Human Art Is NOT In Danger Of Extinction
It seems each day a new technology is released or a new concept unveiled that shatters our preconceived notions of what’s possible in this world, and Artificial Intelligence is currently at the forefront of this. Many people believe that the up-and-coming A.I. technology of the 2020s shows potential for replacing jobs and roles formerly thought to be requiring a Human. They cite the ever-improving model of “Machine Learning” as proof that, after vast time collecting knowledge of our world, the day of A.I. taking over is not a work of science fiction.
The most counterintuitive implication of this new technology is that A.I. will one day replace the role of the Human Artist. AI is able to outperform humans on nearly all tasks that it is assigned, what makes art so different? All claims about Art are controversial by nature, however, the rebuttals made by those who support the “A.I. Artist takeover” are founded on fundamentally erroneous concepts.
The direct rebuttal to my claim, that A.I. will replace Artists in the future, is founded on the false concept that artists are something that is even replaceable in the first place. In the International Journal of Education and Management my opponent, author Rubio Yang, points out that “according to John Pugliano, an American investment finance expert and author of The Robots are Coming, ‘any routine and predictable job is likely to be replaced by artificial intelligence in the next five to ten years.’ Some artists expressed concern about this phenomenon, they pointed out that maybe artificial intelligence will replace artists in the future.”
AI is by far not the first time a new technology has threatened previous art forms. To name two out of a vast list of examples: the invention of photography threatened painted artwork, and the advent of streaming music threatened the physical music medium. These inventions both disrupted the status quo and caused artists and art purveyors to be up in arms, much like people predict about A.I., however, we see now that the threat of these technologies permanently replacing their predecessors has been proven false. There will always be appreciation for painted artwork despite the inventions of photography and moving images, according to Google, as of 2022 there were “somewhere in the region of 15,000 art galleries in the US.” Photography and Paintings now coexist in the world of art, each having its own special value. There will also always be a following for physical media despite the digital revolution. According to the U.S. 2022 Luminate Year-End Music Report, “In 2022, sales of albums on cassette tape in the U.S. increased by 28% to 440,000”. Taylor Swift recently released an album on cassette tape, thought to be an absolutely dead and “replaced” medium of art. Technology will always advance with time, but art has proven again and again to be resilient against obsolescence. The focus shifts from time to time to different art forms, but none ever seem to be fully eradicated, which my opponents suggest AI will do.
Scientists and scholars alike contest that artificially intelligent artists can produce work that exhibits originality and true uniqueness. Those who argue this, claim the algorithms are so advanced now that A.I. work is NOT simply a compilation of previous art, but is the byproduct of “true” creation, indistinguishable from that of humans. In an essay published by the University of Guelph in Ontario titled GAN Computers Generate Arts, the author explains how “Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) use deep learning archi-tectures to facilitate generative modeling. In this approach, the goal of the model is to generate new examples of data that would not be distinguishable by humans as data coming from the real set. This is achieved upon successful training where the adversarial network can identify patterns in the data and learn the distribution of the dataset.” Author Sakib Shahriar is telling us that A.I. Art algorithms, referred to as “GANs”, are technologically capable of producing “new examples of data”, otherwise known as “new art”.
While the technology is scientifically proven, the originality of A.I.-created works is a heavily debated topic, especially among human artists who believe their intellectual property is being directly stolen and compiled without their consent. Within the past few months of 2023 artists and art platforms have gone as far as to take legal action against A.I. companies regarding this issue. In January 2023 Getty Images, one of the world’s largest media hosting companies containing 477 million human-created assets, filed a lawsuit against the art generator company Stability AI. In a press release directly from Getty Images on the day of the filing, the company stated that “Stability AI infringed intellectual property rights including copyright in content owned or represented by Getty Images. It is Getty Images’ position that Stability AI unlawfully copied and processed millions of images.” The company goes on to say how they’ve already given several A.I. companies legal access to their database for the purposes of training their algorithms, in an effort to further A.I. research. However, in this case, “Stability AI did not seek any such license from Getty Images and instead, we believe, chose to ignore viable licensing options.”Just like if a music artist uses a sample of a previous song in his track, any art that contains direct elements of previous intellectual property must be used legally and with credit given to the original creator. An example of this can be found in MC Hammer’s bold use of Rick James’ Super Freak in his own U Can’t Touch This, which contains a repeated line of music from James’ song. Rick James filed a lawsuit against MC and eventually settled the dispute outside of court when MC agreed to credit James as a songwriter. The use of A.I. involves performing the same task, admittedly on a much larger scale with abundant data, which raises the question of whether it is actually creating anything new or if it is simply compiling human creations, acquired legally and sometimes illegally. The resulting works may be indistinguishable when mixed using A.I., but “indistinguishable” is just A.I.’s disguise for “not original”.
References
Shahriar, S. (2022). GAN computers generate arts? a survey on visual arts, music, and literary text generation using generative adversarial network. Displays, 102237.
