There has been a lot of heated debate surrounding AI in the realm of creativity. From people criticizing generative AI art, to generative AI videos, etc. In fact, the newest game in a franchise called Call of Duty received heavy backlash for using generative AI to make assets in their game. This has made many people pessimistic about the future of the art/animation industry, and also caused doubt that the industry will be a career worth getting into in the future, but I intend to argue against these beliefs in this post.
There’s a good chance I don’t have to answer this, but basically it’s any art entirely generated by AI. There is upscaled AI art that was drawn by a person but upscaled for resolution increase without losing any quality, however, that isn’t the subject of this article as many people don’t necessarily have a problem with that.
What people do have a problem with though is art generated entirely by AI, fearing the things such as
Artists being replaced with AI
The soullessness of AI art taking over genuine art pieces
People using AI to steal and claim art that isn’t theres
While there is some truth to these concerns, if you take things into consideration from every angle, it ends up being impractical at worst and at best it can only do things that have already been done way before AI was even of concern. Let’s address each topic one by one.
To address this first part, we must deal with the harsh truth that there is a good chance that AI has definitely replaced real people in some art forms, primarily voice acting. However, the idea that it will take over the industry as a whole is unrealistic and unsustainable. I already talked about this a little bit in my last article named “What’s happening with OpenAI”, but AI as of now is far too expensive to manage for any company, with ChatGPT even losing millions of dollars to people simply saying “thank you” after every prompt.
It’s even worse for AI art, because not only is it already expensive enough to generate 30 second clips to put on tik tok or a funny discord gif, but it also doesn’t look good to a majority of people, and also cannot be copyrighted under USA law.
Speaking of the profits argument, that also leads into the quality argument. I doubt that people in general would want to watch things generated by AI. Some people think that people have no tastes or standards of quality and will just watch anything, but usually that argument is only said for things that people don’t like. It’s true that general audiences
Tend to go with things they’re more familiar with over new things
Can sometimes support genuinely bad movies
But in general, I don’t see the possibility of people in mass supporting AI movies, especially considering the amount of hate that persists with AI generated content, and will probably continue to persist in the future. This type of hate isn’t something that doesn’t just go away easily by letting people forget.
Some people make the comparison of “well people have had problems with photography/CGI, and it went away after a while”, but this is a false equivalency because both of those are art forms that require the person to, for lack of better words, actually do something. AI generated content is not like this, and that’s the problem that people will always have with it. The soullessness and lack of human input will always be a problem people have with it.
If you don’t know what a DAW is, it’s a platform used to make music on a computer with pre-recorded samples, such as FL studio. A single person can create an entire symphony with a DAW, and it’s far cheaper to do so. However, despite this, companies in general still prefer to hire symphonies instead of having people use DAWs. Most of the time, DAWs are either only used on
Rap, electronic, or other forms of music (mainly because those art forms usually require it)
Lower budget projects
Major companies, such as Nintendo and Dreamworks, still hire real people to compose music (and if Nintendo out of all companies doesn’t do the cheaper option, then it must mean that it’s better.)
This isn’t as much of a fear as the previously discussed topic, but it’s still a major point of discussion. Essentially, this fear comes from the fact that generative AI allows you to copy and paste a picture from someone into AI, and essentially steal from that person.
This has led to people doing things such as winning entire art contests by using AI, however, the problem is still over exaggerated. Theft from artists has existed since the inception of art, and there’s many different ways to steal it that we have learnt to deal with, AI is just the next thing we have to figure out. This problem can also easily be solved by
Creating new laws surrounding the theft of art with AI and use of it
Art contest requiring you to send the file of the art you made instead of just the picture
AI isn’t anything new when it comes to theft in the Art community, it happens all the time. So all we need to do is add new rules and methods of detecting art made by AI.
While the concern around AI art is over exaggerated, at the same time, it does come from a place where genuine concern is warranted. We still need stronger and more clear laws regarding the use of AI generative art when it comes to selling/producing it. When those laws will be created/what they will be is a mystery that time will have to unravel.