Queer art in the age of AI: Challenges, ethics and the future

Although the debate around AI and its potential effects on creative fields is relatively recent, the technology at the center of the controversy has been around since the 1950s.

There are two main forms of AI; predictive and the currently more controversial, generative.

According to IBM, generative AI “refers to deep-learning models that can generate high-quality text, images, and other content based on the data they were trained on.”

Also according to IBM, predictive AI “involves using statistical analysis and machine learning (ML) to identify patterns, anticipate behaviors and forecast upcoming events.”

The current controversy with AI started in 2022 with the introduction of ChatGPT and other generative AI programs.

People in creative fields such as writers and artists have worried that it would be used to replace their jobs and that the machines were being trained on their work without permission. In the film industry, there were concerns about AI being used to write scripts and scan an actor’s likeness. This ended up being a point of contention during contract negotiations for the WGA and SAG-AFTRA. Following strikes, both unions were able to get AI protections added.

For a more local look at AI and art, Philadelphia Gay News spoke to Ben Deane-Schierloh, the Philadelphia-based artist behind That’s Bearly Art for his take.

Deane-Schierloh was born in England and moved to Philadelphia in middle school. He earned a theatre degree from West Chester University, where he also met his husband. He currently does coaching and facilitating for software development teams as his day job.

In 2019, he got into digital illustration.

“Illustration is something that has always been part of my life,” Deane-Schierloh said. “I’ve been doodling on the sides of notebooks since before I can remember, but I think I told myself I couldn’t really pursue anything as an artist because I’m color blind. And what I learned was that with digital illustration tools, there are a lot of accessibility tools and devices that are able to sort of help with my shortcomings in terms of my disability in that regard.”

In 2023, four years later, Deane-Schierloh launched That’s Bearly Art after numerous people told him they would wear his designs on a T-shirt.

He describes his designs as “nerdy, silly, stupid, sex-positive and queer-friendly”, and offers them as T-shirts and art prints. He also does commission work; anything from logos to NSFW portraits. One of the biggest opportunities he’s gotten from That’s Bearly Art has been designing the 2024 Philadelphia Pride Logo. He is also set to design the 2025 logo.

So what does this local artist think about AI and its effect on the art community? He feels conflicted about AI as a general concept in part because he has used it in the past for his day job.

“In terms of art, I think it’s a much more complicated question,” Deane-Schierloh said.

He continued, “If AI were perfect, I don’t have a problem with artists using it as a tool. I’m someone that does digital illustration, so I’m using a lot of tools already. There are certain things in illustration programs, like pen stabilizers or brush stabilizers, so that you get a more straight line or a cleaner stroke to your lines that you’re drawing with. There are things like color fill, where it auto-fills the color for you that you select. And these things are used as tools to make life easier, right? They don’t take away from the creativity that someone is expressing.”

He added that he thinks some people use AI as a tool to get a mockup of ideas or as inspiration, like they’d do with images from Pinterest.

“My problem with it is that AI is not perfect, and a lot of these AI machines are built using stolen art and art that people did not consent to having fed to a machine. And so even if you’re using it for inspiration, the ethical questions make me uncomfortable. I don’t think it’s something that you can really ethically use, because it was sourced from stolen work a lot of times,” he explained.

Between the two forms of AI, Deane-Schierloh believes generative AI is the more pressing issue and that predictive could be more helpful with less ethical concerns.

Although he would never use generative AI for illustrations, he would use it for things like SEO and captions.

“There’s a lot of tools that are like generative AI to come up with the right caption and that can be helpful, especially when you’re trying to advertise your very human-created work in a world that is run by machines. And by that, I mean the social media algorithms,” Deane-Schierloh said.

Even though he feels that using AI this way is helpful, especially for metadata for his website that isn’t seen, he admitted that if something is going to be seen by people, then he’ll add a human component like a silly hashtag that the AI wouldn’t have added.

