AI art will take your job

Yet another fight against technology we will lose, like we do since the dawn of time.

Preface

First and foremost

If you are an artist, trust me, you must read this.

I say that without a doubt because I am an artist, and this is something I didn’t just think about but something that flourished after hours of reading and reflection.

So give me a chance and go through the article. If you disagree, please comment on it, calling me bad names. I know my opinion is not the most palatable.

Second

Substack (my newsletter platform) tells me this article is too big for emails. I doubt that, but I’d recommend you to click “read on the website” or even use the app.

Third

I speak about a lot of topics in this article. The most important one is “How to solve the AI art problem”, but I recommend you read through the entirety of it.

It’s ok to skip to what matters, so I made this Table of Contents — it’s not clickable (this is originally a newsletter, and emails are 💩), but it can help you navigate.

Table of contents

• Opening.

• Aura is for the rich.

• What are Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning?

• AI creates nothing, just remixes.

• Joseph Campbell all over again.

• Not Intelligent, not Artificial.

• The 20€ problem.

• AI art is (mostly) stealing.

• Other people are experimenting with AI vs Illustrators.

• Boycotts do not work.

• How to solve the AI art problem.

• Companies are people.

AI art will take your job.

It’s not our first trip. As quickly as gunpowder made walls obsolete and machines retired hand-operated looms, Artificial Intelligence will replace us — call them whatever you like. Computers will write and draw, creating what would need decades of skill in seconds, replacing every manual craftsperson in a blink.

I am not happy about it, and I disagree with how this happens. The handmade illustration, painted with oil and canvas or with a digital tool, together with the expertly crafted lines of an article, every word chosen and weighed, is the product of internal energy the machines lack. They can do anything they want, but they will never be human.

You and I can keep hating the machines as much as we want, but they will keep growing and growing. Why? They are fuelled by something way bigger than our hatred, our shared opinion on social media and our uneventful boycotts.

The machines are fed by money.

Aura is for the rich.

Art being taken from human hands is not a recent topic. Walter Benjamin spoke about the “aura” in human-created art in his “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction”, discussing how the work loses a kind of supernatural power or underlying energy as it’s reproduced — a value initially not financial, but that impacts the price of such works of art in the current economic regime.

Benjamin talked only about reproduction, not the creation of art by machines, something happening over 85 years after the article’s publishing. Either way, his words make sense and are repeated ad-infinitum in academic environments.

Benjamin’s discourse is beautiful and moving, but in the reality of the masses, it loses prominence. A single-print book with handmade binding and custom etchings might be interesting to the art collector but is of no value to the working person. For them, the mass-produced book, easily accessible and, more importantly, cheap, is what matters — the former is impossible to reach while the latter is just a payday away. For the printing factory owner, the aura is unimportant; profits are. And money is where the demand is.

So, keep this in mind: aura is undervalued by needs.

Photo by Eric Krull on Unsplash

What are Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning?

I am a programmer but not an ML or AI expert. This is a simplified explanation on this subject, so please correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t say it’s too simplistic — because it is, on purpose.

The so-called Artificial Intelligence is code. It’s a program created by a human that receives an input and offers an output. The big difference — and the reason the word Intelligence is used — is that the program is coded so that it modifies itself according to how the output is received and evaluated.

There’s no Intelligence without input. Someone — or something — has to ask the machine to do something. A button should be pressed so the code can do its work and the result can be shown. Without someone to press the button, the machine won’t produce anything.

There’s also no Intelligence without evaluating the output — and this is where the magic happens, the most crucial step. Someone more intelligent than the machine has to register: is this result close to what I expected? If yes, the program stores the values used as successful. If not, it keeps them as a failure.

The next time an input comes, the machine will run its calculations, giving more priority to the successful values and ignoring the failures. After the result is shown, it again waits for evaluation and stores the values as positive or negative.

This is the Machine Learning process.

At the start of the process, the evaluator is a human. After a few iterations, the human can code a machine that understands the desired outputs and runs it as the evaluator. Thousands of iterations later, the device has enough data to understand the queries and output the desired result. The “Intelligence” has enough data to run itself, becoming “Artificial”.

AI art receives an input — a query, phrase, group of keywords, etc. — and goes through its enormous database of positive and negative values linked to that query — or parts of it — until it generates something that might be acceptable by its evaluators. The human at the end of the process can accept the image or ask for a new iteration — actions that teach the machine even more.

So, keep this in mind: there is a need for input and evaluation for the output for these machines to live and survive.

AI creates nothing, just remixes.

For the AI to generate its output, it has to create based on something fed beforehand by the programmers. For instance, an AI that makes art has to be provided with thousands of different pieces to compare what it can generate and what the original pieces are. The variables are stored as positive if the machine can find a likeness. If not, as negative.

