Reading Blog #2

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3600211.3604681

After completing a project that explicitly called for the use of AI generation, I found myself with a sick feeling in my stomach after using those tools. Something about their use in the final project, as I expressed in my artist statement, felt “wrong” and “ugly.” I sought out literature to see why I, and many others, have this inexplicable feeling when using these generators:

Several years ago in a philosophy class, I made the argument that for something to be art, it must have a creator and an audience, both aware of one another. This article here discusses the problems with describing AI generation as “art”, and they nailed my point perfectly. Art is a form of communication, but AI is not a communicator:

“The image generator has no understanding of the perspective of the audience or the experience that the output is intended to communicate to [its] audience.”

The authors further this point by arguing that an artist’s unique style is a reflection of communication with their own culture. Image generators create products devoid of substance because it has no culture to communicate with; it can mirror whatever data it has been fed, but it cannot make commentary with it. There is no story with image generation, which removes what makes it art.

I put in "death" into an AI, and searched "death" into a user submitted stock photography site (Pexels.com). The real photo communicates a story. It makes reference to culture. The image generator fails to tell you anything beyond aesthetic.

My read-through mainly focused on the reasons why image generation just doesn’t produce the same products as real artists, but this article delves much further than that. There is one sentence in here that is vital to my own understanding of my issues with these generators:

“students who foresee image generators replacing artists have become demoralized and dissuaded from honing their craft and developing their style.”

Bingo!

When working side-by-side with the technology, guiding it in a direction of my own choosing, I felt my motivation slip downhill. Even just using image generation as an artist (for a final product) demoralizes my interest to create. Generative products make people unmotivated, and to me, that goes against the entire purpose of art. This article helped me articulate and understand the feelings I was left with for Project 1.