Replace all artists? The strange logic of the AI art defenders

Artists are rather united across the board in maintaining that all too important human connection that links mind to creation. Use of AI art in the commercial sphere prompts backlash, and art communities are making it a point to reject its use regardless of what context it finds itself in.

However, elsewhere across the internet, there is a contingent that believes that the creation of AI art is not only an acceptable practice morally and creatively but also a positive and transformative development in itself. In some cases, it has turned into a distaste for the real-life human artist.

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One positive aspect of AI art, oft repeated by its defenders, is how it lowers the barrier of entry for non-artists – that the barrier that currently exists, and has always existed, is equivalent to artistic elitism and gatekeeping.

Someone who lacks technical skill or a craft can visually express an idea without any basis or training in art, so in the eyes of the defenders, AI becomes a tool of liberation rather than a tool that dilutes the artistic pool with non-artists.

But such accusations of elitism and gatekeeping attempt to redefine the meaning of an artist into nothing. Everyone has a need to express themselves, but not everyone is artistically inclined, and not everyone has the temperament of an artist. The designation of ‘artist’ should maintain some meaning and relevance in the face of prompt-typers attempting to expand the definition to include themselves.

A lot of arguments put forth by the AI art defenders rest on these sorts of false equivalences, an ignorance of how the nature of AI-generated art will fundamentally change the creative landscape in ways wholly unseen before.

An AI-generated comic making the equivalence between the environmental concerns of AI and the production of art supplies (Image: OpenAI) Defenders assert that generative image models such as Midjourney and DALL-E are not a replacement for artists, but simply another tool that provides output. But for art’s creation, the journey is just as important as the outcome. It is the part of the process that provides the meaning and substance that taps the work into the human condition.

When the camera was invented, painters feared it would make them obsolete. On the contrary, it only lifted the creative veil from the burden of realism, giving rise to movements like impressionism, surrealism, and abstract art. The camera became a powerful new tool that shook the traditional paint and brush from its preconceptions.

Following along this side of the argument, AI is the exact same as these unfounded past fears of artistic and technological innovation, that generative AI is simply a new kind of brush, chisel, or camera, and not a replacement for any of these things.

But how can that be when the impulses driving AI art are a technical exercise in standardising the creative process, to produce some sort of formula that establishes what most would consider a ‘pretty picture’?

AI tools are designed with the engineer in mind, tasks that require a logical start and endpoint. The creative process avoids this, starting its journey with no clear view of its destination. There is no universally accepted ‘pretty picture’, yet AI is happy to attempt the impossible definition of one.

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Generative AI models are trained on vast datasets of already existing assets, but it is central to the argument of their defenders that it does not just result in lazily amalgamating existing artworks into a new form.

They point to how AI learns patterns, relationships, and concepts much like a human artist learns by studying thousands of works of art throughout their life. But while the creative human mind can take experience that then manifests into artistic expression, AI art generators can only hope for an uncanny and unsettling verisimilitude, regardless of how picture-perfect ‘accurate’ it becomes.

A human artist does not learn by ingesting millions of images to statistically predict the most probable pixel. They learn by living. Their study is not data processing; it is a slow, often painful, accretion of human experience.

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The strange logic of the AI art defenders, for all their claims of liberation and democratisation, ultimately champions a tool that standardises output and severs the essential connection between life and art. An artist’s output is not a recombination of styles but a synthesis of their entire being, something that lives outside the capabilities of 1s and 0s pattern recognition.

The solution lies in recognising this schism as a philosophical divide, not just the technological, and to choose, consciously, to champion the messy, unpredictable, and profoundly human journey of creation over the sterile (in)efficiency of a machine.

Art made by humans is imperfect because humans are imperfect, not because it lies in wait to be perfected by advancing technology. Maybe someday AI will be able to produce perfect, original masterpieces – but will the sight of them elicit any real feelings, or will they be struck with a cold indifference?