ai

The Democratization of Nothing

I’m thinking about AI again…

Art is a tricky subject - getting away from “What even is art anyway?”, it’s a concept that is rife with contradictions. Art is both for everyone, and also not for everyone - can be made by anyone, and yet not everyone can make it, and even more importantly: not everyone can make a living at it.

For Everyone, and Yet Not

Historically, only the very rich had access to even seeing art. Museums in an ancient context were a place for philosophical debate and introspection - a museum as a place to view art didn’t exist until the 15th century, and the first open to the public museum (rather than a rich mans private collection to share with his rich friends) didn’t open until 1683. From there the history of publicly available museums is spotty…

As time has passed, more art has become more accessible to the public through museums, through print and the innovation of art books and reproductions, and eventually through the internet and the myriad ways anyone with a phone and a wifi signal has access to everything from museum collections to individual artists instagram pages. This greater access has had a cascading effect on the people who make, or would be inclined to make art, because seeing great art inspires great art. Seeing what other people have accomplished inspires other people to push farther.

In addition to access to seeing art - the tools for creating art have also become more accessible. Earlier painters had to make their own paints by grinding pigments from stones and ash and plants (and mummies). The knowledge of how to do this, how to stretch a canvas, what paper to use all had to be learned from other painters - and all of these materials are costly. Even today, nice professional quality paint can be exceedingly expensive depending on the pigment. The availability of synthetic pigments, commercially available paints, and eventually student grade materials made the bar of entry ever easier to pass through. Eventually the innovation of digital media lowered that bar even further - the one time purchase of a tablet, digital pencil and procreate can set an artist up for years without any additional cost, let alone storage concerns - because what do you do with the heaps of pieces you can’t sell?

Art knowledge, lessons, specifics on media (watercolor techniques vs oil for example) are more readily available now than ever before. No longer do you need an apprenticeship with the one artist you’ve ever heard of - there are specialized schools, private lessons, uncounted how-to books, and endless internet tutorials. I’ve often joked with my husband that if I’d had the available information there is now when I was first starting out, my entire life would be on a different trajectory.

The history of art is the democratization of art. We live in a time when anyone with the will to put in the hours can become an artist, in practice if not in profession. And if you only want to own art rather than make it - there are countless artists available to you at the click of the button, and nearly every price point. If you can’t afford an original, buy a print - and if even that is too much, stealing a screenshot to keep as your computer desktop is easy enough for anyone. If this artist is too expensive, there are thousands more. And yet…

And yet some tech bros are so hard pressed - either that they can’t make art, or can’t buy art - that they have to crow about the democratization of art with the introduction of AI systems. Because “now everyone can make art” - forgetting that that has always been a possibility, working artists just put in the hours first to hone a craft; dismissing that generating an image with a text prompt isn’t really making anything at all, and that the source images that the AI model was built off of were all stolen from people who put many more into their work than the programmers did creating an algorithm. I do wonder if they’ll be crowing about the “democratization of finance”, or the “democratization of software development” when AI is competently capable of doing those jobs as well. I haven’t messed around with MidJourney or any other AI image generators enough to see where they are in taking critique, or making small revisions. In my job I have seen an influx of imagery submitted by high school students who want something shiny for the low low cost of free, and at least a few posts from artists and designers who have been let go from their jobs because they were replaced with AI.

How hard would it have been to only train AI models on art in the public domain - to give those models the same art education that any college graduate would get and see what evolved from that? Something far more interesting I think than the overly plasticized look so many ai images have now when the ai hasn’t been directed to copy a specific artist.

Progress is inevitable, but a thing that you can get for free has no value. I can see a future in which art become harder to access, because to give access to a thing is to have a thing stolen - this has already been a problem for years with unscrupulous individuals and companies stealing art images from the internet to turn a profit on a cheaply made t-shirt or sticker, that all of this art has now been scraped from social media is just a cherry on top of a pile of bullshit. The desire of cheaply made goods, and the refusal to take no for an answer will in the long run rob everyone after.