Getty Images Statement. (2023, January 17). Getty Images Statement. Getty Images Press Site – Newsroom – Getty Images. https://newsroom.gettyimages.com/en/getty-images/getty-images-statement
Yang, R. Are the Artists no Longer Needed in the AI Age?. International Journal of Education and Management, 274.
Ana Santos Rutschman. (2018, March 15). Stephen Hawking warned about the perils of artificial intelligence – yet AI gave him a voice. The Conversation.
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Counterintuitive Spring 2023 
The main rebuttals I examined were: “A.I. Art DOES show signs of fully replacing the Human Art medium” and “Work made up of previous art IS original creativity”.
Could I please have feedback on how well I destroyed these opponents? How weak/strong my sources were?
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Period INSIDE the quotation marks, please.
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I scanned your sources and was impressed by all the LANGUAGE in the Journal article. My goodness. You could use it to prove almost anything! And I really appreciate what I learned about Machine Learning from the GAN article. I haven’t looked to see how either article figures into your own essay here. This process is taking awhile.
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I will say that two paragraphs in, I’m having trouble with the vagueness of your claims here:
—Participles are not good at indicating actual OCCURRENCES. So, when you say, “The most counterintuitive implication of this new technology is A.I. replacing the role of the Human Artist,” we don’t know if you mean it’s counterintuitive to imply that AI WILL replace human artists, or that AI WON’T replace human artists.
—Similarly, when you say “Any claim regarding the philosophies of art and creativity is by nature a controversial one,” you MIGHT MEAN that ALL claims about art are controversial by nature, or you might mean that any claim about AI REPLACING ARTISTS will necessarily be controversial.
—When you say, “The rebuttals made by those who support the ‘A.I. Artist takeover’ are founded on fundamentally erroneous concepts,” you’ve called them Rebuttals, which means they’re made to refute disparate claims, but since you haven’t named your own claim in this essay, . . . you need to be more specific somewhere so we know whether we’re on offense or defense.
—You could try:
P3.
—OK, so you didn’t start this paragraph with an observation about the Erroneousness of the Pundits’ claims.
—You use Pugliano to get to this quote, but it’s from unnamed artists who express a fear; it’s not a categorical claim that AI WILL replace artists, which would be the more ideal position for your Worthy Opponent to voice.
—Hawking’s a Worthy Opponent for a broad swath of knowledge claims, but he doesn’t speak about art here at all. More likely he’s expressing fear that macroeconomic decisions, or military decisions, will be made by algorithm and that we’ll no longer trust ourselves as a species to veto those choices, right or wrong.
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P4.
You make fascinating arguments that don’t seem to quite hit the bullseye.
—Photography did indeed threaten the careers of artists who relied on faithful reproduction of realistic scenes, or portraits of living people, or other scenes that could be captured by a camera.
—Artists responded by abandoning “representational art” and an unprecedented explosion of abstractions, hallucinations, concepts-as-art, multi-media works on and off of stretchers followed and continue today.
—The fact that art galleries exist, or will exist, doesn’t indicate the health of representational artworks on canvas. They might well stay open to display AI art, right?
—I guess you’re trying to hit a different target with the cassette tape example. You shift the argument from “AI will be able to produce images as aesthetic, as significant and as meaningful to viewers as any artist can” to “AI won’t produce physical works of art.” I think Andy Warhol got to this argument before you did, when he abandoned the primacy of “the artist’s hands produced this canvas” with “the artist directed the production of these images, which have been mass produced and are being sold as discrete iterations of the original, which does not exist.” (Quote invented; don’t use it to quote AW.)
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—I’m not sure this is anybody’s claim.
—If it is, the claim will confuse many readers.
—Does it rely on an underlying claim that to be a work of creation, art must be indistinguishable from the work of humans? According to the GAN article, the discriminator is fooled roughly 50% of the time in the ideal training protocol. Presumably the algorithm could be cranked to demand that the discriminator be fooled 100% of the time. If one work of art fools every human interrogator, is it therefore indistinguishable, and is it therefore “real art”?
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—Please, please, please, commas and periods INSIDE the quotation marks.
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The Getty argument is powerful. How are you using it?
—Does it help to fight the battle on the field of “where did you get those source images, and who’s going to pay to produce them in the future”?
—In one way, it REALLY helps your argument to say, for example, Degas was an acknowledged master whose images have inspired and enriched millions of viewers. AI might be able to create images “in the style of Degas” now, but DEPENDS ENTIRELY on the human artist Degas to do so. AI didn’t “CREATE” new Degas masterworks; it merely FORGED new ones.
—But, uh-oh, if we ask AI to produce work “like Rembrandt portraits, but as if the subjects had been photographed by Diane Arbus,” then I don’t know what to say about the resulting work, or whether Rembrandt and Arbus could reasonably object.
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Thank you for the nod to our Conference conversation about Super Freak. It stands as a good example of artists copping overt references to the work of others, and the courts managed a way to rectify the infraction, but the cases are different, aren’t they, when the musical phrase, like a direct quotation without quotation marks, is reproduced “note-or-word-for-note-or-word” as if it were an original part of the new work? “In the style of” is categorically different.
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