For those who follow these kinds of stories, there was some recent kerfuffle about an artist who won a state art competition by using the Artificial Intelligence (AI) imagining program, Midjourney, rather than drawing it out by hand (or by mouse, since it was a digital artwork competition). As is true to form, most of the discussion around this event is whether or not this will be good for other artists, particularly those who don’t use AI assistance. I can save all of you the trouble and point out that No, traditional artistry won’t be able to keep up. Automation will always displace some workers as the process of production becomes more efficient, and this is now an avenue where that can happen.
So we now have a situation in which a person suffered because a computer did a task that they could have otherwise been paid for, and people suffering is a bad thing, so we don’t like the computer then because it caused a bad thing to happen. Right?
I’ll step away from mainstream convention and completely disagree with that notion on all fronts. First, I’ll mention that I too have used Midjourney to generate the cover art for my most recent novel. In fact, I got five different alternatives prepped and ready to go in the timeframe that it would have taken for me to get an email reply from a professional cover artist. All it took was whacking a bot on Discord until it gave me something close to what I wanted, and following it up with some untalented photoshopping on GIMP. That being said, it is also worth pointing out that writers aren’t safe from AI. The computers are gunning for my hobby too. I might have gained personal utility from the use of artificial intelligence, but I’m completely aware that I’ll be losing out in the long run.
With that out of the way: the reason that people are anti-AI has nothing to do with the value that AI brings to society. Just look at the above imagery. I don’t know about you, but I think that it looks pretty awesome. That would make for a fun desktop background, or poster, or banner for a website. It would have never existed had AI not been involved. Now that we have AI, we have more art entering the mainstream, and that art is easier to produce. More is better. We like having More. Therefore, we can fairly rule out that AI is killing the art industry, contrary to popular sentiment on the topic. The opposite is happening to have so much more choice available to consumers.
The main grievance that people are having then is in the opportunity cost imposed on traditional artists. With income inequality continuing to rise and the possibility of art having less fiscal value, those who specialize in art without AI assistance are at an economic disadvantage… In a global society that already had them at an economic disadvantage. That is most certainly a problem.
But that is a separate problem to “is AI bad?” because if you resolve the economic concerns, the moral quandary goes out the window. All that is left is whether your art will still get consumed if it is drowned out by a bunch of computer-generated rivals. That will obviously happen more than before, and I personally do not care. Why? Because sharing art for the sake of art being shared is inherently an exercise in vanity, and I think we should place as little value on personal vanity as possible.
The question is really: how much are we entitled to having our work consumed just because we chose to handicap ourselves? How much value does it bring to society to resist this form of technology and place traditional art on a pedestal if that leads to consumers having less choice? I’d rather it be that people can have access to whatever form of art they want than there being less art, but some really talented artists have a couple million more followers on Instagram. The talented artists can still produce whatever they want, but there are also a bunch of other untalented artists who can have AI do it for them. Again, more is better. We like having more.
So this is all to say: don’t hate the player, hate the game. The computer isn’t to blame because we suck at building equity in society. The computer is just a tool like anything else. Whether we utilize it or not is our own prerogative, but we shouldn’t resist technological progression because some people will be left behind. We should instead use that same energy to help those people economically so they don’t suffer.
That is the path in which everyone wins.
