaning to “its” “work”. It can only see what you asked of it and use the blended up remains of someone else’s work to put it into shape. Actual art has taken time for the person to make. AI just makes soulless reconstructions.

Shameless robbery

AI companies shamelessly take images that have been made public for other humans to enjoy and blended them into fine paste for the AI to then sell that model for everyone else to use. In the end, the AI company receives profit, but the thousands of artists, whose work got stolen receive nothing!

You can say that if their work has been so assimilated then it’s no longer theirs, however it’s just blatantly wrong. As we’ve discussed previously, AI is not capable of creating someone new. It’s the work of every human artists’ work the companies could get their hands on being put into their AI models without the artists consent or compensation.

And AI apologists are calling whatever AI spews out their original work, which is obviously not true.

”It’s just a tool”

A tool is supposed to be used. You can’t compare, for example, digital coloring or any other modern tool, and AI just because “they do stuff for you”. Said digital coloring just makes the work simpler: the artist still has to come up with the color scheme and color it themselves. Not to mention the app they’ve used for it is most likely written by other humans too.

This reminds me of an old soviet cartoon:

What most AI apologists are talking about does not fit the category of a tool. It’s more like a human that they can micromanage. But that human doesn’t have any reasoning capabilities. And personal opinion. And conscience. And intelligence. And- you get the picture.

In the end

1/ I don’t mind image generation of silly cat videos or something that you’d never see in real life (“what if the sky was green” sort of thing).

2/ AI can be used as a tool, but only as a tool. You’re supposed to work with it, not just tell it what to do (for acceptable usage of AI (in my opinion) see pt.4).

3/ AI art is off the table, unless done ironically.

4/ AI is great at deep fakes, which is fine by me as long as it’s not used to actually deceive people.

This was my personal opinion on generative AI thanks for reading my post.

TODO: fix numbered lists in CSS