By Laura Klotzkin, Managing & Comics Editor

Ten years ago, when looking at any kind of art or media, people would often wonder about it. “How did they do that?” “How long did it take to cultivate these skills?” “How long did this piece take?” The one question that never crossed anybody’s mind was: “Was this made by a person?”

We live in a time where new technologies are emerging every single day; technologies that people widely agree increase our quality of living. While the advance of human knowledge and technology is, in my opinion, absolutely beneficial, as an artist I cannot help but observe when some technologies are being used in a negative manner.

I will mainly be focusing on the discussion around generative AI (Artificial Intelligence). 

“Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) refers to a type of artificial intelligence that can create new content, such as text, images, audio or video, by learning patterns from large sets of sample material,” the University of San Francisco stated. 

This means that generative AI analyzes patterns in online data to create content.

The system that AI models use to create media in this manner can end up being increasingly problematic. 

For example, the way that the company Meta functions. Meta owns two very popular social media sites: Facebook and Instagram. Meta also has its own AI connected to these platforms. According to the Meta Privacy Center, Meta AI is trained off of information available on the internet, information sourced from third-party resources and information from anything posted on Meta’s products. This includes photos, comments, captions and general interactions.

This means that Meta AI can train off of the entire internet. As an artist, I do not feel comfortable with art that I make being used to train generative AI models. Unfortunately, it is difficult to avoid. I have to post my art to Meta services as a way to build up my career by promoting my work. Because Meta Services are so widely used, it’s unrealistic for me to evade them.

Additionally, AI models have been known to steal work from artists in general. 

“Generative AI tools are trained on collections of material gathered from many places,” said the University of South Florida. “Some AI image and text generation tools have been trained on material scraped from web pages without the consent or knowledge of the web page owners.” 

I have heard people argue that putting content onto the internet in the first place counts as consent to it being used for AI models. However, we live in a time where it is pretty much impossible not to use the internet. In a career path like art, for example, where networking and social media are so important, it is unreasonable for people not to use the internet. Therefore, I believe it is unreasonable to consider posting content as automatic permission. This leads to things being fed into AI for training purposes without proper consent. 

Something else to consider about generative AI is that AI-created media cannot be copyrighted.

“Material created by generative AI tools does not currently receive copyright protections in the United States,” stated the University of South Florida. 

I personally think that this law is a good thing. The reason that copyright exists is to protect people’s work and ideas. What is there to protect if a machine is the one doing the work? If you want to retain ownership over the things that you make, you should try to avoid using AI tools.

We should also be encouraging jobs for artists and creators. I believe that there should be a robust art community of creators of all kinds. By hiring real people, other people can retain ownership over their own IPs.

Perhaps some of the most compelling reasons people should consider steering away from generative AI is because it just looks bad. I know people might see me as an artist saying that out of spite because I do not want to be replaced by a machine. However, I say this as somebody who has been training for years to have an eye for good design and visual impact. Other art students and I can see the uncanny effect that tends to appear in generated images. We can see weird mistakes like having an abnormal number of fingers, or image fragments blending into each other strangely. We can see when AI-generated videos have odd character movements. These mistakes would not happen with professionally trained human artists. 

If it is a matter of liking the art style of generated images, these styles were taken from real human artists, artists who may not have given actual consent. People who want images for any reason can get any style they want by simply hiring the right person.

The art industry has been run by real people since the beginning of its existence. While I have no interest in holding back the advancement of human technology, I think that technology should be used ethically. 

The last thing to consider is that Daemen has a very high-quality art department with a lot of talented artists. If nothing else, I believe in the development of education. If you need a piece of art, ask student workers if they are artistic. Talk to students and faculty in the art department and see if anybody is looking for commissions. As a Daemen art student, I highly encourage people to scout out the talented students and faculty for your next art project.