“I think [what is] more useful for a business owner is the predictive AI, [showing] ways to analyze the data that you have available to you. So for example, on my website, I spend a lot of time looking through reports of who’s viewing my website. What pages are they looking at? What products are they looking at? Do they start going through the checkout and then abandon it halfway through? And that’s all really useful data to look at, but you’re drawing hypotheses based off of the data that you’re seeing,” Deane-Schierloh said.

From what he’s seen, other artists in the online space are generally either very upset or warning people about AI and showing people how to protect their art from it. He’s also seen a lot of the artists he follows online getting their art stolen by AI.

Art theft online in and of itself isn’t new, he explained. In the past, it’s mostly been small things like someone reposting art without credit or bigger things like companies using artwork without permission on clothing.

“And you know that’s stolen by humans, AI is stolen by machines. So the actual theft piece itself is not new. It’s just [that] machines are way better at doing it on a larger scale, and so it becomes harder to catch and stay aware of that,” he concluded.

Another issue he sees is people using AI instead of commissioning an actual artist. 

Deane-Schierloh said, “I think I’m lucky in a way, to be in the queer community, because we are a group of people that tend to be well informed about marginalized people and distrustful of big corporations and big entities, you know, just from a historical context. So I think a lot of queer folks are sort of naturally skeptical of AI and thus want to support the actual human creators instead, which is really a blessing.”

On the other side of this, he’s also seen queer AI artists who are able to get thousands of followers because of how quickly they’re able to put out new content.

He worries that for the queer community and humanity at large that AI will lead to homogenization. Deane-Schierloh pointed out that AI combines the inputs it’s given to create one output; and since queer people aren’t the majority, the majority of the inputs aren’t based on their experiences. He believes that over time, this will lead to outputs that are less queer.

His bigger concern is that AI has already become too normalized. He pointed out that many people on Facebook and Instagram use AI-generated profile pictures and see no issue with it simply because everyone around them does the same. Even those who might have otherwise paid for a commissioned portrait often opt for AI-generated images instead.

“No one then is getting a custom profile picture illustrated by a queer employee or a queer artist that they know, or any artist that they know, that has that human connection, that human experience, to it,” he said.

Instead of using an app for a profile picture, he’d rather be able to talk about finding an artist he connected with based on shared interests.

“So if I’m talking to my friends [and] they go, ‘Oh, I love your profile picture. That’s really cool.’ I would much prefer to be able to tell them all the cool human stuff about human connection. Instead of ‘Yeah, I took the phone in my face and submitted it to an app.’ So I hope people recognize the impact and the importance of art on the human experience,” he continued.

Deane-Schierloh would love to see regulation for AI put in place, but worries it might be too late for some things.

“The amount of data that these machines are analyzing and taking as input is just so vast already. How do you fix that? You know it’s already been done. How do you remove from an AI machine learning millions and millions of stolen pieces of artboard once they’re already in there? So I think it’s really messy, and I think it’s going to be messy, but that doesn’t mean it’s not needed. I think a lot of these AI companies need to be held accountable,” he said.

“I would love to see some regulation [where] you must provide details of the artwork that was scraped to create your machine learning. I would love to see financial compensation for artists whose work was stolen. That one seems like that’s a stretch, but it shouldn’t be, and I would love to see more regulations in place to prevent this.”

With no regulations, he sees a future where artists take steps, like some are doing now, to make their art unreadable to AI. 

Deane-Schierloh’s overall message to people is to support queer artists, especially small and local ones. 

“You know, there are people near you with talent and with expertise and skills, and those people want to be seen as much as the ones that are popular, as much as the machines that are being used. And so I encourage folks to look in your own communities, for people that can provide the things you’re looking for. I think oftentimes you’ll find them.”

This story is part of the Digital Equity Local Voices Fellowship lab through News is Out. The lab initiative is made possible with support from Comcast NBCUniversal.