AI art has made a large appearance within today’s society, especially among the internet and social media. Over the past few years, more and more programs to generate AI art have appeared. With the appearance of AI becoming more frequent, controversies have sprouted as well. The main debate is if AI art is ethical or not, and it seems society is pretty split on this topic.

Before we even get into the debate, we have to understand what AI is as a whole and how AI art works. 

AI or Artificial Intelligence, is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. According to TechTarget, “It has been effectively used in businesses to automate tasks done by humans, including customer service work, lead generation, fraud detection and quality control. AI can perform tasks much better than humans…such as analyzing large large numbers of legal documents…because of the massive data sets it can process, AI can also give enterprises insights into their operations they might not have been aware of.” AI technology can be and is used to expand our capabilities as a society, yet everything has its flaws, and AI art is one of them.

AI art is a generative process that creates new visuals. How does this work? According to the Interaction Design Foundation, “This process typically involves algorithms that can learn from data and generate new, original art pieces…photographs, paintings, or drawings, which AI uses to learn about styles, textures, and compositions. Once trained, the AI can generate new images autonomously or based on specific AI prompts or parameters set by a human artist.” To put it in more simpler terms, AI art programs use pre-existing pieces of art and photographs to generate new images. The main issues with this process is that it can be and is used to steal an artists work to generate new images in their style, which many artists do not agree with or consent to. Many of these programs, such as Midjourney, DALL-E, NightCafe, and more, use generative databases of billions of images, possibly using millions of artists pieces without their permission. The use of generative AI clashes with copyright laws. Several lawsuits over time have been brought against AI by Artists, claiming the use of their artworks by AI without their permission. Many of these cases outcomes are still undecided and split in opinions.

Artists are fighting online and within the court systems to keep their original artwork from being fueled into a machine, especially when the use of the machine takes no real effort to create a visual. Pick up a pencil, marker, a paint brush, or maybe a digital stylus. Create that paint stroke yourself. Don’t let the machine take control over the power of an artists mind and hand.