Artificial intelligence (AI) is often connected with advancements in technological processes – improved analytics, simplified operations, autonomous gadgets, and so on. However, its brilliance as a creative force has recently taken center stage, to the point that some are crediting it with the creation of genuine forms of art.
This has created a quandary for human artists, specifically, how the very nature of their jobs can survive when individuals with little or no training are able to create unique works of art and hyper-real pictures with nothing more than a few descriptive words.
The problem was highlighted earlier this year when a piece of digital art developed using an AI-based platform called Midjourney won first place over handcrafted pieces. The sculpture, named “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” was created using textual descriptions, prompting detractors to allege that it isn’t “real” art but a type of digital theft.
Aside from a helping hand from AI Esthetics, the actual concern for artists is the same as it is for everyone else as the world gets more digital and intelligent algorithms grow more competent at completing the activities that humans do today. After all, why pay a real person a lot of money when it will take them a lot more time to make a final product that might or might not be exactly what was wanted? And since AI has already shown it can paint, sculpt, quilt, and do a wide range of other creative tasks, this problem affects not only the fine arts but also a huge number of crafters and commercial artists.
However, much as in technological domains, AI will not replace these occupations. Rather, those who understand how to utilize AI successfully will replace those who do not. And the applications for these more creative uses of AI have already become fairly wide and powerful – not just for artists, but for everyone.
To be sure, there are some tricky legal considerations surrounding AI-generated art. Copyright ownership, for example, gets a bit murky when the inventor is a computer algorithm. But, if the AI model does not own the work, who does? Who defined the project, the data scientist who trained the model, or someone else?
At its core, AI is merely another instrument for projecting human ideas and aspirations. After all, the early painters used their hands or crude instruments to paint on cave walls. By the Renaissance, this had developed to brushes and canvas. In the contemporary era, we saw photography and lithographs, which led to the diverse digital art forms we see today.
Some people might say that since AI does most of the work when making pictures, the human mind is almost completely taken out of the process, leaving an image that is about as artistic as a plastic spoon. But this doesn’t take into account the fact that even smart machines need human direction to make a finished product, and it’s the spark of creative imagination that gives art its real value.