Shreejita Satpathy, Grade 12

A common experience throughout generations on social media is the time spent mindlessly scrolling through timelines and feeds, consuming content in bite-sized chunks. Many utilize social media applications such as Instagram to consume content in a variety of different methods, one of which includes art. A frequent situation is as follows: a person, while scrolling through Instagram, sees an artist’s posts. This artist posts about once every week, and each post takes hours of planning and execution, as the artist takes the time to bring every detail from their imagination to the real life, which is the result of months or even years of preparation. The person scrolling spends about thirty seconds on this artist’s post before moving on to something else. This latter post is AI art, which is created based on a written or art prompt. Hundreds or thousands of previous artworks were analyzed, merged together, and mimicked in order to create the AI art in a matter of minutes. The person scrolling spends approximately thirty seconds on this post, too. The difference is, the artist’s post took hours of pure human work to create, whereas the AI art analyzed others’ work and produced a product in a matter of minutes. Yet, both pieces of work received about the same interaction though they took vastly different amounts of effort to create, which raises a question of whether AI art is harmful to the ideas of artistry, originality, and the expression of true human emotions.
Many argue that AI art obscures the true definition of an artist. For example, according to American Scientist, AI samples the art of previous artists in order to create a series of images that somewhat resembles human art. AI art can display severely disfigured human faces purely due to the error and overlap between all of the sampled art. However, human pieces, such as Three Studies for a Portrait of Henrietta Moraes by Francis Bacon can aim to highlight this form of painting as well, except with truer purpose or meaning behind it (Elgammal, 2019). AI does not put emotion into the art it produces, so its art is essentially mass-produced without true, flawed, human meaning that makes the process of being an artist so enjoyable. Instead, AI art is created by stimulating and copying art from the thousands of samples it analyzes first, which leaves the question of whether the art produced is original at all. Furthermore, there is an argument that AI continues to replace the more menial human tasks that feed the workforce, and though it is not at the same level of emotion and feeling as real humans, the art produced by AI can be mistaken for human art. With AI art algorithms such as DALL⠂E, AI Dungeon, and Dream, rapidly made content may be created for quick consumption, which can outcompete human artists (Bilton, 2022). When AI can be commissioned conveniently and free of charge, this can take jobs away from artists who must charge to support themselves and for the time they spent working.
However, on the flipside, this free AI art that is created can be beneficial when people may not be able to afford to commission human art. Furthermore, AI art can provide immediate entertainment; a person may render their ideas in a matter of minutes. This could be just for pure leisure, or it could even act as a form of inspiration for artists to build their ideas off of. In this way, AI art can act as a stepping stone for artists to build and grow their work. For example, AI art can combine the artistic styles of past eras and phases in a way that is original from the stimulus materials and thus provide an idea to upcoming artists on how to navigate their respective mediums in a manner consistent with the eras they are attempting to mimic (Gey, 2021). Even non-artists are able to create hobbies out of utilizing AI to create art as seen on social media platforms such as Instagram and Tumblr. These enjoyers of the art may not have the skills or resources to create art that suits their artistic visions themselves, but due to AI art algorithms they can still bring their ideas to life and share them with countless others, in turn spreading the joy and appreciate of art that they have. Beyond this, the touch of human emotion on art pieces is what tends to make them so appealing to viewers and enjoyers of art. AI art is appealing to express creative freedom and innovation, but only human art is advanced enough currently to truly create sophisticated pieces of art with hidden meanings and symbols that can only be derived from expressed first-hand human experience.
Societal culture is progressing as rapidly as social media advances. These trends and the consumability of content has led to a fast-paced nature of society, as an increasing number of trends have seen their rises and falls in recent years. The prominence of AI art has risen as has the debate towards its ethical and cultural ramifications, as AI-generated art holds very different connotations towards people of different socioeconomic backgrounds. To average enjoyers and viewers, AI art is an accessible form of creative self-expression and can be consumed alongside human-created art. To artists, to some extent AI art may outcompete them, but AI art can also act as an inspiration and method of expanding artistic outreach. For now, both forms of art are enjoyed by the world without significant conflict; however, based on the application of AI art, this can either strengthen the appeal of human art for consumption or decline the appeal, which can affect how accessible both forms may be as forms of creative self-expression for all.

Works Cited:
Elgammal, Ahmed. “AI Is Blurring the Definition of Artist: Semantic Scholar.” American Scientist, 1 Jan. 2019, https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/AI-Is-Blurring-the-Definition-of-Artist-Elgammal/279e6a3f7e1611c210357504df6605a98eb86e98.

Gey, Thomas. “The Role of AI in Art Creation.” Medium, Towards Data Science, 4 Dec. 2021, https://towardsdatascience.com/the-role-of-ai-in-art-creation-a53dbd562cdb#.

Mages Institute. “Will Artists Lose Their Jobs to Artificial Intelligence?” Mages , Mages Institute, 22 Oct. 2021, https://mages.edu.sg/blog/will-artists-lose-their-jobs-to-artificial-intelligence/.