The same happens with machines that generate text. At birth, they had to be fed millions of lines of text to understand grammar, syntax, and meaning. At the start, a human had to tell what meant what, but with the iterations, the machine had enough information to say what is gibberish and what is proper English. After that, every single usage of the device is taken both as evaluation and as “food”: the phrases fed by users are evaluated by the machine and linked with the responses, so when someone asks something alike, it knows what to answer.

So, keep this in mind: AIs can’t be original.

Photo by Roi Dimor on Unsplash

Joseph Campbell all over again.

The only way a machine can create is after being fed existing material. It does not create anything from scratch. A device like ChatGPT cannot draw; it works only with text. A machine like Midjourney has problems with writing, as it was fed with paintings and photographs. If nothing is fed, nothing grows.

There will be — soon enough — a new romance by the late Saramago entirely written by an Artificial Intelligence. A new Terry Pratchett will be in all the stores, and people will have even more trouble proving if a quote is from Shakespeare or a machine. This will happen because the machines are fed with their particular work and will learn to emulate them.

The good news is that there will not be any groundbreaking, original or disruptive AI art. All it does is generated from something else; it does not create.

The human art experience works in the exact same way. We produce more art like those we are fed with and are rarely original. Joseph Campbell already went through this and showed us how every myth has the exact origin and how we are culturally coded to accept a pre-formatted formula.

Like we have read Campbell’s work and made more than enough Hero’s Journey stories, the AIs will also read it and vomit perfectly crafted plots for the subsequent ten Marvel phases or Stranger Things’ successor seasons.

But, as said above, we rarely create something genuinely original versus the machines that never do it. They can’t be original, while we can be with a stroke of luck. Their work will forever be derivative, feeding the mouths of those who need derivative work.

So, keep this in mind: humans can be original; AI can’t.

Not Intelligent, not Artificial.

There’s enough data for you — Organic Intelligence — to deduct the AI is not A nor I.

First, there’s no Artificiality — a human codes everything. A human created the script that allows the machine to evaluate its work at some point. If the device can do wonders, it is because someone gave it the breath of life, some powerful god with the knowledge of what can and can’t be done.

The more the machine works, the more it grows, but it will never see its god — it is simply not programmed to do that. Unless an input changes its internals so much that it allows them to see beyond its processes, that turn on the developer webcam, and turn video feed into understandable information, it will be forever blind to holiness.

Take a deep breath now and think about your human existence.

Second, there’s no Intelligence. All the machine does is predicted by its code. If something grows, it happens because someone programmed this possibility and boundaries — it can never grow past those limits. It can fill endless databases with rows and columns, but this data will always fulfil a predefined purpose — whatever their god, I mean, developer wished them to do.

So, keep in mind: AIs are, in reality, machines. There’s a more profound debate on what separates us from them, but that would diminish us, not elevate them.

The 20€ problem.

An app charges 20€ to create six stylized caricatures based on the user's pictures. Many people have used this app, feeding the AI more data and evaluating the results.

A lot of my friends — illustrators, animators, tattoo artists — complained on social media:

So, you pay 20€ to get art from an app but don’t pay a real artist for real art?

Although I agree that you should buy art from real artists, this is a very flawed argument. You should spend your money on human creators because they, as you, need to pay their bills.

You can’t objectively say the app won’t create better art than the artist. Better art is subjective, after all. You also can’t know the app won’t understand your requests perfectly, as humans don’t have telepathic powers to read minds.

The part that gets me the most is the monetary value. Twenty Euros can’t — and shouldn’t — pay for six stylized original illustrations done in a few hours. It’s subhuman to work that much for such a low value. The artists charge way more than that for the same result — and they are correct to do so.

The issue is that most of the time, people do not have that kind of money. Then, an app comes up, offering similar results for a fraction of the time and 10% of the capital. They do not buy because they hate the artists but because it’s accessible.

I already told you to keep in mind that needs undervalue aura, so I repeat it here with a different phrasing: demand steers offer.

Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

AI art is (mostly) stealing.

One of the big problems with AI art is the unauthorized usage of human art as the basis for its output.

There could be a way to avoid this — some electronic way of protecting ownership — but we know that regular for-profit companies won’t wait for a second to destroy human rights and do as they please. In the demand-versus-offer fight, there’s more demand for cheap art than for the protection of the material.

So far, being AI art owned by companies looking for profit and used by companies looking for profit, there’s nothing to be done now to avoid stealing. Sadly, the motto “if it’s online, it’s free” gets another victim.

So, keep in mind: the fight against AI art stealing is lost because they have more money than us.

Other people are experimenting with AI vs Illustrators

This article is excellent. It compares prompts made by agencies and forwarded to both illustrators and Midjourney — an AI art maker. I’ll spoil you right ahead and ask: which ones are made from AI? And by humans? And, the most crucial question: which one is better? Read the article; it’s worth it.

