Why Artists Will Survive Gen AI

A common fear of artists within the modern day is the invention of gen AI, and with the technology only improving, it is hard to blame them. Never before have anyone been able to write a description to the program and convert those words into an image with just a click of the button.

Not only is the development of these programs shady at best, but the implications of being able to have a software make something for you has dark implications for artists. It is an existential terror that makes artists feel doomed and helpless in the face of it all. However, there is some good news.

Generative AI won’t be lasting, and artists will outlive the technology. This is not just an opinion nor a perspective this time. No, there are facts that actually back up this claim. So, let us take a small look into why artists will prevail and ultimately win.

Thousands-Year Tradition VS Novel Gimmick

Art is something that has existed for a long time. An extremely long time. The oldest piece of art in known history is 73,000 years old. A painting on a rock face in South Africa that predates even cave paintings. In comparison, gen AI is not even in its fetus stage with it being less than a hundred years old.

A brown rock with faint red marks on it.

(image courtesy of https://www.livescience.com/63565-worlds-oldest-drawing.html )

ELIZA is the oldest chatbot from 1961 created by Joseph Weizenbaum. AI as we currently know it are far younger. ChatGPT has come out only in 2022, which as of writing this article will be approximately three years ago.

Art is already proven to have staying power. Humans have been creating since the beginning of time, with gen AI being the current shiny keys being jangled in front of us with people swiftly losing interest. In fact, the public has already shown over and over again that they don’t want products generated by AI.

Market Demands

Whenever a company announces it’s going to use generative AI, it never goes well. Take Duolingo, for instance. There was a massive pushback to the point of many people stopping their use of the app when it announced it was going to be an “AI-first” company.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn3V6eVqidg

While other issues with the app is highlighted, it is still important to emphasize that it is AI that drove people away. Not the gamification, not the ads. The AI. Duolingo is far from the only example as well. It is among the more notable instances of the market showing that it wants things created by humans.

Another example of the market rejecting AI is how people react to Google’s AI features along with the oversaturation of ads and sponsored posts. Many people leave for alternative search engines such as DuckDuckGo in order to get the results they want and less AI features, even if DuckDuckGo itself might not be the best option for trying to stay away from AI features.

Copyright Laws

Only human-created art can be copyrighted. This is a ruling declared after a primate took a photograph of itself utilizing a camera. Computers are not humans, meaning that nothing AI generated can be copyrighted. Companies want their products copyrighted so they can have strict control over them to where they’re the only things they can use it for maximum profits. If something is public domain, then they can’t maximize those profits.

But that is not the only copyright challenge AI technology is facing. Disney and Universal are currently suing Midjourney due to the fact they can make highly accurate images that look extremely close to their own copyrighted media. A big factor that leads to these recreations is how AI is trained.

AI scours for images across the internet and put it into its data, which it can call back whenever it needs to generate an image. It knows who Darth Vadar is because it has scraped thousands of images about Darth Vadar, both still frames from movies and fan art created by passionate artists.

Training Ouroboros

An ouroboros is an ancient symbol depicting a snake eating its own tail. It is considered a sacred symbol that represents “the unity of all things, material and spiritual, which never disappear but perpetually change form in an eternal cycle of destruction and re-creation.” (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ouroboros ) But in the context of AI, it is anything but a good thing.

Much like the snake eating its own tail, AI is capable of picking up its own output and using it as training data. In fact, there is so much output out there, it is nearly impossible to truly avoid. AI training on output gives a decay-like effect where the quality grows worse for each generation until it resembles garbled nonsense that the human mind can’t recognize any patterns or make sense of.

Conclusion

AI is a shiny toy at best where its luster and novelty is wearing off. People are growing sick of it in increasing numbers, and there are recent findings that the use of chatbots may be killing our brains. (https://www.sciencealert.com/does-using-artificial-intelligence-ruin-your-actual-intelligence-scientists-investigated )

The details of how it will happen is uncertain, but AI as a technology will eventually die off and go to the wayside while artists will rise once more. Perhaps artists will integrate assistive AI to their works, making them more efficient while still doing most of the work, or perhaps the technology will disappear completely and everything will still be done by hand.

But no matter what, artists can rest easy knowing that the odds are stacked in favor of them. Art is something that has survived and persisted through every technology advancement, even if what used to be large industries are now much smaller niches. (IE portrait paintings vs the camera)