Friend, foe or something in between: Creatives talk AI’s complex presence in the art world

LUCY LAWLER Lantern reporter lawler.129@osu.edu

New technology can often work its way into the art world, and in 2023, artificial intelligence has allowed the art to create itself.

Popular apps, such as the 2021 release Dream by WOMBO and 2022’s Wonder — boasting over 10 and 5 million downloads respectively, according to Google Play — generate pictures in a multitude of artistic styles via artificial intelligence software, all based on users’ textual prompts. This AI art remains widely accessible in 2023.

Ken Rinaldo, a pioneer of AI art and Ohio State professor emeritus of art and technology, said he views AI as a tool capable of both enhancing and dampening the human imagination. Individual experimentation is what keeps AI art fresh, he said.

“[I’ve] always taken an attitude that the best art and technology works arise out of misusing the tools,” Rinaldo said. “If one uses the tools as intended, often you end up with work that looks like everybody else’s work.”

Rinaldo said his most recent exhibition, entitled “Synthetic Evolution,” premiered in Lisbon, Portugal, in June 2022, and explored the relationship between mankind and machinery. After compiling a data set from 200 personal drawings, Rinaldo trained an AI to understand his style. He then selected the AI’s strongest outputs, added color to them and altered their form if needed, he said. Finally, Rinaldo said the hybrid illustrations were printed out on fine art paper.

Accompanying video footage depicted the compositions’ transformations from beginning to end, demonstrating how artists can collaborate with AI in daring ways, Rinaldo said. He said artists who want to work with AI should consciously avoid laziness.

“Art is much more about exploring a sense of wonder, perhaps an awe, and trying to create a sense of awe,” Rinaldo said. “If one is expressing a kind of aesthetic that flows through an algorithm, then maybe it doesn’t quite have, for me, an essence of what the artist might actually wish they were saying.”

James Waite, a master’s student in fine arts who uses they/them pronouns, said they feel some standalone AI-produced images lack the valuable aura of handcreated works. However, Waite, who has a background in web development, said people seeking out AI art should not have to feel shame.

“We can’t be the aesthetics police,” Waite said. “I can’t tell somebody that they don’t like something because of how it looks, because that’s obviously a very subjective and personal conversation there.”

Waite said fandom culture — a phenomenon that occurs when people foster communities devoted to specific facets of pop culture — is one likely proponent of AI art. Fastacting AI art generators can help meet the high demand for fan art related to beloved movie franchises, TV shows and book series, they said.

“People have an insatiable wanting or a desire to get more of what they already like,” Waite said. “I think for those people, the question of authenticity doesn’t really matter to them at all.”

Artists’ ability to opt in to technology companies’ data sets is also crucial to consider when discussing AI art as a whole, they said. Waite said when artists are denied that choice, they are denied creative power and autonomy.

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“I posted an image online, and then an image of something exists on the website, and you can go download that,” Waite said. “But it’s still my copyrighted material.”

Rinaldo said AI art can acquire a more legitimate reputation with time.

“There was a time when people felt that photographers were going to put painters out of business, that clearly didn’t happen,” Rinaldo said. “Even in medieval times, those who didn’t mix their own paint were thought not to be real artists, because they didn’t understand the chemistry of paint.”

AI art’s fate rests in artists’ hands, Rinaldo said. Originality is still of importance, perhaps more so than ever before, he said.

“I think artists are going to need to develop a far more intimate relationship with artificial intelligence in order to really develop something new, and not just let the algorithms take the work where it might take it,” Rinaldo said.