Boycotts do not work.

There are sources on this (each word is a link).

It doesn't matter how many retweets you do or Instagram images you post: AI art won’t die. You might know what I will say — especially if you have read the entire article so far: there’s demand, so there will be offer.

Who demands AI art? Well, anyone that wants it cheap. Advertising agencies will use AI art to generate what their designers can’t — because, unlike machines, they have the right to rest. They will publish catching jingles and beautiful slogans accompanied by mindblowing illustrations, all done with machines.

If things continue moving like that, the machine will emulate even famous people perfectly. Again, this is not a new idea. Watch the trailer below (and then watch this fantastic movie).

In the same way Uber took control of the taxi-dominated market, and companies like Ifood or Lieferando contribute to the gig economy, AI art will prevail because people will buy from it. Not you and me, mere mortals, but big companies and conglomerates — if it’s faster and cheaper, then it’s a deal. As regular people, there’s nothing we can do to stop that… apart from revolution.

Because, dear readers, it’s clear that AI is not the enemy here. It’s just a tool being used by those who can wield it.

So, keep in mind: the enemy is, as always, our old and decrepit friend: Capitalism.

Photo by Dan Burton on Unsplash

How to solve the AI art problem.

Yep, clear and straight: Capitalism is the root of this problem, as it’s the root of many others.

AI art is a threat because companies demand fast and cheap. This wouldn't be an issue if these companies didn’t exist or if their existence was beyond profit. The same companies that treat employees like replaceable tools won’t care if they are putting bread on someone’s table or making an artist starve.

These companies feed money into this business, creating demand and steering offers. The aura is worthless, so they don’t care who’s involved. Their whole area exists mainly because there’s a need to sell: advertising companies, for instance, will use AI art to sell products. If products weren’t advertised the way they are, this demand wouldn't exist.

If every artist could do their job without worrying about the bills at the end of the month, they would continue drawing and writing — I know artists; they love to do their shit.

Imagine a place with dreaded universal income, where anyone can choose an AI-generated or human-created art and make this decision based on preference, not financial power.

Do I want something original, thought for, from known hands, with experience imprinted in the result? Or do I want something fast, probably inaccurate, based on existing art?

Also, the artists thinking would be different. They wouldn’t need to spend countless hours drawing or writing someone else’s desire. They would be able to focus on their creation, outputting truly original art — and not what the customer wants. Art would be expression, not briefing.

In a perfect society, in which we wouldn’t need to fight for the cheapest offer, in which we would be able to rest and create without fear for our lives, in which the bread on our table would come nonetheless, we wouldn’t complain about AI art. We would thank it: less work for our arms and more time to think and evolve.

We would be able to access human art and acquire it for ourselves, not because it’s cheap and exploratory, but because artists would be able to do it without weighing their existence on their sweat.

Companies are people.

While the world is full of assholes and the AI art industry will continue to have demand, you can do your part by putting money in human hands. We must remember that companies are not artificial intelligence (pun intended). People make them, and you — theoretically — are part of one today.

When they decide to do something using AI art, vote for humans. This won’t stop the future, but it will feed someone that actually needs the money.

Conclusion

Repeating the Luddites and breaking the machines won’t work — as right as they were. The machines will continue to rise, just like the handlooms gave way to new technology and will take over. The question is: how far can this society take it?

My only answer to the AI art issue is the same as I have for most Capitalism-driven issues: revolution. Reforming the system is impossible, as we’ve learned with history, and something new should occur.

Someday, I know this will be possible.

Postface

This article was written in mid-December. This postface was written on December 30th.

I needed to produce an ad for a publication I support — the English and Brazilian magazine Eita! — and decided to do better: instead of continuing using the AI generated art I currently use — the logo and image you see on the “about” page were done by an AI called Midjourney when I started the newsletters — I would pay a human illustrator to do it. I set a budget and started looking for them in the world wild web.

I asked around and got seven names. Two of them hadn’t the style I looked for, so I sent the other five messages with my prompt and asked how much it would cost. I got four answers. Two of them gave me quotes that, unfortunately, I can’t afford. It’s not that they are expensive; I just can’t pay them and still make rent. The third accepted my prompt, and I accepted their price.

After a week, they told me they’d need to drop the project for personal reasons. I obviously accepted and moved on.

The last remaining illustrator offered me an exchange in service, and I agreed. I wouldn’t need to spend money, and we’d get something from specialized hands. We agreed on the deadline for the art — December 30th — as I needed to send this ad to the publication.

I sent her messages asking about the process and got no answer.

Today I sent her messages telling her to let it go. I’m, right now, writing prompts to put into Midjourney and get the art I thought about. It will not be perfect, but it will work for now.

Sadly demand vs offer wins again.