‘It’s cheating’: AI can be a tool in creating art, but it should never be the artist

Have you ever seen an image, sketch, or a paragraph of text generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and felt something was just off or missing from it? You are not alone. The missing piece is us — humans — and our creativity. 

AI is everywhere — it’s fast, impressive, and oftentimes accurate. It can proofread essays, check grammar, provide synonyms to words, and create poems, music, and a range of other art forms. It’s like that perfectionist friend or cousin who is good at anything and everything.

Ask ChatGPT — everyone’s favourite generative AI chat bot — to write a devastatingly heartbreaking poem. Sure, it can create one that rhymes and all, but would it actually feel like a poem that truly “comes from within”? I doubt it!

Although AI is cool, its use in craft demands caution. Otherwise, it can take away the very thing we value in art — authenticity.

At its core, a poem is supposed to feel like I am living someone’s story and experiencing their pain. AI does not have a weird humour, nor does it fall in and out of love or cry during movies. But humans do. That’s what makes human art different — it’s full of heart.

When we use AI’s assistance in creating artwork, we could be unknowingly ripping off some other artist’s work. To train an AI model to generate images, developers need to feed it a massive library of example pictures known as a data set.

While OpenAI has kept its data set under wraps (it could very well be filled with anything from Renaissance masterpieces to memes someone made in Microsoft Paint), Stability AI’s data set is made up of a whopping 2.3 billion images tagged with text. Key stress on the word “billion” with a B — times two. 

Any guesses where all these images come from? They were scraped off the internet, without asking for artists’ permission or paying them.

“It’s cheating and it’s basically fraud,” Berlin-based independent illustrator Katria Raden told Science News Explores. (Sidenote: have a look at her Instagram page @katriaraden, you won’t regret it!)

No doubt, artificial intelligence can be a handy tool for artists if they make prudent use of it. AI is great for repetitive and time-consuming tasks, but using it to create art from scratch could not only amount to being unethical but also possibly stealing off from existing work.

AI could be a tool in the studio, but it should not be the one holding the brush. Art requires vision, vulnerability, voice — and a chat bot or AI generator shouldn’t be looked to for doing that work.

After all, art never needs to be perfect. It just needs to be yours.