Is AI art 'real' art?
Many well-known artists, among whom are Kanye West and Timbaland, have begun actively using AI in their work and encourage creative communities to follow their example. Their audience, on the other hand, isn't very thrilled about this trend. Some of them don't even notice that or simply don't mind. However, quite a lot of fans are genuinely concerned about this tendency. Have a look at the comments under one of Timbaland's latest music videos and see what we're talking about. People are calling the song 'soulless' or referring to Black Mirror episodes. This video isn't an exception but rather an illustration of how AI creative implementation is met by the audience.
Let's dive deeper into how we actually understand art. One of the most detailed definitions is provided by LibreTexts: 'art is a highly diverse range of human activities engaged in creating visual, auditory, or performed artifacts - artworks - that express the author’s imaginative or technical skill, and are intended to be appreciated for their beauty or emotional power'. Each person understands this term in their own way but hardly will anyone disagree that art is an expression of whatever is inside us: ideas, feelings or soul, if you like. Art is closely tied to an individual's empirical perception of life and the uniqueness that experience provides. Neural networks can definitely come up with new ideas by logically processing information. Just as people do if they follow the concept of 'everything new is reinvented old'. But the key words here are 'reinvention' and 'rethinking' which require new individual's vision by definition. Luckily or unfortunately (take your pick), AI lacks both empirical experience and originality of vision. The latter deserves special attention.
Generally speaking, neural networks learn from publicly available information and materials. It concerns not only famous artists' works but also niche creators that upload their works on the internet. Steven Zapata, a professional illustrator, even calls this 'an ethical crisis' in his TED talk: 'billions of copyrighted images scraped from the web without consent, credit, or compensation'. There have been a couple of lawsuits illustrating this matter, among which two are especially discussed: New York Times v. OpenAI and Bartz v. Anthropic PBC in both of which authors and publishers sued AI companies for using their copyrighted texts to train models. Despite the fact that both of these cases are legally disputable, the situation is clear: people don't enjoy it when their intellectual property is used for this technological benefit. Not only because of the usage itself but also due to real harm to the creators market: who would pay small creators when companies can cut costs with AI?
Getting back to the initial subject, the conclusion is that AI can't create art by itself. It's just a tool that requires an artist's vision and ideas. When it comes to the partial use of AI in creative piece, though, how can we distinguish art from just 'generated content'? What metrics allow us to judge what counts as 'art' and can some work be called 'only partially art'? These are philosophical questions every modern person has to face and answer for themselves. From our perspective, AI used purely as an instrument for expressing artist's vision, and doesn't outweigh the originality can still be called someone's artwork. For instance, AI enables filmmakers to depict imaginable worlds on an absolutely new level that earlier advanced technologies couldn't reach.
To sum up, AI works can't be considered individual art pieces in their own right. Whether works that involve AI can still be called pure art is food for thought for each individual. Every person should have their own inner metrics in this case, but self-expression that involves AI certainly has a right to exist. What is clear for now: businesses benefit from neural networks by decreasing expenses and increasing sales, creators are at risk as a profession and we, as consumers are left with ethical crisis.
On a more hopeful note: AI will stay an instrument in human hands, not a replacement for human thinking or creation - as long as we keep this principle in mind. Clarify AI is an AI tool that helps you understand something already existing on YouTube and save time. If you'd like to go deeper on an AI & Art topic, you can watch or summarise the videos we analysed while preparing this article.
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Do you consider works performed by AI or with AI an actual art? Share what you think.