Progress is inevitable, unless it’s built on exploitation and the exploited have just enough power to take control over their own production. Artists faced with a world in which noone listens to their concerns will draw back into safe spaces, will stop posting art so publicly, will revert back to physical media which is more complicated to steal.

Progress is inevitable until progress eats itself.

Intentionality

I’m old enough to remember the infancy of social media, when it was all supplemental to everyone having their own websites - myspace and opendiary were supplemental to your geocities or blogspot or custom domain. You’d spend time. week to week checking in various sites to see if that lady who bought the 6ft tall metal rooster had written a new post, or if the geeky lady had a new review of some etsy shop. It was all a little more time intensive, but also very intentional. And it feels like the internet may soon be making an about face back in that direction.

Meta and IG are scraping all of your images for their datasets - apparently in using the platform you’ve given permission for them to do whatever they want with your images unless you can prove it’s directly harming you. I remember seeing this in the IG terms of use back when I first created an account, but it also seemed very choiceless at the time. Scrolling through a feed is so much easier for an audience than going through your list of links to see who is going to entertain you for 5 seconds - and at the time I was a lot more concerned with being seen than I am now a decade+ later. I’m curious to see if we all go back to individual web preseences, or if artists will attempt to use tech like Nightshade to protect themselves from what is essentially theft. I’m not 100% sure it matters - I don’t know if Meta is able to remove the millions of ai images from the dataset effectively and I have been watching for that moment when that snake starts eating it own tail.

I remember my moment last year(or was it two years ago?) when I had a glint of optimism about what ai was going to do and what people were going to do with it. I’d forgotten that people are human and humans do what humans do - and it’s frequently the least amount of work for the most amount of gain regardless of who it hurts in the process.

In short, I’m going to be purging and deleting my IGs, which is going to take forever to delete each individual image - not that it matters for past content, what’s been scraped had been scraped already. But this venue give me infinitely more control of what is mine, and more reason to use a blog space.

I’d like more intentionality in my life - which includes who views what I make. I’d rather you were here on purpose than a glance in a sea of content.

AI Art and the Future

I’m an artist. I work in a range of mediums - watercolor, digital, glue and ephemera, and tea a couple of times. I’ve made prints with linocut and plate, dabbled in photography and dance, and spent a very short amount of time singing in a band. I don’t question the authenticity of myself as an artist. The tools change, but the ability to make something remains.

A question being raised now is whether AI generated art is actually art, and if the people generating the art are artists.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that they are not, because their status on artist is completely reliant on that one particular tool. The only thing you’re actually creating is a prompt to put in a tool - and the AI is doing the rest of the work. Remove access to Midjourney and you’re left with nothing more than a clever wordsmith at best.

Anyone whose been making art for awhile knows that access to better tools makes for better art - higher quality paint is easier to work with, better quality brushes give you better control of the paint you apply to a canvas, digital images created in Procreate or Photoshop are a world away from those created in Microsoft Paint. 

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, particularly in reference to when Adobe Photoshop really started kicking off an an illustrative tool in the early aughts and the emotionally violent backlash from artists in traditional mediums who decried the notion that a digital image could be considered “art” - there was also a rash of “artists” whose entire portfolios consisted of photoshop filters jammed on top of mediocre photography, and these images were novel and trendy for half a minute before they became worse than mundane and the community at large learned to recognize them for what they were. 

What art is or isn’t is one of those questions may be best left to philosophy, and I do have a small pile of books on aesthetics that have recently been bumped higher up on my “to read” list; and maybe now the more relevant question is “What is an artist?”  I am not a mathematician for the possession of a calculator. I am not a chef because I can pull together a meal from things I found in the back of the pantry. Throwing a series of words together doesn’t make you a writer, even if you are writing. And throwing a series of words in an AI art generator doesn’t make you an artist.

AI generated art is here and it’s not going anywhere - but once more artists start really using it what they make is going to blow these early breathes of existence away in ways we can’t image right now.