INTELLIGENCE

such oddball moments have inspired no shortage of memes and internet jokes, apps including NightCafe, DALL-E2 and Deep Dream Generator have been learning at an almost alarming rate, and the so-called artworks have improved rapidly.

And why wouldn’t the process improve? Such apps are available to all, and users can do as little as enter a text prompt. They can go further, too, inputting a string of keywords, descriptions and specific art styles. This begs questions, though: Can a user with no discernible artistic skills be classified as an artist when the breadth of their effort was typing a few words into an app? Who decides what is legitimate art, anyway?

At nearly every point in human history, there are those who have resisted new advancements, new tech, new opportunities. Digital art created with PhotoShop, for example, was once widely regarded as lesser, yet now stands beside traditional artistry as its own accepted format. Television was going to rot our brains; the radio was going to corrupt us; the Gutenberg Press was going to put devil words in the hands of the icky proletariat. But humankind has always harnessed tech and bent it to our will. In this case, though, when it comes to the clash between arts, humanity and computers, something feels different. Something feels like it’s happening too quickly.

Nikesha Breeze, an interdisciplinary artist, activist and co-founder of Santa Fe’s Earthseed Black Arts Alliance, has a nuanced take.

“I think that [AI art] is going to have a lot of negative impact and a lot of positive impact,” they tell SFR in a phone interview from Ghana. “I think that just like any tool that comes in, there’s going to be a massive shift in how we think about art, how we think about media in general, how we think about image and accessibility and community.”

Breeze has proven adept at art forms from illustration and portraiture to largescale sculpture and fabrication and says there’s a kind of allure in the idea of using AI generators as a launchpad, and/or in things in art,” they say. “It...may be a useful tool I’ll implement in the ways any futurist artist would try to do. I’m curious and excited to see how I’ll use it and how I’ll continue to refine my own skill through it.”

Of course, that’s part of the rub. AIgenerated art is still in its infancy, and not all artists see its rise as a beacon of progress—or even as an acceptable tool. Some see a slew of ethical issues, ranging from art theft to fewer jobs in a world that already has scant options for artists.

In a recent Editor & Publisher piece, for example, cartoonist Rob Tornoe lamented that, “The idea of a computer now creating a work of art that might take me several hours to produce feels like a punch in the face.”

Frank Ragano and Mariannah Amster of the annual CURRENTS New Media Festival view AI art’s possible effect on creative jobs as somewhat murky, and they should know. Together, they’ve created one of the country’s preeminent digital arts events in Santa Fe, and much of the success hinges on how artists use new and emerging tech.

“There’s no doubt it’ll change a lot of creative jobs,” Ragano notes. “I mean, people will either lose jobs or adapt to using AI. If a business finds that it can produce work for, say, advertisement, that is successful, and it costs them less than using an artist, they’re definitely gonna do that.” automating tasks to build off those images that use their existing handmade skills and artistry. Creating quick backgrounds or workshopping an idea without having to put in hours of effort sounds enticing, as does popping out a dozen potential versions of a piece in minutes. Still, Breeze says, they are optimistic but cautious about the ways they might incorporate the process into their own work—not to mention the possible implications for other working artists.

“I think it will continue to help me support and refine my art, to be able to use it as a tool to stretch the capacities and potentialities, speed, production—all of these

Amster points out another possible effect.

“That may be true, but I think one of the things we’ve learned doing CURRENTS is that people still at first are really excited by the technology,” she explains, “but then the human hand or the artist’s hand comes back into the work and people want that physicality.”

At CURRENTS 826, the festival’s permanent Canyon Road outpost, for example, the recently closed Earth’s Other group show featured artists David Stout and Colin Ives using AI methodologies in print work—while maintaining their own notable and perceivable human touch.

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“For me, and the artists we are seeing and choosing to show, it’s not the AI on its own making work. That would concern me. I see it as a tool for artists, or a collaborating partner,” Amster says. “I feel like artists are really coming into their own when it comes to using technology...it’s not just fascination with the technology, but really bringing an artful perspective to the technology.”

“The best results have been through AI and human artist collaboration,” Ragano adds.

Other creative types are less enthused.

Self-described “engineerish artist” Justin Michael Crouch, whose work has included large metal sculptures, has concerns. He and others have regularly spoken out against AI art on social media, and in real life, and he says he’ll continue to consider generative learning apps as problematic.

”Is AI ever going to give us another Da Vinci? Is AI ever going to give us another Michelangelo?” he asks. “Absolutely not, because all it is doing is looking at every single piece of art we’ve created and remixing it into something we’ve technically never seen—yet you can look at it and see the derivatives from real effort that is put forth by an actual consciousness.”

Here, Crouch touches on the sources of training for AI image generators. Stable Diffusion, for example, is built from a database of over 5 billion image and text pairings from the nonprofit open network, LAION. LAION’s stores are massive, and with users training the system daily, the collection will only grow. The universe of potential legal issues is staggering to consider.

Do all users obtain consent from the artists whose works they upload? Of course not, and many believe creating AI images—or, as Crouch says, remixing them—ultimately violates the intellectual property have done so. Even so, having to search out credit that way seems a challenge, and Crouch, Deco and Breeze still have fears.

“I have every ethical concern about AI art,” Breeze says. “I think an entirely new way of thinking about copyright, thinking about open source, all of these things, is coming into question. Ethically, there are major challenges, and I think that as the tool is growing and as the tool is being used equally, we need to begin to look at ways to support and protect ourselves and each other through its use.” rights of the artists whose work upon which it was trained.

That brings up another minefield of considerations. Can an image not technically created by a human person be copyrighted or even just owned by a human person?

Way back in 2011, for example, wildlife photographer David Slater found himself embroiled in a legal quagmire after a macaque in Indonesia accidentally shot a selfie with one of Slater’s cameras.

“As for the ethics of AI illustration, I find it alarming that some artists have had their art pre-empted without permission, license, royalty or commission to form the basis of some scammer’s AI illustration,” says Santa Fe-based collage artist Deco, who speaks from 40 years of experience in the arts.

Crouch, meanwhile, doesn’t mince words.

“When you plagiarize 2.4 million different things and then just rearrange all that plagiarism into something that seems original, it’s absolutely not because you can always go back and analyze the thousand different conglomerations that it has utilized,” he says.

Some are trying, however, including website DeLouvre, which helps artists seek out the possible inclusion of their work simply by uploading AI images they believe